A Socio-Semiotic Perspective on Boko Haram Terrorism in Northern Nigeria

• 作者: Ahmed Umar
• 来源期刊: 语言与符号学研究
• 学科: 政治法律
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（3）
• 页码范围: 60-76
• 页数: 17页
• 分类号: D815.5

摘要

Using a multimodal socio-semiotic framework(Bezemer & Jewitt, 2010), this paper examines the terrorist campaign of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria and its impact on the people of the region. The terrorists have been shown to deploy physical weapons like knives and firearms, along with psychological ones like multimodal socio-semiotic propaganda to target society, both materially and psychologically. Their ultimate psychological weapon is death, encoded in multimodal signs(Kress, 2010). The targeted society tends to respond to that prompt of death with fear, which in turn serves as another prompt to various attitudinal, conceptual, and practical changes within that society. The overall socio-semiotic link between terrorist campaigns and social control rests on that major terrorist prompt of death, and fear remains the dominant social response(Van Leeuwen, 2005). The moment the targeted society ceases to recognize that prompt, or that prompt loses its intended social responsive value, terrorism in that society will not continue to survive.