Alienating the Grassroots: Looking Back at Al Qaeda’s Communicative Approach Toward Muslim Audiences

This paper explores the way in which the Al-Qaida leadership appeals to and addresses different cohorts of Sunni Muslim audiences through its statements. This communicative approach is understood in the context of collective action frames from the social movement literature. The paper analyzes the way in which communiqués from Usama bin Ladin and Ayman Al-Zawahiri have approached different Muslim audiences, defining three principal approaches: encouragement, excommunication and exasperation. The paper discusses how these approaches developed from the early 1990s up until the end of 2011, arguing that denunciation of Muslim publics has become an ever more prominent feature of this discourse