The Significance of ISIS's State Building in Syria

Abstract

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.

Beyond genocide: Towards an improved analysis and understanding of the Syrian regime's mass atrocity crimes in the Syrian Civil War

“…The entire displacement process, extending from the initial "movement," to temporary relocation and onto resettlement, has enabled the Syrian Regime to "sort" the population. The Syrian Regime's extensive use of siege and blockade enabled it, for example, to establish an agreement that removed the ISIS presence in al-Hajar al-Aswad, its last stronghold in the southern Damascus region (Bakkour & Stansfield, 2023). Fifteen hundred ISIS fighters were evacuated in 25 buses and 30 trucks to the Syrian Badia, which is near to As-Suwayda governorate (Al-Arabiya, May 2020), meaning that the whole of the capital, and the region to the south of it, was restored to Syrian Regime control for the first time since 2012.…”