Why hello, blog of yore! I am so thankful to blogspot for not deleting my account due to inactivity. I just took a little trip down memory lane reading my old entries. Unfortunately, I think graduate school has made me smarter, but also a worse writer. So, apologies in advance for whatever may follow...
One thought I had recently that I wanted to share (in more than 140 characters, hence my resumption of blogging) draws from a recent op-ed I came across from Conservative MP Liam Fox. In it, he argues that the Cameron government should take immediate action in Iraq to check ISIS's power, except this time without seeking parliamentary approval, as Cameron attempted to do with Syria last year. (Interesting to hear a parliamentarian say so emphatically to the government: "Please ignore us!", but that's neither here nor there.) Fox's discussion of the threat that ISIS poses includes the following parenthetical aside: "I believe that calling the group by its chosen name, the Islamic State, is a political mistake." In other words, he does not think we should endorse ISIS as a member of the state system, and the title in acronym form does not do this as explicitly as does "Islamic State."
Well, why would ISIS bother to call itself a state? It is insulting to people like Fox, because it makes a mockery of the idea that the "international community", or the club of existing states or some subset thereof, determines what and what is not a state. Instead, what al-Baghdadi and his followers have established in parts of northeast Syria and northern Iraq is something which, at most, meets a very minimalist definition of the state -- a monopoly on the use of violence, without regard for whether or not that use of violence is "legitimate" (in either the popular sense of the word, or in Weberian terms). If we did not believe legitimacy to be an important aspect of the definition of states, then there would be no reason for an international organization such as the UN to have any control over what counts as a "state". As a permanent UN Security Council member, the UK has a vested interest in maintaining a strong role for the UN in regulating entry into the state system. In the meantime, groups like ISIS (and maybe groups like the MNLA in Northern Mali) attempt to leverage the fact that the international community's criteria for statehood seems to be arbitrary, at best, or strategically biased, at worst. See: Kosovo, Somaliland, Palestine, East Timor, South Sudan, etc. There are many reasons why these states, or aspiring states, have varied in the amount of international recognition they have received. However, whether the governing power holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force does not seem to be a strict criteria for inclusion. It is clear that recognized states frequently use force in ways that seem likely to be viewed as largely illegitimate in the eyes of the population. The UN cannot and does not restrict entry or police its member states to ensure this.
So, ISIS, like many other groups before it, is creating its state by sheer force, and most likely intends for some time to ignore its juridical relationship to the formal, existing state system. While we have some good theory about why ethnic movements seek secession or independence (see e.g. Horowitz 2003, Walter 2006), can we use these theories to understand why groups like ISIS might seek to call themselves states? They don't fit the mold of a traditional separatist or secessionist movement. They are not currently seeking international recognition, although perhaps the use of the word "state" in their name suggests that someday they might. In any case, it is hard to imagine that any of Weber's three types of legitimate rule apply here.
