Browsing by Subject "Terrorism"

The objective of this thesis is to utilise the frame-building perspective to study how the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat framed the case of the Chibok schoolgirls who were abducted by the terrorist group Boko Haram in April 2014 in Nigeria. The data of this study is based on 105 news articles published by Helsingin Sanomat between April 2014 and December 2018. The structure of the thesis consists of four main sections. The first section focuses on mapping the case in the Nigerian context and providing information to understand the Nigerian situation with regard to its historical background, the rise of Boko Haram, and the case of the abducted Chibok girls. The second section focuses on the theoretical frameworks. News framing theory is an appropriate tool for studying media content that deals with terrorism. While the case consists of foreign news, there are also brief references to the theory of newsworthiness and foreign news transmission processes in the Finnish media. Also, the ambiguous relation between media and terrorism is addressed: terrorists need media for conveying information about their attacks, and correspondingly, their attacks serve as material for the news media. The third section focuses on terrorism and its victims, and its relation to conflict-related gender-based violence. In the Chibok schoolgirls’ case one perspective to violence is the concept of abduction. The fourth section focuses on the implementation of the frame building perspective to examine the selected Helsingin Sanomat news data. The study reveals that in reporting the Chibok schoolgirls’ case, Helsingin Sanomat favoured material from western news agencies and the most referred to news agencies were AFP and Reuters. Local Nigerian media was referred to as a source only in five of the news. The categorization of the quote source types reveals that Nigerian authorities dominated as sources for the citations in the news. From the news data a total of 12 frame theme categories are recognized and these categories are further organized into four main frame theme groups. In the group “Understanding the circumstances” the prevailing background information is the description of Boko Haram and the dichotomy of the country, but discussion of the ethno-religious historical background of the conflict remains limited. The second group “Government inactivity and politics” reveals that the news mainly concentrate on the negotiations and the international interventions to resolve the conflict between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram. The third group “Terrorism and violence” concentrates on the case of the Chibok schoolgirls, and the other attacks are described as chains of events. The Nigerian government’s role in the atrocities is recognized but not widely discussed. In the last frame theme group “Community and compassion” the communities’ active role in conflict resolution is recognized as the voice of the victims of Boko Haram. In general, the Chibok schoolgirls are depicted as a cohesive group which is subject to terrorism and collective violence. Despite the wide media coverage, the schoolgirls’ story is told by others in the news or via the reports of human rights organizations. The conflict in the country is depicted to be that between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram, although the unstable situation in the country has developed from a complex web of socio-cultural, economic, ethno-religious, and regional elements. The Chibok girls themselves, although referred to in the news, are mainly presented as victims whose own voice is hardly heard.

Some claim religion kills while others say people kill for all sort of things. In fact, the link between religion and violence is a much-debated academic topic. William T. Cavanaugh (2009) has challenged what he called the “conventional wisdom” about religious violence by pinpointing several important “blind spots.” His discussion of the usefulness of the construct of religious violence for its consumers in the West is fundamental to this study. Cavanaugh concludes that the “myth of religious violence” served West in both domestic politics and foreign policy and has been used against Muslims in particular. According to Mathew Rowley (2015) religious violence is a context-dependent and very complex phenomenon and oversimplifying the connection may help to jeopardize peace. In the wake of few historical incidents in the late 20th century, a small fragment of extremists emerged in the Muslim world. The activities of such groups, especially in the post 9/11 era, provided an avenue for the media and some academics to give a clear-cut answer to the question, i.e., to attribute Islam and jihad to violence. This study highlights the difference between the theoretical discussions about jihad among academics and its practical implementation in the texts of Muslims thinkers. Academic works on jihad have failed to address this issue and thus led widespread conviction of the contemporary scholarship that jihad has remained an unchanged and fixed concept. In this view, “Muslim” extremists and terrorists are the real face of Islam, and the notion of abodes means the absolute supremacy of Islamic rule over the whole world in which peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims is not possible even on an individual level. The discussion on the concept of jihad among contemporary scholars, especially Daniel Pipes (2002), David Cook (2005), Patricia Crone (2004), Bernard Lewis (2003), and Rudolph Peters (1979 and 1996) serve as the reference point to my analysis. Brigitte Gabriel (2009) work has been included as a representative of the “popular literature” on jihad, which reproduces the “myths” in a more aggressive form. I applied a two-way strategy to highlight the meaning of jihad in Muslim thought by presenting an overview of Muslim history, with focus on jihad, and an investigation of Muslim sources. Mawdudi (1996, 2000), Nasir (2013), and Ahmad (2016) argue that Islam through its concept of jihad allows limited violence under certain conditions and in specific environments. The analysis illustrates that there is a wide variety of how central concepts directing the interpretation of jihad have been understood. Such differences have not only created theoretical disputes but also given rise to various practical implications. Similarly, Mamdani (2003) asserts that the current Muslim extremism and terrorism is the outcome of specific political and strategic policies of the West, mainly the US. The analysis of Muslim sources gives no support for the view of such academic research on religion and violence that has singled out Islam and jihad and equated them with violence. To correct the view, the diverse historical interpretations of jihad should be identified, and a detailed study of the rich theological discussions on jihad should be taken into consideration. A central feature in the misrepresentation of jihad is the failure to pay notice to the variety of meanings and interpretations of jihad, and the notion of the abodes in Muslim legal tradition. Much of contemporary academic scholarship is based on superficial knowledge of the Islamic sources and an overemphasis of certain statements of classical jurists, which leads to the simplification of complex concepts.