6 - ‘Islamic State’ and the Neoliberal War Machine: Power, Resistance and Revolution

Summary

War clearly follows the same movement as capitalism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps growing, war becomes increasingly a ‘war of matériel’ in which the human being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is instead a pure element of machinic enslavement.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 514–15

Introduction

Deleuze and Guattari's ‘war machine’ has been a useful framework through which to conceptualise the relational and processual arrangements of state-like apparatuses such as Islamic State (IS), including in their hybridised dimensions. As Ditrych et al. note (in this volume), the hybrid nomadic and state-like characteristics of IS can be said to characterise Deleuze and Guattari's (1980) theory of state capture and opposition regarding (sometimes non-violent) ‘war machine’ apparatus. Where the war machine exists exterior to state but remains vulnerable to state co-optation, its non-disciplinary nomadic elements include ‘warriors’, ‘herders’, and groups of people who otherwise exist in fleeting organisational hierarchies, as ‘rhizomatic’ assemblages. As elements of a war-like war machine, IS actors within and outside the Middle East can similarly be said to operate on transnational scales that are dynamic and deterritorialising, though at the same time reconstitutive of the broader, state-based, strategic–military game they operate within (Richards, 2020).

This chapter's analysis of IS's neoliberal methods of statist governance in its financial practices and propaganda extends Ditrych et al.'s discussion in this volume of the international, ‘revolutionary’ aspects of IS, whose transformative potential is likewise mediated by inflammatory counter-IS influences. Also from this volume, it reflects on Müller-Rensch's interrogation of the Marxist–Leninist ideological aspects of IS's spatial and temporal (anti-)neoliberal positioning. These analyses might be situated historically among scholarship after the al-Qaʿida attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 (9/11) that incorporated philosophical frames to interpret al-Qaʿida’s, and then IS’s, dialectical relationships with cultural and economic globalisation. In one such example, Boggs and Pollard drew on Baudrillard's notions of hyperreality to highlight a circular causality between ‘jihadist’ terrorism and globalised modernity, while Giroux (2012) elsewhere incorporated Massumi's (1993) ‘mainstream workstations of fear’ to examine how the ‘visual theatre’ of this form of terrorism ‘mimics the politics of the ‘official’ war on terrorism’.