4 - ISIS’s War Machine Between the Revolution and the International System and Its Adaptation

Summary

The Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shām (ISIS) has often been cast as the nemesis of the contemporary international system – an actor deliberately so extreme and hostile to international (liberal) norms that it stands completely outside the field of their enactment (Dallal, 2017; Mohamedou, 2017). Whereas other contributions focusing on ISIS in this volume problematise this simple opposition by showing how the movement and its predecessors have become embedded in neoliberal conditions – impacting on its hybrid subjectivity (Walshe, Richards, this volume) – or highlight the resemblances and mutual borrowing between different revolutionary visions (Müller-Rensch, this volume), this chapter presents a different take on ISIS's hybridity. Without disputing the many violations of the most basic human rights that it has routinely committed and the numerous cases of extreme violence that it has been involved in, we turn our attention to the embeddedness of ISIS within the international system and its multiple entanglements with it. Using the theoretical lens of hybrid revolutionary agency, we show how the revolutionary aspirations of the movement and the means of their communication are nonetheless still situated within the matrix of the system ISIS seeks to dismantle, as well as how the international system of states has adapted to such a challenge. As such, via illustrative excursions into different registers of ISIS operations and reactions to these, we seek to render visible a series of entanglements of different practices and rationalities, as well as their effects.

This study of ISIS will deploy the framework presented in the theoretical section of the book to stake out a space for a new interpretation of how ISIS has been constituted in the cyberspace and information sphere and what its effects have been in relation to the sociopolitical order which it has sought to revolutionise. The analysis departs from the premise that, with no attempt to impose a false unity on ISIS as a constantly becoming entity, it acts on and, in many ways, against certain organising principles of the contemporary world order. This principle defines a fundamental authority structure and is constitutive of the legitimacy of the process of actors’ constitution, as well as their form and operation (Mendelsohn, 2012, p. 593).