ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the subject and the rationale of the book. It first discusses various reasons that may encourage a person to become a terrorist through the review of the most influential literature on the topic. After this, it introduces Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as the book’s case study and shows why and how the group can serve both as an example of what we already know about terrorism but also as a good case to discover something new, in particular – the way how it built and used its propaganda machine. After this, the book discusses more broadly the topics of propaganda and marketing and branding and introduces the idea that the latter can give us some useful insight into understanding how terrorist propaganda works and what effect it has on the audiences.
