Abstract
This chapter investigates digital media as new spaces for the promotion and normalisation of war and violence and marks a shift in analytical focus from the content of digital text, images or videos to the wide range of senses and practices involved in providing meaning to these forms of representation. To this end, the chapter presents an embodied reading of Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda video ‘Flames of War’. This draws out, firstly, how the organisation’s online propaganda addresses the embodied and affective sensibilities of spectators to facilitate a felt sense of intimacy and, secondly, how the affective potentials and intensities generated by such experiences are mobilised through the networked dynamic of digital and social media. These, the chapter argues, are distinctive features of how war is experienced on and through digital media, revealing new possibilities for promoting military action for insurgent groups like IS who do not have the communicative capacities that state militaries do.