This report examines how global jihadist organizations construct and prioritize the figure of the “enemy” within their strategic narratives, focusing on the ways al-Qaeda and the Islamic State frame threats, assign blame, and mobilize audiences through discursive practices. Drawing on data from the TITAN Project, the study analyzes how enemy categories are articulated, reordered, and redefined over time in official propaganda, revealing the narrative logics that underpin jihadist worldviews.
By combining corpus-based quantitative analysis with qualitative discourse examination, the report highlights key differences in how each organization identifies and hierarchizes its enemies—ranging from local regimes and Western powers to rival jihadist groups and segments of the Muslim population. These distinctions are shown to be neither incidental nor purely rhetorical, but rather central to each organization’s broader strategic objectives, patterns of mobilization, and claims to legitimacy.
The analysis shows that both organizations now place the near enemy at the center of their rhetorical and strategic frameworks, a shift with significant implications for how violence is justified and mobilization pathways are constructed. While this re-centering does not amount to a full doctrinal rupture with earlier paradigms, it does signal an important recalibration in jihadist messaging. Al-Qaeda retains a strategic-doctrinal structure in which distant powers remain a constant object of denunciation, even as local actors become the primary focus of mobilization. The Islamic State, by contrast, collapses traditional distinctions by advancing an absolutist enemy logic that fuses doctrine with direct operational incitement. Taken together, these patterns suggest that the classical near–far enemy dichotomy has been conceptually preserved but empirically eroded, offering a more precise lens through which to assess contemporary jihadist strategy, persuasion, and legitimization.