The Islamic State: A Headless Chicken 

Any good farmer knows to watch for the runaway chicken at the chopping block. I sincerely hope that there were some farmers in the situation room this past weekend. Cloaked in the early morning hours of October 26th, 2019, U.S. Special Operations Forces entered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Barisha compound, leaving nine dead, definitively ending a decade-long hunt for the self-proclaimed Caliph when Baghdadi took his own life by detonating an explosive vest. Code-named Kayla Mueller—a nod to the American aid-worker who was tortured by Baghdadi himself—the raid in northwestern Syria was the long-awaited climax of justice applied to the Islamic State (IS). 

Following a brief celebration after reading the morning news, I was overcome with a profound sense of ignorance. What about 2011? The death of Osama bin Laden was supposed to promise a way out of Afghanistan, was it not? What is right is not always effective. Who leads is often much less consequential than how and why that something is being led. In our well-deserved and perhaps naive glee, it is imperative that we not lose sight of the decapitated diaspora that is today’s Islamic State.

The most notable IS leaders—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—notoriously exploited the breakdown of between state and society and, when lacking legitimate challengers, replaced the empty space with a totalitarian bargain dictated by IS. For Baghdadi, civil unrest in Syria and religious tension in Iraq strained the social fabric of the region to a tipping point, welcoming a new state to take power in place of those that had failed before. Engaging in both large scale offensives and isolated acts of terror, the Islamic State expanded in an attempt to establish permanent authority.

This proved challenging, however, for fundamentally, IS itself embodies this very breakdown of the bargain between society and state. Salafi-Jihadist interpretations of Islamic eschatology impel its followers to facilitate the systematic destruction of societal contracts, replacing the status quo with anything more than the extreme, carnivalesque violence that attracts so many young men (Bourke 37). Beyond pursuing territory where previous states have lost control, the Islamic State actively seeks this dissolution by way of sectarian demagoguery. Yet, perhaps more critical than understanding the appetite for violence within IS is decoding the means by which its violence is so effectively spread on a global scale. It is a self-sustaining model, fueled by the discord it creates.

When we observe the Islamic State as a global phenomenon, we notice that iterations emerge—almost invariably—within the context of civil war or deteriorating political convention. Where there is violence, instability and an appetite for Islamic conservatism, the remnants of the Caliphate will appear. James Fearon, a Political Science at Stanford University, understands this area of opportunity as “the bargaining model”, which boils down insecurities concerning uncertainty, commitment and divisibility (381). In all of its manifestations, the Islamic State manages to fill the empty space that these discrepancies leave behind, rushing across roadways and fertile regions like water through a crack, shifting and expanding to fill the surrounding environment. Since 2014, dozens of jihadist groups in more than 30 countries have sworn bay’ah to the Islamic State, operating insurgencies and terror cells across the globe (“Islamic State”). Wherever instability goes unaddressed, the Islamic State takes root.

This phenomenon is quite similar to what BYU professor, Bruce D. Porter, refers to when he argues that “states make war and war makes states” (1). Ironically, the inability of the Islamic State to form its own “state”—at least one bound by Porter’s conception of a “national-territorial totality” (possessing both established sovereignty and self-contained identity)—is what fuels both its growth in the short term and simultaneously prevents any sustained future (5). Evident in this instability sits Fearon’s bargaining model of war, where violence occurs in a period when there are inequalities between perceived power and actual power, one state seeking to test its perceived power against that of another state, in the hopes that the opposing state will either succumb to violence or cede some amount of their influence (391-393). This is exactly what we see when IS affiliates test the authority of local states on the war-torn borders, like that of Mali and Niger. In feeding off these internal security dilemmas—functioning as a predatory actor—it seeks to further disparage any stable bargain between members of society. Porter’s claim manifests evidently as the condition of war is clearly a prerequisite for the Islamic State’s expansion and certainly necessary for its survival. 

Acknowledging these realities, the amorphous shapeshifter that is the Islamic State will persist without Baghdadi, as it gains power through the exploitation of ever-present external disorder rather than by way of strong organizational cohesion. If the international community truly desires to remove the threat of IS and the myriad of similar organizations waiting to take its place, a coalition of nations from the Maghreb to southeast Asia must come together to address civil unrest and shift the paradigm of local governance. To effectively combat the Islamic State’s ability to exploit faults between society and state, these regional and international allies must work towards a common public apparatus that is supported by civil law, citizen engagement and diplomatic relations in order to end the unproductive, twenty-year-long game of decapitation whack-a-mole that is still being played today.

Works Cited

Fearon, James D. “Rationalist Explanations for War.” International Organization, vol. 49, no. 3, 1995, pp. 379–414. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706903. (381-382)

“‘The Mirror Image of War.” War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics, by Bruce D. Porter, Free Press, 2002, pp. 1–5.

“The Pleasures of War.” An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare, by Joanna Bourke, Basic Books, 2010, p. 37.

Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium. (n.d.). Islamic State (IS) / Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) / Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS or ISIL, IS).