They were not radical, even when they committed that: An appraisal-driven discourse analysis of feelings and attitudes towards the 17-A terrorist cell in Barcelona

Abstract

Identity conflict and the loss of meaning experienced by some Muslim young people in Western countries are key factors behind fanaticism, leading some of them to find purpose in life within extremist groups (AdamTroian et al. 2021; Moyano and González 2021). The narrative that emerges from the radicalisation process provides a rich source for psychologists and discourse analysts, exploring not only the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, but also issues stemming from self-perception and other-representation. Such conflict-based narratives materialise in individuals’ evaluative language patterns (Etaywe and Zappavigna 2022). In this paper, we conduct a close analysis of the discursive construction of emotion and opinion in a collection of semi-structured interviews with social workers or neighbours who knew the perpetrators of the 2017 terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils. To do so, we use corpus-driven methodologies and a refined version of Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework (see Benítez-Castro and Hidalgo-Tenorio 2019). Our analysis aims to cast light on the social frictions that may have contributed to their endorsement of violence (Moyano et al. 2021).