This chapter demonstrates that jihadist rebels with more transformative goals imitate the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance using the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon. When Hezbollah first formed, it defined its goals as revolutionary and imitated the CCP’s governance, building many of the same institutions as the CCP, despite Hezbollah leaders’ familiarity with more ideologically proximate models for political organization. Hezbollah, however, changed the content of the CCP’s governance institutions to match its jihadist ideology. Even today, Hezbollah leaders and members compare the organization to the CCP or leftist rebel groups that imitated the CCP and note that governance is a strategy for revolutionary change with its origins in the Chinese Civil War. The chapter further underscores that it is more transformative goals, and not ideologies, that determine governance strategies.

Chapter 5 deals with the creation of the Islamic State and of the movement ISIS. Their literalist and expressly politicised interpretations of doctrine have led it to espouse exclusionary and aggressive notions of the umma. The community of the faith becomes identifiable with a revived Caliphate, based on territorial dimensions and purist standards of community membership. The chapter elaborates on the trajectory of radical Islamism and points to areas of difference with al-Qa‘ida. It also argues that the brutality of ISIS against the Shi‘a and others subverts its avowed expansionist aim, as many within the Muslim world as well as non-Muslim powers have sought to destroy it. But, as the chapter demonstrates, military defeat and territorial retrenchment are unlikely to exorcise the allure, in receptive quarters, of a purportedly ‘authentic’ but highly romanticised umma.