Categorizing the Islamic State

Stathis N. Kalyvas has a post on the Monkey Cage, The logic of violence in the Islamic State’s war, in which he exams how the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) uses violence. The question he asks is whether we should view the Islamic State as a sectarian or revolutionary group.

Though he cautions that the data is incomplete and somewhat contradictory, he argues that the Islamic State appears to be more a revolutionary group that happens to be Islamic than a predominantly Islamist group, as follows:

First, violence is not a transparent process and we should be careful about drawing easy conclusions from what transpires from the fog of the civil war battlefield. Second, there is nothing particularly Islamic or jihadi about the organization’s violence. The practices described above have been used by a variety of insurgent (and also incumbent) actors in civil wars across time and space. Therefore, easy cultural interpretations should be challenged. Third, if the Islamic State ought to be characterized, it would be as a revolutionary (or radical) insurgent actor. These groups project a goal of radical political and social change; they are composed of a highly motivated core, recruit using ideological messages (although not all their recruits or collaborators are ideologically motivated – far from it) and tend to invest heavily in the indoctrination of their followers. They tend to prevail over their less effectively organized insurgent rivals (see the examples of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front or the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka), but their Achilles heel lies in their radical proclivities which often turn local populations against them if the opportunity arises, as happened in Iraq with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Revolutionary groups can appropriate a variety of other causes (nationalism, ethnic or sectarian identities), but their revolutionary identity is central and helps make sense of much of their activity. In that respect, we have much to learn from revisiting the action and strategy of the last generation of insurgent revolutionary actors, those of the Cold War.

The big point I would like to make here is that, when interpreting ongoing events, one is forced to use theory by the lack of available data.  An essential part of using theory to analyze current events and make predictions about future events is deciding in what theoretical category the events belong. Are you looking at apples or oranges?

Elizabeth R. Nugent touches on the same subject in a MC post, What do we mean by ‘Islamist’?. She argues:

Islamism’s definition as an ideology that locates political legitimacy in the application of the sharia (often translated as Islamic law) and in Islamic tradition pegs it to complicated and unfixed concepts that are diversely interpreted in different manners by different practitioners. Various definitions of sharia draw from any combination of the prescriptions outlined in the Koran and the Sunnah related to larger societal issues of politics, economics, justice and social organization. The complexities arising from the translation of a multiplicity of practiced and interpreted Islams is manifested in the diverse range of actors that might fall under the rubric of an Islamist movement, party, or group. Islamists can range from those that advocate for quietism, effecting gradual political change through internal individual reform, to political parties advocating for societal reform through social welfare and electoral contestation, to revolutionary militants that seek to overthrow illegitimate states and implement revolutionary change. Islamists range from those who root justifications of their political behavior in personal and literalist interpretation of the textual tradition, to those who rely on interpretations derived from independent reasoning and decision-making with a firm basis in established schools of Islamic legal theory.

She concludes:

In many ways, this finding and the larger point are obvious and intuitive, but it’s something that continues to get lost in contemporary debates. It means both actors and critics who essentialize Islam, and fault or credit the entire faith tradition for one politicized version contained within its discursive tradition, are incorrect. It’s why militant actors as well as religious parties cannot claim that they speak for all of Islam or Muslims as a collective community, and it’s why outsiders cannot condemn Islam as a monolithic entity. These differences in interpretation and practice are the fascinating and frustrating challenges in understanding religion in politics, and understanding the inherent multiplicity and pluralism contained with religious faith traditions is important for consumers of news about Islamism and its current political actors.