International Political Sociology (2018) 12, 139–155

The Islamic State: Violence and Ideology in a

Post-colonial Revolutionary Regime
BRIAN MELLO
Muhlenberg College

This paper seeks to counter popular and academic discourse that empha-
sizes the uniqueness or unprecedented nature of the Islamic State. Many
of these claims highlight the violence perpetrated by ISIS as evidence of its
unique ideology. This essay draws from the work of Foucault and Fanon,
as well as from Richard Sakwa’s thinking on the changing nature of the
concept of revolution, in order to counter these popular narratives. The
paper begins by reading ISIS’s public executions through the lens of Fou-
cault’s discussion of the spectacle of violence in Discipline and Punish. What
is often described as unique, irrational, unprecedented violence is reread
as advancing particular rational goals. Yet, rather than dismiss ISIS’s ideol-
ogy altogether, the paper argues that ISIS is best understood as exhibiting
qualities of an anticolonial revolutionary regime. Through violent actions,
it forges new collective identities grounded in a national culture rooted in
an effort to find authenticity in precolonial Sunni Islam.

Much of the scholarly work on the Islamic State1 has focused on explaining its rise,
identifying how it might be confronted or defeated, and understanding its ideology
and political practices.2 At times, this scholarly literature has confronted a tendency
in media coverage and political rhetoric to exaggerate the threat that ISIS poses to
the United States (e.g., Friis 2015). Yet, running through some of this literature, as
well as more popular rhetoric, is a view of the Islamic State as a unique force both in
the regional politics of the Middle East and in the broader scope of Islamist radical-
ism (e.g., Wood 2015). Indeed, there are many aspects to ISIS’s politics, ideology,
and tactics that make it different from prior Islamist organizations. Unlike other
militarized Islamist organizations, ISIS has advanced forms of violence, governance,
and sectarianism that have actively sought to remake borders (and by extension
the state system) throughout the entire Middle East and beyond (through affiliated
individuals and groups from Nigeria to Bangladesh).
This article offers an interpretive framework that seeks to make sense of ISIS’s
seemingly unique qualities in ways that help it appear less new and unprecedented.
Drawing on the work of Foucault and Fanon, I provide exegesis and analysis of
1
Throughout this paper I use ISIS and the Islamic State interchangeably. While this obfuscates the pre-caliphate
from post-caliphate periods, the choice to use both Islamic State and ISIS reflects both usage in popular references and
the fact that the logic of violence and would-be state formation animated Islamic State actors across its various names.
2
A nice overview of the growing literature on the Islamic State is provided by Byman (2016). Works that focus
primarily on the Islamic State’s ideology include Wood (2015) and Bunzel (2015). Works that focus primarily on ISIS
violence include Neer and O’Toole (2014) and Friis (2015). Works that focus more comprehensively on the Islamic
State’s origins, violent practices, and governmental practices, in addition to its ideology, include Stern and Berger
(2015); Cronin (2015); Walt (2015); al-Tamimi (2014); Caris and Reynolds (2014); Weiss and Hassan (2015); Haykel
(2016). A number of think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Enterprise Institute, and
the Center for American Progress, have published policy papers focused on confronting ISIS militarily. A good summary
of changing military strategy against ISIS is provided by Tilghman (2016).

Mello, Brian (2018) The Islamic State: Violence and Ideology in a Post-colonial Revolutionary Regime. International Political
Sociology, doi: 10.1093/ips/oly003
Corresponding author e-mail: brianmello@muhlenberg.edu
© The Author(s) (2018). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
140 ISIS: Violence and Ideology

Islamist texts critical to ISIS’s self-definition, ISIS videos, and particular practices, in
order to offer a framework for interpreting the violent acts and practices that ISIS
has engaged in; its processes of consolidating authority and imposing rule; and the
nature of its ideology, which underpins both its violence and state-making practices.
Alessandrini (2014) offers a compelling case for the “productive possibilities”
for writing a history of the present that can result from “thinking Fanon and Fou-
cault together.”3 For Alessandrini, what binds Foucault and Fanon is how their work
points to critical ways for reading and analyzing current political practices—to un-
pack their meaning in ways that seek to understand, rather than to judge, the sub-
jects they interrogate. Here, insights from Foucault’s analysis of discipline and pun-
ishment and Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and anticolonialism are combined to
make ISIS’s violence more intelligible. Drawing insights from both Foucault and
Fanon allows for a better understanding of ISIS than would an analysis that drew
primarily from one or the other. Foucault offers useful lenses for understanding
both the Islamic State’s violence and its governing practices, while Fanon helps lo-
cate the Islamic State as the latest in a line of anticolonial Islamist insurgencies. Just
as Friis (2015) examined beheading videos and the visibility of the war against ISIS
to problematize arguments that ISIS’s violence is “beyond anything we have seen,”
this paper locates the Islamic State within the broader, century-long struggle of Is-
lamists to respond to the exigencies of the post-Ottoman Middle East (Strindberg
and Warn 2011).
Highlighting the uniqueness of the Islamic State is problematic on two fronts.
First, we ought to consider what implications arise from stressing ISIS as a unique
political force. At the most basic level, stressing uniqueness suggests that neither
existing social science frameworks nor, by extension, existing strategies to contain,
resist, and defeat the Islamic State are available; that both have to be invented de
novo. Second, given the need to make sense of this seemingly unique and inno-
vative force in world politics, there is a troubling tendency to root such de novo
understandings in the importance of ISIS’s ideology. Thus, in the conclusion of his
influential article, Wood (2015) writes of the ideological appeal of the Islamic State:
That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophesy as a matter of
dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-
obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive di-
vine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model.

Followers of the Islamic State, this line of reasoning goes, display what Weber has
called value-related rationality more than goal-oriented (or more strategic) rational-
ity. Moreover, such reasoning implies that ISIS’s is a value-related rationality steeped
in a messianic, end-of-days version of Sunni Islam that manifests itself without par-
allel in Middle East history. By establishing a new caliphate, the Islamic State seeks
to hasten the final confrontation that will restore Islamic greatness. Descriptions
of the Islamic State’s uniqueness and of its ideological purity, therefore, contribute
both to a tendency to exaggerate the importance of the Islamic State, overstating its
attraction, reach, and influence, and to the reification of Orientalist beliefs, which
continue to justify Western military intervention.4
The Islamic State might not be as unique as some suggest; the Islamic State
emerged out of a century of Sunni Islamist political mobilization. It reflects, there-
fore, learning and innovation from lessons drawn across these experiences. Three
aspects of the Islamic State that are different from prior versions of Sunni jihadism
and, therefore, worth pointing out and keeping in mind throughout this analysis

3
In an earlier essay, Alessandrini (2009, 74) provides a more in-depth argument that Fanon and Foucault are linked
“by a shared project of writing a history of the present.”
4
For a useful overview of the attraction of Orientalist explanations for Islamist politics, see, Brasted and Khan
(2012).
 BRIAN MELLO 141

include: the innovative way in which ISIS has recorded, disseminated, and broad-
cast its violence; a concerted focus on sectarian, especially anti-Shiite violence; and
rather than a patient, teleological view of history, an emphasis on the immediate
creation of a new caliphate.
ISIS is innovative in its use of high quality video productions designed to attract
viewers; these video depictions of violent operations are meant to entertain as much
as to instill fear, depending on the viewing audience. It is this symbolic depiction
of violence and the consequent use of social media to broadcast violent successes,
rather than the violence itself, that has separated ISIS from prior militant Islamist or-
ganizations.5 Not the first to display violence through choreographed videos posted
on social media platforms, ISIS has nonetheless perfected this practice.
A second innovation of ISIS is its profound sectarianism, developed through a
broad application of Takfiri doctrine, whereby ISIS leaders define other Muslims
(particular Shiites) as apostates and, therefore, justifiably subjects for violent con-
frontation. Such a practice, which has been crucial to ISIS, emerged, in part, out of
the Sunni organizations associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq during the
decade following the 2003 US invasion. In addition, ISIS has more systematically
targeted other non-Muslim religious communities for forced conversion or exter-
mination than prior Islamist organizations. The targeting of Christians and Yazidis
in northern Iraq are particularly notable examples.
Finally, ISIS offers an important innovation in the world of Salafist jihadism. Al
Qaeda’s teleological view of history drove the organization’s clandestine behavior,
where organizational secrecy, with punctuated and dramatic displays of violence,
were the order of the day, secure in the knowledge that history would eventually
lead to the fall of the West and the return of Islamic greatness. ISIS appears less
content to wait for history to play itself out but is, instead, driven by the belief that
more open and widespread action can bring about the return of Islamic greatness
in the more immediate future. This split is a central point of contention between
the Islamic State and al Qaeda globally and within the Middle East.
In developing a framework for understanding ISIS, this paper proceeds in three
linked parts. First, drawing on the understanding of power and control developed
by Foucault, I explore both the logic and potential limits of the Islamic State’s re-
liance on the spectacle of violence. My focus here is on the way in which the Is-
lamic State uses violence as punishment, which constitutes its most dramatic forms
of violence but by no means the entirety of its violent behavior. Here, I draw on a
number of sources that highlight the essential rationality of Islamic State violence,
as well as on textual exegesis of The Management of Savagery, a 2003/4 jihadist text
that has prominently informed ISIS’s thinking and action. Second, I explore how
the use of violence in the Islamic State’s efforts to consolidate authority, remake
society, and impose its strategy of survival reflects its distinct form of what Foucault
calls governmentality. I argue that one reason the Islamic State appears new and
unprecedented has to do with the way that ISIS reflects the revolutionary logic of
twentieth century emancipatory revolutionary regimes, a form of biopolitical con-
trol that receded with the end of the Cold War. Shades of ISIS’s form of rule, in
other words, might be seen in the Khmer Rouge, in Stalinist Russia, and even in the
early years of the post-1979 Islamic Republic of Iran. Finally, I examine how both
the Islamic State’s ideology and its violence reflect Frantz Fanon’s insights about
the logic of anticolonial resistance and help locate the Islamic State as a would-be
5
ISIS may appear to engage in extraordinarily brutal forms of violence, but such violence is hardly unique. From
death and dismemberment caused by American drone strikes and aerial assaults, to images of children scalded from
allied firebombing of cities during World War II, to piles of bodies on road sides and in rivers during the Rwandan
genocide, all states and societies have proven themselves capable of the most brutal forms of violence. Moreover, as
countless recent studies make clear, sexual violence in warfare is an all-too-common runaway norm (see, for example,
Enloe 1990, Leatherman 2011, Sjoberg 2013, and DeLargy 2013). Sexual violence was even an apparently widespread
practice by Americans during World War II (Roberts 2013).
142 ISIS: Violence and Ideology

anticolonial revolutionary regime. Taken together, the Islamic State’s deployment

of savage violence is both ideologically informed and strategically oriented; its state-
making behavior seems out of place in the postrevolutionary, neoliberal moment
but has its analogues in prior revolutionary regimes and reflects the enduring logic
of anticolonialism outlined by Fanon, replete with the impossible search for an au-
thentic national identity in a mythically pure past.
An accurate understanding of the Islamic State remains important, even though
recent military defeats have diminished its territorial control and undermined its
effort to build a form of government premised on the calculated use of violence
combined with practices that inculcated its vision for Islamic life. The military defeat
of the Islamic State has done little to change the broader conditions that enabled
the rise of its version of an anticolonial Islamist revolutionary regime within the
Middle East, and the continued allegiance to the ISIS model in Africa and Central
Asia hint that it may be premature to celebrate the demise of the Islamic State
model entirely. Understanding the Islamic State may help focus future analyses on
innovations in Islamist radicalism that emerge both within the Middle East and,
possibly, from the scores of Islamic State militants who have returned to their home
countries.

Viral Executions and Beheadings: The Islamic State’s Spectacle of Violence

Many popular accounts point to ISIS’s extreme brutality as distinguishing it from
other radical forces of Islamist militarism. The Islamic State’s beheadings, mass ex-
ecutions, crucifixions, and sexual enslavement, the argument goes, place it in a
brutal category all of its own. For instance, in introducing American audiences to
ISIS, PBS Frontline stressed to viewers that even al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, Jabaat
al Nusra, found ISIS’s violence too much and, thereby, resisted, rather than swore
allegiance to the rising Islamic State (Frontline 2014). Indeed, from mass killings to
mass sexual enslavement, ISIS’s extreme violence is what defines it to most Western
audiences. Yet, the violence of ISIS is neither new nor merely psychotic. It has its
roots in the insurgency and resistance to the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003;
it reflects the violence used by regimes from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Weiss and Has-
san 2015, 23) to Hafez and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria (Weiss and Hassan 2015, 134–35);
and its logic was clearly articulated by Jihadi-Salafist ideologists in the decade prior
to the declaration of an Islamic caliphate.6
Much of the scholarship on the Islamic State contends that Abu Bakr Naji’s ji-
hadist text The Management of Savagery greatly influenced Abu Musab al Zarqawi
and, therefore, provides the historical justifications for the Islamic State’s violence
(e.g., Stern and Berger 2015, 23; Weiss and Hassan 2015, 40–41; and Atwan 2015).
This text is worth considering insofar as it offers a rational explanation for savage
violence and complicates arguments that advance cultural or religious explanations
for ISIS’s violence. Naji (2003, 8–10) begins his account by asserting that direct
confrontation with America “removes the aura of invincibility” and will “spread
confidence in the souls of Muslims.” For Naji, forcing the United States to attack
the Islamic world directly, rather than hiding behind proxy states, will undermine
American propaganda and gain supporters (Naji 2003, 10, 18). The initial period
of conflict, which Naji refers to as one of vexation and exhaustion, is designed to
sap the enemy of strength and, through dazzling victories, attract recruits (Naji
2003, 16). The region of savagery, then, must be strategically selected based on an
6
The Islamic State is the offspring of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), which itself was the offspring of al Qaeda in
Iraq (AQI), the branch of al Qaeda established by Abu Musab al Zarqawi to resist the US occupation of Iraq. Zarqawi’s
methods, which often placed him in conflict with key leaders in al Qaeda, involved dramatic violence against Western
targets and sectarian violence targeted primarily at Iraq’s Shiite population (see, Stern and Berger 2015, 13; Weiss and
Hassan 2015, 58–63; and Ibrahim 2015). Reuter (2015) outlines the close connections between former remnants of
Saddam Hussein’s regime and Zarqawi’s AQI, which constituted the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
 BRIAN MELLO 143

evaluation of the enemy’s weaknesses. Naji’s strategy is based on a principle of esca-

lating conflict, where movement from small to large operations creates an image of
increasing power (Naji 2003, 29). Waves of operations, unlike al Qaeda’s concentra-
tion on a few dramatic and isolated attacks, are designed to “send a message to the
enemy that waves of fear and paying the price for its actions will never end” (Naji
2003, 29). Savage violence, thus, creates a demonstration effect that multiplies the
global impact of every operation (Naji 2003, 19, 30). Consequently, after the stage
of “vexation and exhaustion” comes the “paying the price stage.” Successful vio-
lence extends conflict to the largest possible area, attacks the luxury and economic
interests of the enemy, and engages in unexpected actions that emphasize the en-
emy’s paying the price for its current practices (Naji 2003, 83–84). As states fail and
savagery takes hold, in come Islamic groups to administer savage regions, to restore
order and justice (Naji 2003, 23).
Naji acknowledges that his call for jihad is, essentially, a call for crude violence.
“One who previously engaged in Jihad,” he writes, “knows that it is naught but vio-
lence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening (others), and massacring” (Naji 2003, 31).
Yet, even through this religious lens, Naji’s doctrine is not about the religious or
ideological justification for violence but the strategic imperative for it. In the end,
Naji’s text advocates a strategic framework that is the mirror image of the US strat-
egy of shock and awe, first articulated in a 1996 report and later implemented in the
first wave of bomb attacks on Iraq in March 2003. “It behooves us,” he concludes,
“to make them think one thousand times before attacking us” (Naji 2003, 31). This
rationality for terrorism and savage violence has served as a guide for ISIS’s actions,
which promotes its spectacular violence in order to reinforce an image of power
and invincibility.
Islamic State violence has taken a number of forms, including military-style as-
saults on cities and Syrian and Iraqi military positions, guerilla-style urban fighting,
and the violence associated with punishing opponents, enemies, and those who
don’t conform to its mandates. Here, my primary focus is unpacking these latter
forms of punishment, which, through the dissemination of execution videos, have
been among the most publicized elements of ISIS’s violent activity.7 Foucault’s in-
sights on discipline and punishment provide one useful starting point for analyzing
and interpreting Islamic State violence. In his study of the birth of modern forms
of control, Discipline and Punish, Foucault states that his text is grounded by four
general rules, three of which seem critical if we are to understand this aspect of
the Islamic State’s use of violence. Foremost, Foucault (1977, 23) suggests we not
focus entirely on punishment as repressive; rather, we need to explore the “positive
effects” of punishment. That is, we ought to focus as much on how punishment is
designed to produce particular behaviors as it is designed to deter them. Conse-
quently, a second rule of relevance is the need to “regard punishment as a political
tactic” (Foucault 1977, 23). No matter how much we’d like to focus on ISIS’s bru-
tality as evil and vile, in other words, we must focus on how it is designed to advance
particular political purposes. Finally, Foucault states that, in exploring the nature of
punishment, we emphasize how, through punishment, “the body itself is invested
by power relations” (Foucault 1977, 24). Through punishment, bodies are acted
upon, and these actions are designed to convey particular meanings, both to the
individual being punished and, more broadly, as lessons for other bodies. How, in
essence, should we interpret the corporeal dimensions of Islamic State brutality? In
what ways does ISIS’s brutality seek to shape the behavior both of its adherents and
its adversaries?

7
Naji’s text also outlines a calculated logic for the gruesome execution of hostages. In a passage that recalls the
logic of the spectacle as discussed by Foucault, he writes, “The policy of violence must also be followed such that if the
demands are not met, the hostages should be liquidated in a terrifying manner, which will send fear into the hearts of
the enemy and his supporters” (Naji 2003, 33).
144 ISIS: Violence and Ideology

ISIS’s brutal violence is interesting because it represents less the logic of mod-
ern forms of control chronicled by Foucault—those forms that rely increasingly on
examination and observation, on Panopticism—and more on the logic of the spec-
tacle. To illustrate the logic of the spectacle, Foucault (1977, 3–7) begins Discipline
and Punish with the vivid retelling of the botched execution of Damiens in 1757.
Accused of regicide, Damiens was to be publicly drawn and quartered after having
flesh torn from his body and molten lead poured upon those spots where his flesh
had been removed. As Foucault retells this narrative, the horses are too tired to
complete their critical task, and after several failed attempts, the addition of two
horses, and a series of cuts to help the task along, the execution was finally com-
pleted. The horrified images of my students’ faces as I read these passages aloud in
class confirm Foucault’s suspicion that we often mistakenly interpret this incident
and what it signals for our different forms of execution and punishment today. A
change in our moral sentiments, the logic goes, has allowed us to see this barbarous
violence as cruel and unusual; a modern society requires cleaner, less cruel punish-
ments (Foucault 1977, 7–11). This, of course, misses the logic of the spectacle as a
form of punishment.
“The public execution,” Foucault (1977, 47) writes, “is to be understood not only
as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the cer-
emonies by which power is manifested.” The public execution is about restoring, in
the eyes of those who witness the punishment of the body of the condemned, the
awesome power of the state (Foucault 1977, 48–49). The public execution supports
the state’s claims to be the chief rule-maker; it demands obedience to the state’s
wishes; and it demonstrates the capacity of the state to root out and exact punish-
ment upon those who disobey the rules. Moreover, Foucault (1977, 57) argues that,
“In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people,
whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.” For Fou-
cault, seeing the execution was designed to arouse feelings of terror, direct anger at
the accused, and reinforce the power of political authority (Foucault 1977, 58).
Foucault points out that, to be effective, the execution requires the presence of
a public to observe the actions and internalize their meaning. While ISIS certainly
carries out public punishments of enemy combatants, criminals, or anyone whose
lifestyle or beliefs do not comport with the evolving ideology of the Islamic State, I’m
interested here in their use of video to record their violence for a wider audience.
Indeed, through the use of highly produced and choreographed videos, ISIS offers
the spectacle of its violence to an audience that need not be in direct proximity of
the violence itself. Stern and Berger (2015, 3) call these videos “violence porn with a
mission to intimidate and enrage.” “ISIS is using beheadings,” they write, “as a form
of marketing, manipulation, and recruitment, determined to bring the public dis-
play of savagery into our lives, trying to instill in us a state of terror.” This is not the
first time Islamist militants have sought to multiply the effect of violence through
videos disseminated both to news organizations and through internet platforms. It
is, though, perhaps the most highly refined use of mass media propaganda. ISIS’s
videos don’t simply record spectacular violence, they craft a story for the viewing
public that helps convey to the viewer just how to interpret the violence.
It is instructive to unpack one example of the Islamic State’s spectacular exe-
cutions in order to illustrate the spectacle of violence in practice. In early Febru-
ary 2015, ISIS released a video that culminated in the execution of a Jordanian
air force pilot, Muath al-Kassasbeh, who had been captured after his plane had
crashed during anti-ISIS operations in late December 2014. Most news agencies
provided small excerpts from the video, focusing on the moments just before al-
Kassasbeh, detained in an iron cage, was burned alive. The full ISIS video, however,
was a twenty-three-minute production that ultimately made clear that the manner of
execution was designed to mimic the deaths of those caught in anti-ISIS airstrikes.
The video begins with interview footage of Jordanian King Abdullah, designed to
 BRIAN MELLO 145

paint a picture of the monarchy as working hand-in-hand with the United States in
military missions throughout the Islamic world. Multiple cuts of US/Jordanian mil-
itary cooperation are featured throughout the opening three minutes. The explicit
argument here is that Jordan, in siding with American military interests, has demon-
strated its anti-Islamic nature, thus legitimizing violent retribution. The video then
cuts to al-Kassasbeh seated at a table, offering a detailed description of the sortie
that preceded his capture. The text of this interview had been published in ISIS’s
magazine, Dabiq. Dressed in an orange jump suit, which likely is designed to recall
the prisoner clothing of American detainees, he presents what amounts to a con-
fession. Set off as an eerie effigy against a black screen with pop-up images of text,
as well as schematics of the Jordanian air force base from which he took off and of
the F-16 that he was flying, al-Kassasbah describes a joint mission involving planes
from the UAE, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. He even describes the laser-
guided munitions the planes carried. Striking in his discussion of these operations
is the fact that all of the Middle Eastern and North African countries participating
in anti-ISIS military operations are using US-built military aircraft. The argument
that these regimes advance Western colonial interests couldn’t be clearer. The video
then presents several minutes of airstrike videos, intermingled with images of dead
and wounded people (many young children) burned as a result of airstrikes. The
film cuts between al-Kassasbah walking to his execution and images of bodies being
pulled from buildings collapsed in airstrikes. As al-Kassasbah steps into the metal
cage in which he is to die, the viewer is acutely aware that his execution is metaphor-
ically designed to reflect the deaths of those trapped in buildings and burned alive
by anti-ISIS air strikes. This spectacle has a thesis and a purpose; it is not the incom-
prehensible violence of a death cult.
The video reveals much about how the Islamic State uses the spectacle of vio-
lence to advance its goals. Here, the public torture and execution explicitly seeks
to “reveal the truth” of the crime for which execution is a justifiable punishment
(Foucault 1977, 44). The spectacle of the execution is both an act of punishment
and an act of truth production. In this instance, the truth that ISIS produces casts
the West as colonial, crusader powers whose interests are supported by a series of
regimes that continue to act in un-Islamic ways. Their coordinated violence under-
pins the just response of ISIS. Moreover, the execution itself serves to restore justice
and, in so doing, restore the image of ISIS’s power. Al-Kassasbah’s execution is, in
Foucault’s (1977, 49) language, “an emphatic affirmation of power and of [ISIS’s]
superiority.”
The spectacle of violence embodied by such public executions is not simply de-
signed to punish behavior but to produce desired behavior in the public observers
of the violence. Indeed, as Benjamin (1978) writes, violence has two primary func-
tions: it may be either law-making, or law-preserving. Though these two functions
are not entirely free of tension, what binds them is the way in which violence is
designed to enact or produce desired outcomes, to prescribe and enforce rules
of behavior. Insofar as technology has expanded the publicness of the execution,
there are two key differences in who constitutes the public who witnesses ISIS’s ex-
ecutions: one public is constituted by external and internal adversaries; the other
public is constituted by external and internal potential supporters of the Islamic
State. Thus, the affirmation of power represented by the execution serves different
purposes depending on which part of the public the viewer comes from. That part
of the public representing potential subjects of the Islamic State is being asked to
join ISIS, to support the fledgling Islamic State, to emigrate, to be willing to fight
on its behalf. Violent execution videos produce in this public faith in the status and
power of the Islamic State. The other part of the public present as viewers of the ex-
ecution represent internal and external threats to the Islamic State and is being told
that resistance is futile; submission to the Islamic State’s authority is the only choice.
Moreover, ISIS’s execution videos, especially after the execution of journalist James
146 ISIS: Violence and Ideology

Foley in August 2014, have contributed to Western fears of the threat ISIS poses.
Thus, as we bear witness to the spectacle of Islamic State violence, we unwittingly
give the Islamic State the power that it purported to already have.
The spectacle of violence has in certain ways worked well for the Islamic State. It
has secured the allegiance of various rebel groups and many, though not all, smaller
Islamist militant groups fighting in Syria. It garnered close to twenty-five thousand
foreign fighters who came from places as varied as Tunisia and Great Britain to
join in building the new caliphate (Radio Free Europe 2015). Despite being more
numerous and heavily armed than the one thousand ISIS attackers, the fleeing of
some thirty thousand Iraqi troops from Mosul in mid-June 2014 demonstrates the
effective capacity of ISIS’s publicized executions to produce the behavior it desires
(Sly and Ramadan 2014).
Yet, despite its apparent successes, the drawback of the spectacle—the possibility
of sympathy with the condemned—is something with which ISIS must contend. In-
deed, the downfall of the Islamic State’s precursors, AQI and ISI, owed much to the
distaste for Zarqawi’s extreme violence. ISIS appears to have learned some lessons
from Zarqawi’s overreach (al-Tamimi 2014, 8). While AQI and ISI targeted even
the Sunni community in Iraq, ISIS has reserved its most extreme violence primar-
ily for non-Sunni communities—for Shiites, Kurds, Yazidis, and Westerners, as well
as for Sunni Muslims fighting on behalf of foreign regimes. Yet, as the Center for
the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence report on Islamic State defectors
makes clear, ISIS’s attacks against other Sunni Muslims in different factions resisting
Assad, rather than a concerted focus on taking out Assad’s regime, along with con-
cerns over corruption and the generally harsh living conditions in the Islamic State,
held the potential for creating further defections (Neumann 2015). Indeed, ISIS’s
brutal violence is, in part, to blame for the differences that split the Islamic State
from al-Qaeda-backed groups (al-Tamimi 2014, 15). Moreover, while Islamic State
propaganda may have initially frightened the Iraqi army, it hardened the resolve
of Kurdish fighters, and a growing number of states entered into direct military
confrontation with the Islamic State. Its total loss of territory seems, at the current
moment, a brutal inevitability.

The Islamic State as Revolutionary Regime

In the previous section, I drew on insights from Foucault’s analysis of different types
of discipline and punishment to offer a reading of the Islamic State’s reliance on
the public execution as a spectacle of violence, which has been central to concerns
about ISIS and the threat it poses to the West. This analysis challenged some pop-
ular understandings of ISIS brutality. In this section, I explore how ISIS represents
something more than a terrorist organization or an insurgent group. It represents a
would-be revolutionary regime (e.g., Walt 2015). Moving beyond its spectacular vio-
lence, this section focuses on ISIS’s practices of government, and its efforts to incul-
cate particular ways of thinking, acting, and living in the populations over which it
asserts control. While these practices and techniques may appear new and unprece-
dented, this section explores how they are, in fact, reminiscent of similar practices
deployed by prior revolutionary regimes.
In at least two ways, journalists and scholars have resisted understanding the Is-
lamic State as a would-be revolutionary regime. For some, calling the Islamic State a
revolutionary regime overstates the extent to which ISIS draws support from a mo-
bilized and revolutionary population (Adib-Moghaddam 2015). Adib-Moghaddam,
for example, criticizes Walt for suggesting that the Islamic State looks like other rev-
olutionary movements in history, arguing instead that ISIS is “a psychopathic terror
sect . . . a cartel of Fascist bandits, more comparable to the Ku Klux Klan . . . more
Pablo Escobar than Robespierre.” The second, and not unrelated, reason ISIS is not
often described as a would-be revolutionary regime results from the obsession with
 BRIAN MELLO 147

ISIS’s violence. A focus on the Islamic State’s brutality, which, as explored above, is
often rooted in problematic arguments about the role of ISIS’s ideology, tends to
obscure ISIS’s state- and society-making projects and even the role of violence in
this process. From revenue generation to morality policing, to an elaborate govern-
ing structure, to the productive nature of its spectacular violence, the Islamic State
has engaged in both institution building and the articulation of what Joel Migdal
(1988) calls strategies of survival in order to remake the Middle East in its ideologi-
cal image. Indeed, it is in the specific nature of ISIS’s state and society making, and
not necessarily in its spectacular violence, that we can see the importance of the
Islamic State’s ideology.8
Again, Naji’s text, The Management of Savagery, offers a useful understanding of
the principles that guide ISIS’s governance. To manage savagery, Naji makes clear,
is to create a state, and this involves:
spreading internal security; providing food and medical treatment; securing the re-
gion of savagery from the invasions of enemies; establishing Sharia justice among the
people . . . raising the level of belief and combat efficiency during the training of the
youth . . . and so on. (Naji 2003, 11)

Creating a state, in other words, is about borders, education, morality, law, intelli-
gence, and revenue generation. In the area that it controlled militarily, the Islamic
State sought to build legitimacy for its ideological vision through a protostate that
involved a clear political hierarchy, a growing and locally rooted administrative bu-
reaucracy, and multiple types of police forces, educational institutions, a media op-
eration, and a court system that included “the use of hudud corporal punishments
for an assortment of crimes such as theft and blasphemy” (al-Tamimi 2014, 16).
Caris and Reynolds (2014, 14), focusing primarily on examining how ISIS governed
its capital, Raqqa, divide ISIS’s governance into two categories: “administration and
Muslim services.” On the one hand, “Islamic outreach, Shari’a institutes, elemen-
tary education, law enforcement (both local and religious), courts, recruitment,
and tribal relations,” they write, “fall under the administrative category.” On the
other hand, “the provision of services, including humanitarian aid, bakeries, wa-
ter, and electricity falls under what ISIS calls the ‘Department of Muslim Services’”
(Caris and Reynolds 2014, 14).
The dominant focus on ISIS’s brutality and violence tends to obscure the actions
and practices that fall under what Foucault describes as the art of government, or
those rationalities, techniques, and practices deployed to constitute desired sub-
jects. In fact, ISIS’s violent practices, insofar as they seek to produce desired behav-
iors in citizens and subjects of the Islamic State, constitute an important element of
how the Islamic State produces knowledge, truth, and control. As the previous sec-
tion made clear, the spectacle of public executions can be understood as an exercise
of ISIS’s sovereign power. The calculated application of violence sought to produce
in spectators’ correct action (e.g., obedience and respect), as well as a particular
version of the truth. Yet, in addition to its violence, the Islamic State’s more mun-
dane practices, including education, control of prices, provision of public services,
etc., were designed to constitute a population that reflected the desired attitudes,
behaviors, and values that underpin the Islamic State’s conservative interpretations

8
Following Freeden (2006, 14), I see ideologies as “patterned and situated combinations of political concepts that
temporarily define our understanding of the political and compete with alternative configurations over political sup-
port.” Ideologies, therefore, “are human and social products that bind together views of the world . . . and enable
collective action.” Political ideologies provide cognitive maps that help answer questions about who we are, what kind
of world we want to live in, and how should we act to achieve that vision. For Freeden, ideological conveyance occurs
through more than just discursive practices, it occurs “through sight and non-verbal sound: marches, riots, anthems,
uniforms, flags, sirens, the architecture of public institutions, standing when a dignitary enters the room, cartoons …
to give a few random instances” (Freeden 2006, 21). Because much explanatory power has been ascribed to ISIS, my
focus here is on understanding the way ISIS’s state-making practices reveal its ideology.
148 ISIS: Violence and Ideology

of Sunni Islam. This “series of interventions and regulatory controls” constitutes

what Foucault (1984, 262) terms the “bio-power” of the Islamic State. The Islamic
State’s ideology serves as the legitimating anchor for its governing practices. It is an
ideology that promises emancipation to those who are willing to live out the Islamic
State’s way of life.
Drawing from Richard Sakwa’s analysis of the concept of revolution, I argue that
the Islamic State exhibits a type of government most associated with a particular
moment in revolutionary politics. Sakwa’s reflection on the changing nature of rev-
olution at the close of the twentieth century, and my contention that ISIS reflects
a form of government more associated with prior revolutionary regimes, helps ex-
plain why some continue to see the Islamic State as new and unprecedented. Toward
the end of the twentieth century, popular uprisings dramatically brought about the
end of European communism, but rather than replacing it with new revolutionary
regimes, underpinned by new revolutionary ideologies, or promises of emancipat-
ing people from all their worldly hardships, the protests that brought down commu-
nist regimes in Europe focused primarily on making the existing regimes go away.
As Sakwa (2006, 459) notes, the overthrow of European communism represented
“the repudiation at the social level of revolution as an emancipatory act.” For those
who grew up under regimes promising emancipation through revolution, the real-
ity of a life full of political repression and indoctrination and, at times, the ways in
which repression proved the very hypocrisy of professed ideology, left few clamor-
ing for a new totalizing revolutionary ideology. In short, the end of the twentieth
century, Sakwa argues, gave rise to a new brand of antirevolutionary revolutionism.
“By the end of the twentieth century,” he writes, “the notion of emancipatory revo-
lutionism lost whatever popular resonance it once might have had in the countries
that claimed to be building Communism as its basis” (Sakwa 2006, 460). In this
section, I briefly explore how Sakwa’s argument provides insight into the nature of
Arab Spring protests in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet, in interesting ways,
the rise of the Islamic State out of the instability fostered by the Arab Spring repre-
sents the perhaps unexpected return of an emancipatory revolutionary regime. This
revolutionary regime, which seems so out of place given the decisive and epochal
transformation in revolutionary politics noted by Sakwa, explains why ISIS’s rise is
viewed as unique and innovative.
Sakwa’s analysis of the revolutions of 1989 was motivated by the goal of exploring
what, if anything, distinguished the world-historical significance of these events, for
unlike prior revolutionary moments, the events of 1989 didn’t give rise to entirely
new forms of economics or governance. The importance of these events, on the
contrary, he argued, can be found in the ways in which they transformed the very
understanding of revolution itself. To reach this conclusion, Sakwa offers an explo-
ration of three prior and epochal understandings of revolution: revolution as nat-
uralistic cyclicity, Enlightenment revolutionism, and emancipatory revolutionism,
which is most relevant to this analysis of ISIS.
For Sakwa, emancipatory understandings of revolution emerged in the nine-
teenth century with thinkers such as Marx who argued that revolutionary practice
would do more than bring progress; it would bring about full human emancipa-
tion. According to this line of thinking, revolutions could solve all social problems
(Sakwa 2006, 463). Indeed, it is this emancipatory version of revolutions which
underpinned revolutionary ideologies and practices throughout most of the late-
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Emancipatory visions offered by leaders from
Pol Pot to Vladimir Lenin, from Gamal Nasser to Ayatollah Khomeini, promised to
remake the societies over which they presided. Inevitably, in order to achieve eman-
cipation, revolutionary regimes found it necessary to deploy forms of government
that imposed their visions on society through education, indoctrination, repression,
and fear. Propaganda and robust internal security apparatuses provided the tools for
achieving emancipation. In short, twentieth century revolutionary regimes involved
 BRIAN MELLO 149

relatively similar rationalities and practices of government. Yet, none of these rev-
olutionary regimes was able to achieve its ideological vision, and for those individ-
uals unlucky enough to voice discontent about life in such a regime, life became
increasingly solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short. For Sakwa, such was the context
in which the revolutions of 1989 took place.
The revolutions of 1989 were predicated on the collective rejection of the logic of
emancipatory revolutionism; they were, in sum, antirevolutions (Sakwa 2006, 468).
The organizations, practices, and very goals of the antirevolutionary revolutions of
1989 marked, for Sakwa, a fourth epochal moment in the politics of revolutions.
Gone was a politics predicated on identifying policies, ideologies, and practices that
might achieve emancipation, and in its place was a new politics predicated on the
value of political activism itself. In other words, the revolutionary and world histor-
ical element of the 1989 revolutions involved a commitment not to the outcomes
of revolutionary change but to the very democratic aspects of the revolutionary
practices themselves (Sakwa 2006, 472). As Sakwa seems to suspect, this shift in rev-
olutionary thinking has affected revolutionary politics beyond Eastern Europe. In
many ways, that the Arab Spring protests demanded that autocratic regimes go; that
the people have a greater say; and not that some revolutionary ideology be imposed
in order to achieve emancipation from worldly problems, continued to reflect the
movement beyond and against the emancipatory revolutions of the previous cen-
tury and half. All of this makes the rise of ISIS even more striking, for the Islamic
State exhibits the hallmarks of an emancipatory revolutionary regime at a moment
when revolutionary politics had seemingly rejected both the governing style and the
ideological promise of such regimes.
ISIS’s focus on education, and in particular on how education serves as a means
for imposing its religious ideology, makes clearer the Islamic State’s emancipatory
revolutionism. Caris and Reynolds identify several ways in which ISIS advances its
religious ideology. Its initial outreach took the form of Da’wa events; these call those
who live in areas the Islamic State comes to control to meetings that “educate par-
ticipants about ISIS core beliefs” (Caris and Reynolds 2014, 15). In addition, the
Islamic State constituted a religious police force (al-Hisba), which subsequently as-
sured public cooperation with the core beliefs that had been elucidated in Da’wa
meetings. From assuring women present themselves with proper modesty to assur-
ing that stores do not unfairly raise prices on customers, the religious police help
constitute the everyday social practices that reflect the Islamic State’s version of
Salafism. ISIS also replaced all previous schools with religious schools of its own
making, part of a strategy targeted at recruiting children into its state-making ef-
forts. The combined effort of this educational outreach is to instill in the public
a faith that, in complying with the Islamic State, individuals will be liberated from
those forces that have held them back.
The message from the Islamic State’s educational efforts is clear—following ISIS’s
rules provides residents of the Islamic state with security, stability, and financial re-
sources. The contrast to the lawlessness and insecurity that had engulfed Syria in
the aftermath of prodemocracy protests in 2011, or the anti-Sunni corruption and
discrimination that defined life under Shiite rule in Iraq, couldn’t be greater. “For
the local community,” Weiss and Hassan (2015, 223–24) write, “the difference [of
life inside in contrast to outside the Islamic State] was quickly felt: ISIS provided
safety and security; its methods of justice were swift, and nobody was exempt from
punishment, including its own fighters who deviated from the strict moral code
it had laid down.” They conclude, “ISIS established itself as a viable law enforcer
and won credit from two important societal segments: those who were disillusioned
with the Syrian revolution and started to reminisce about safety and security under
the regime, and those who were alienated by the [Free Syrian Army] and Islamic
factions” (Weiss and Hassan 2015, 228).
150 ISIS: Violence and Ideology

Stern and Berger (2015, 211) suggest that “like other ‘total organizations,’ ISIS
aims to create a new form of man.” This new man is one who is capable of shaping
history through successful and violent direct confrontation with the West and the
local regimes that have advanced Western colonialism. It is a new man whose stead-
fast commitment to Sunni fundamentalism provides the shared identity upon which
this resistance depends. It is a new man capable not only of surviving but of thriving
in his emancipation from Western colonialism. It is a new man who can tear down
borders imposed by Western powers and redraw them through the establishment of
a new caliphate. This, of course, is an old theme running through Islamist politics.
Sayyid Qutb (2009, 149), for example, described jihad as “a positive movement that
aims to liberate man throughout the world.”
The emancipatory promise offered by the Islamic State is captured in “This is
the Promise of Allah (2014),” a document released upon ISIS’s declaration of a
new caliphate from “Allepo to Diyala.” Through the establishment of an Islamic
State which embraces and enacts Sunni fundamentalist principles, and which suc-
cessfully confronts both the West and the regimes currently in power throughout
the Islamic world, ISIS offers the opportunity for honor and esteem, while its ad-
versaries (cast as apostates and infidels) are “killed, imprisoned, or defeated.” “The
time has come,” the founders of the Islamic State declare, “for those generations
that were drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation,
and being ruled by the vilest of all people, after their long slumber in the darkness
of neglect—the time has come for them to rise.” In calling Muslims to come and
join the caliphate, the Islamic State offers a utopian vision of a society that offers
not just progress but the removal of evil itself (2014). In short, ISIS promotes it-
self as an emancipatory revolutionary regime. Its practices of government, and its
effort to inculcate particular ways of thinking, acting, and living in the populations
over which it asserts control, are reminiscent of similar practices deployed by prior
emancipatory revolutionary regimes. It is here, in seeking to understand the logic
of the Islamic State as a revolutionary regime, and not necessarily in understanding
the logic of its violence, that its particular ideological vision plays an important role.
Thus, the specific, religiously based, anticolonial, ideological beliefs held by the Is-
lamic State’s leadership are what define it as a Sunni Islamist revolutionary regime.
Nonetheless, as the final section of this paper will argue, even though specific as-
pects of its ideology are unique, by reaching into a mythical past to underpin an
identity for today, the Islamic State has parallels in other anticolonial movements
and continues a line of thinking articulated by Islamist ideologists throughout the
twentieth century.

The Dialectics of Violence: The Wretched of the Earth are Still Recreating
Themselves
To this point, I have drawn on Foucault’s analysis of discipline and punishment
as a lens both for understanding the spectacle of violence associated with ISIS’s
public executions, as well as for exploring forms of biopolitical control associated
with its art of government (one that I suggest is best described as an example of an
emancipatory revolutionary regime) within the territory it controlled. I turn here to
the work of Frantz Fanon because it is Fanon’s analysis of anticolonial struggles that
offers the best way to understand the broader violence of ISIS, as well as make sense
of its ideological vision within the particular historical moment. Strindberg and
Warn (2011) offer a useful template for developing a Fanonian analysis of Islamist
politics. Fanon’s focus on resistance to European colonialism and, in particular, his
analysis of the Cold War in shaping anticolonial struggles, suggests that the current
context of Islamist politics is not quite the same as the politics of decolonization
in Africa and Southeast Asia in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, there are important
 BRIAN MELLO 151

similarities that are worth considering, for they help us understand that ISIS is not
something entirely new or unprecedented; that its violence reflects a dialectics of
anticolonial violence that has shaped so much Middle Eastern and North African
politics since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; and that its violence, like the
anticolonial violence upon which Fanon focused, is constitutive of identity.
It is fair to say that violence is, more broadly, important to many processes of
identity formation. From Tilly’s (1994) discussion of warfare and the rise of early
European nationalisms, to Migdal’s (1988) identification of war as useful to the
formation of a strong Israeli identity, to Schmitt’s (1996) arguments about the im-
portance of existential enemies to politics and the constitution of friends, the re-
lationship of violence to identity formation is not unique to the Islamic State. The
argument advanced here is that the Islamic state’s violence can be read through a
Fanonian lens as part of a broader trajectory of anticolonial identity politics that has
developed and shifted but has remained an important part of politics in the Middle
East and North Africa since the end of the Ottoman Empire. Consequently, such
a reading of ISIS may point to implications for the future of Islamist violence after
the military defeat of the Islamic State as a territorial entity.
For Fanon, the distinguishing feature of colonialism is a dialectical relationship
between the settler and the native. The settler, through a series of ideological con-
structs, brings about the very identity of the native, and imbues the native with an-
imalistic qualities that serve to justify the settlers’ violent rule. At a certain point,
though, the native comes to recognize the settler’s construction of him as false.
Fanon suggests that the violence of anticolonialism resolves the dialectical relation-
ship between the settler and the native with the creation of a new, shared identity—
the rebel. For the native, anticolonial violence “binds [people] together as a whole,
since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of a great or-
ganism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in
the beginning” (Fanon 1963, 93). In short, violent anticolonial struggle constitutes
new political identities. Strindberg and Warn (2011, 56) refer to this peculiar rela-
tionship between violence and identity as the Fanonian impulse, which refers to “the
psychological impact of insurgence and resistance on the native Self, and the translation of that
impact into political currency, tactics, and strategy.” The Fanonian impulse differentiates
anticolonial violence from other forms of violence, insofar as “armed resistance not
only carries with it the promise of political liberation but constitutes in and of itself
the means of psychological emancipation” (Strindberg and Warn 2011, 58).
Strindberg and Warn (2011, 55) suggest that Islamist politics in the Middle East
and North Africa “are at root anti-colonial liberation struggles.” Islamist politics,
as such, represents a potent opposition to both larger political forces (i.e., the rela-
tionship between Western states and the Muslim nation [Strindberg and Warn 2011,
43]) and more local forces (i.e., the different interactions between specific popula-
tions and rulers within post-Ottoman states [Strindberg and Warn 2011, 44]). More-
over, they write, “The Manichean world created by the legacy of imperialism and
colonialism has profound repercussions for all major Islamist movements, which
have emerged as responses to the failed liberation struggles of the leftists and na-
tionalists” (Strindberg and Warn 2011, 51). It is, therefore, impossible not to read
the creation of identity within the Islamic State through such a lens. While not
confronting the same settler colonialism about which Fanon was writing, in violent
struggle against the West, and against the Syrian, Iraqi, (and other Sunni) regimes
that it sees as merely doing the bidding of the West, ISIS fosters in its fighters a new
identity—perhaps more a new version of the Islamic warrior rather than the rebel.9
The Islamic State, unlike the postcolonial bourgeoisie about which Fanon writes,
does not generally seek to enter into the capitalist system, to inherit the previous
9
For a more comprehensive analysis of how the violence of ISIS helps constitute collective identity, see Neer and
O’Toole (2014).
152 ISIS: Violence and Ideology

regime’s levers of economic and political power, even while its violence recalls the
violence of both past regimes in the Middle East and the actions of external powers
in the region.10 On the contrary, ISIS offers what appears to be a more thorough-
going rejection of ancien régimes. In this sense, as the previous section argued,
we might look beyond Fanon, to the literature on revolutionary regimes, in order
to understand the nature of ISIS’s revolutionary utopianism. Yet, I contend that
Fanon’s discussion of the demand for a national culture within anticolonial upris-
ings is relevant for an understanding of ISIS’s version of an anticolonial Islamist
ideology.
For Fanon, the native intellectual seeks to rescue a national culture by going back
in history to rehabilitate a civilizational identity that existed before colonialism and
which was denied and belittled by colonialism. This effort to recover an authentic
precolonial identity is an act of resistance, engaged in by those who “relentlessly de-
termine to renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs
of life of their people” (Fanon 1963, 210). What’s interesting about this process is
both the extent to which it is engaged in with zeal and the ways in which it is an
impossible task. Indeed, rather than recovering an authentic past, this process in-
volves the invention of a prior mythic authenticity. It is an invention, which, like
other forms of imagining a community, seeks to bring about a collective identity,
here, an imagined community specifically designed to resist and present an alterna-
tive to colonialism.
The distinctive nature of the Islamic State’s ideology worth considering here is
described by Bunzel as a branch of Jihadi-Salafism. “Jihadi-Salafism,” Bunzel (2015,
7) writes, “is a distinctive ideological movement in Sunni Islam . . . The movement
is predicated on an extremist and minoritarian reading of Islamic scripture that
is also textually rigorous, deeply rooted in premodern theological tradition, and
extensively elaborated by a recognized cadre of religious authorities.” The Islamic
State, then, can trace its ideological lineage back to Sunni thinkers ranging from
the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hasan al-Banna to Saudi Wahhabism and Sayyid Qutb
(Bunzel 2015, 7–9). Its central tenets involve a return to a precolonial, purified,
conservative enactment of Islamic life that can respond to “Western imperialism
and the associated decline of Islam in public life” (Bunzel 2015, 7).
The effort to draw from a mythical past to inform a resurgent present identity
is perhaps most strikingly evident in the Islamic State’s concerted efforts to wipe
away state borders because existing states are artificial colonial constructions that
divide the ummah, or Islamic community. The declaration of the caliphate, there-
fore, specifically sought to undo the boarders that have shaped the state system
since the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.11 According to Malise Ruthven (2014),
the Sykes-Picot agreement features prominently in ISIS thinking because “it stands
near the beginning of what many Arabs view as a sequence of Western betrayals
spanning from the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in World War I to the es-
tablishment of Israel in 1948 to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.” In its public statements
surrounding the declaration of the caliphate, and in symbolic acts of destruction
that dismantled the physical infrastructure that once marked state borders between
Iraq and Syria, Ruthven (2014) argues that ISIS “is nurtured by the myth of precolo-
nial innocence.”
For ISIS, any individual or group who doesn’t conform to this conservative vision
of Sunni Islam, which is disseminated through education and enforced through
public punishments as discussed in the previous sections, represents a betrayal of
the religion. Consequently, the Islamic State has liberally applied takfiri doctrine to

10
Although it is worth pointing out that the Islamic State has relied, like the states it purports to replace, on the
sale of oil for revenue. So, in some sense, it has sought to assume the levers of rentierism.
11
For an English language video that reveals how Sykes-Picot factors into ISIS thinking, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i357G1HuFcI.
 BRIAN MELLO 153

label nonconformists as unbelievers. This, then, justifies the Islamic State’s cleans-
ing of nonbelievers from the territory of the caliphate through the acts of spectacu-
lar violence described above. In practice, this has involved confrontation with, and
mass killings of, Kurds, Yazidis, and, perhaps most importantly, Shiite Muslims.12 In
the end, then, the Islamic State’s violence helps to forge a new collective identity
premised on the power of Sunni Muslims to remake the Middle East, to rid the re-
gion of Western and heretical influences, and to restore the Islamic Middle East to
its once great heights.

The Importance and Limits of Understanding ISIS

My primary interest in this article is to offer an understanding of important ele-
ments of the Islamic State’s politics. In particular, I have drawn on key analytical and
theoretical ideas developed by Foucault and Fanon to present a reading of ISIS’s vi-
olence, of its type of revolutionary governance, and of its ideology. Throughout, I
have had, as my foil, academic and popular accounts of the Islamic State that stress
its innovative, unique qualities. Even where such accounts accurately locate ISIS’s
origins in the debacle that was America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, their emphasis
on originality and uniqueness risk propagating Orientalist clash-of-civilization argu-
ments about the nature of Islamist radicalism (Said 1979). If we focus on the Islamic
State as a terrorist organization that engages in violence to satiate a lust for death
and destruction, we miss the ways in which the rise of the Islamic State is a symptom
of problematic state formation dating back to the end of the Ottoman Empire; we
miss the ways it is the result of forces resisting neocolonialism; and we miss the way
its ideology and violence are, therefore, rational and understandable. The analysis
offered here, it should be clear, doesn’t make the Islamic State any easier or more
difficult to contain or defeat militarily, but it makes it more comprehensible. In-
deed, it appears that the military defeat of the Islamic State may be well underway.
Yet, the failure to design effective and inclusive political institutions that both pro-
mote material opportunity and build stable political identities will likely leave open
the opportunity for another innovative form of Islamist radicalism to emerge in its
place. Radical Islamist ideologies and practices remain potent forces in a region
defined by autocracy, oil politics, economic inequality, and weak state capacity.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank participants of the Columbia University Law and
Politics faculty seminar, as well as the editors of this journal and the two review-
ers of this article, for insightful and helpful feedback and comments. Where the
final paper has improved, it is due to this critical feedback.

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