Jihad in a World of Sovereigns: Law, Violence, and Islam in the Bosnia Crisis

Abstract

This article argues that jihads waged in recent decades by "foreign fighter" volunteers invoking a sense of global Islamic solidarity can be usefully understood as attempts to enact an alternative to the interventions of the "International Community." Drawing from ethnographic and archival research on Arab volunteers who joined the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article highlights the challenges and dilemmas facing such jihad fighters as they maneuvered at the edges of diverse legal orders, including international and Islamic law. Jihad fighters appealed to a divine authority above the global nation-state order while at the same time rooting themselves in that order through affiliation with the sovereign and avowedly secular nation-state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This article demonstrates an innovative approach to law, violence, and Islam that critically situates states and nonstate actors in relation to one another in transnational perspective.Darryl Li is an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Thanks are due to Aslı Bâli,

The ontological threat of foreign fighters

“…Rich and Conduit (2015) have conducted one of the few comparative analyses which contrast Syria to the recent case of Chechnya. Li’s (2016) analysis looks at Bosnia with a focus on Islam and Jihad. Malet (2013) analysed four historical cases (Texas Revolution, Spanish Civil War, Israeli War of Independence and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), but did so by focusing on the recruitment process of foreign fighters.…”

Captivity: A Provocation

“…Susan Lepselter's (2016) fieldwork with those abducted by aliens reads beautifully alongside the work of French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, especially his Les chasses à l'homme (2010) and Théorie du drone (2013). The anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li's (2016) work with imprisoned Islamist ex-fighters detained in Bosnian prisons commingles with Juno Salazar Parreñas's (2012) work on orangutan rehabilitation centers. And the writing of Laurence Ralph (2014) on disabled gang members provides a photographic negative to The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict written by Austin Reed (2016Reed ( [1858) and edited by Caleb Smith.…”

Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

“…For example,Bayly 2007;Chari and Verdery 2009;Kwon 2010;Li 2015; and Westad 2007. 2 In this growing body of scholarship (e.g.,Aslanian 2011;Ho 2006;Marsden 2015), "partial groupings" refers to groups or networks of individuals who are geographically dispersed, and connected across geopolitical divides and long distances, and yet nevertheless are embedded in particular localities and formed in relationship to ongoing circulations and exchanges over time.…”