Researchers and policy makers appear to hold a deeply
rooted reluctance to acknowledge, let alone address, the
significance of ISIS’s state building. Those who have
engaged with this issue have tended to traverse the
analytical dead end of legalistic questions and themes,
inevitably concluding that ISIS’s efforts fell short of
the ...
Researchers and policy makers appear to hold a deeply
rooted reluctance to acknowledge, let alone address, the
significance of ISIS’s state building. Those who have
engaged with this issue have tended to traverse the
analytical dead end of legalistic questions and themes,
inevitably concluding that ISIS’s efforts fell short of
the threshold of statehood. This article sharply diverges
from this reasoning and instead focuses on the political extent of ISIS’s state building, which was a reaction
to the collapse of authority in Iraq and Syria, and
the concomitant failure to protect peoples at risk. The
study examines the Islamic State on four dimensions:
the stabilization of society, the extraction of income,
the politicization of religion, and the use of sectarian
divisions. It finds that ISIS’s efforts were internally contradictory and contained a number of elements that
impeded its establishing a conventionally defined state
and its carrying out of actions expected of such a state.
