Islamists in the MENA Warscape
Our new special issue on Iraq, Syria and MENA warscapes and a new book on Syria join the MENA Academy
How do Islamists adapt and change when embedded within protracted conflicts? Do Islamists have distinctive advantages or disadvantages relative to non-Islamist actors in such conflict situations? If they do, do such advantages or disadvantages adhere to all religions or to all Islamists — or is it a distinctly Sunni Islamist phenemonon? I’ve been working on these and related questions in both academic and policy work for over a decade. Now, I’m delighted to announce the publication of a special issue of the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism entitled “Changing Warscapes, Changing Islamists: Religion, Organization, Strategic Context and New Approaches to Jihadist Insurgencies.” Jeroen Gunning, Morten Valbjørn and I guest edited the special issue, and co-authored its opening article, based on a series of online workshops and an in-person university at Denmark’s Aarhus University several years ago. Its release coincides with the publication of From Jihad to Politics: How Syrian Jihadis Embraced Politics (Oxford University Press), by Jerome Drevon, who is one of the authors in our special issue and whose new book I discuss below (instead of at the top of the post like normal).
The special issue represents the first among several projects I’ve been working on meant to develop and deploy the concept of warscapes within the Middle Eastern context. This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the warscapes concept, developed primarily by anthropologists of African wars (like Carolyn Nordstrom, Stephen Lubkemann, Marielle Debos, and Danny Hoffmann) and African scholars like Achilles Mbembe has begun to gain popularity among critical security studies scholars in recent years (see last week’s post about Yassir Munif’s book on necropolitics in Syria, for instance, and recent work by Munira Khayyat, Sami Hermez, Samer Abboud, Samar al-Bulushi and Kali Rubaii). It’s also central to my current book project, Battle Scars: Silence and Violence in Middle Eastern Warscapes, forthcoming someday from Columbia, and to another theoretically oriented collective project which met most recently at Sciences Po. It’s a contested concept within anthropology, the literature on African wars, conflict studies, and more (as several of our excellent peer reviewers pointedly noted) — which makes it really interesting to work with across comparative cases to see what it can contribute.
As we introduce the Special Issue’s framing essay (available open access here):
A vast and rich literature on armed Islamist groups has developed over the last two and a half decades, as scholars and analysts have taken the measure of national and transnational armed Islamist groups and the internationalized insurgencies which have taken root across the globe. Scholarship in the decade after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda (AQ) attack on the United States tended to focus on and draw conclusions from a relatively limited number of cases. The decade since the 2011 Arab uprisings has seen a remarkable proliferation of new armed conflicts across the Middle East in which Islamist actors of various types have taken a leading role. This has opened up new opportunities to develop the already rich literature on the performance, behavior, and adaptations of Islamist organizations during protracted armed conflict. The array of new conflicts and groups fighting in them have produced a massive amount of new data, which can shed light on longstanding debates and open up new lines of inquiry. Even where access to the field is limited, the socially mediated nature of these wars has resulted in an unprecedented volume of information openly available on the internet: official publications by groups, internal debates on Facebook pages or WhatsApp groups, direct access to leaders and members of armed groups active on social media, videos of speeches or battles or propaganda, millions of tweets suitable for network analysis and other big data methods, and much more.
However, understanding the new map of Islamists in conflict requires more than simply adding new data to existing theoretical approaches. We argue in this framing essay for the Special Issue that the duration, complexity, transnational linkages and interminable nature of many of the conflicts in which armed Islamist groups have taken root can be best understood through the concept of “warscapes,” an approach to war developed primarily by anthropologists of African conflicts. After describing and explaining the relevance of the warscapes literature, we contend that it would equally benefit from engagement with the scholarship on armed Islamists in protracted conflicts in the Middle East – whether from the field of Jihadism Studies, Islamism studies more broadly or that part of the civil wars literature focusing on armed Islamist groups.
This article explores how adopting and updating the warscape concept changes the way we understand and research the participation of armed Islamist groups in protracted and transnationalized conflicts in the Middle East. Becoming embedded in warscapes has brought significant changes in the behavior and ideology of Islamist groups, as some have taken up the mantle of governance while others have developed in a symbiotic way with states, societies, and other non-state actors. The conflicts they are part of do not have clear start or end dates and the recurrence of violence remains likely, making retaining armed capacity a central consideration even during long periods without active battle. Warscapes also profoundly change political and socio-economic dynamics, affecting both Islamists and the broader populations they are embedded in in ways which blur the divisions between groups and can generate unexpected strategic choices. We began the workshops for this Special Issue with a simple question: Within the context of conflicts which fit the description of warscapes, do Islamist groups behave similarly or differently in some systematic way in interaction with this context?
Our framing essay is more than an introduction to the collected articles. Gunning, Valbjørn and I set out a comprehensive research agenda which attempts to take seriously the implications of the type of conflict captured by the warscapes concept: interconnected conflicts with no clear beginning or ending, not bounded by national or state boundaries, in which institutions, economies, social relations and individuals at all levels adapt to a condition of life in which the possibility of violence is endemic but not constant. We insist on placing Islamists within the broader conflict ecology, with individuals and groups often moving across ideological lines and adapting to local incentives and threats. That means simultaneously not exceptionalizing them as religious actors but taking seriously the specific mechanisms by which religion might affect their organizational structures, interests and goals, strategies, alliance choices, access to external resources, and rhetorical positioning.
Where many studies rooted in the warscape tradition emphasize close ethnography and cultural studies approaches, for Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, we wanted to address the conflict studies subfield and show the value of the warscapes concept for critical empirical and theoretical questions about armed Islamist groups. Our framing essay sets out dig deeply into a number of key theoretical questions: What matters more for explaining insurgent behavior, ideology/religious belief or the strategic context? Would Islamist actors be expected to behave differently in response to strategic imperatives than non-Islamists? Do some Islamists — Sunni, Shi’a, salafi-jihadist, Ikhwani — behave the same way in response to these strategic cues, or are there significant variations to be explained by their ideas, organization, or individual leaders? How do organizations (the meso-level) matter for mediating structure and individual agency?
The articles in the special issue approach this brief from a wide range of theoretical and empirical directions. Several articles focus on Iraq, one of the longest running and most internationalized of the warscapes. Inna Rudolf’s “All the Mahdi’s Men: Contextualising Nuances Within Iraq’s Islamic Resistance” looks at variation within the Shi’a Popular Mobilization Units, drawing on the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu to show how different leaders and groups navigate a political field in which the boundaries of state and society are deeply permeable and contested. Mohammed Hafez and Michael Gabbay’s “Choosing Sides in Forever Wars: How Wedge Threats Shape Ideological Alignment in Fragmented Warscapes” presents a richly detailed and theoretically novel explanation for the evolution and internal contestation of Sunni jihadist insurgency groups in Iraq between 2003-2009, encompassing the effects of the U.S. “surge.” And Younes Saramafir’s “Warscapes and Reticulating Inhumanities: Ethnographic Lessons from Shia Militancy” presents a deeply ethnographic and theoretically engaged exploration of the motivations of Shi’a fighters across the warscape (and one which engages especially deeply with the warscapes theoretical literature). Finally, shifting to Syria, Jerome Drevon’s “Can Jihadis’ Strategic Interests Trump Their Ideology? Foreign Support and Insurgent Survival in Syria” examines the choices made by different Syrian jihadist insurgent groups in response to the need to govern territory and maintain group cohesion.
Several of the papers take a broader cross-national focus. Morten Valbjørn, Jeroen Gunning and Raphaël Lefèvre’s “When Transnationalism is not Global: Dynamics of Armed Transnational Shi‘a Islamist Groups” (link forthcoming) takes up the question of armed Shi’a Islamist groups, exploring whether and how they differ from Sunni groups with a unique global dataset. And Isak Svensson, Desiree Nilson and Tim Gåsste’s “No end in sight? Trajectories of war terminations in Islamist armed conflicts” (link forthcoming) asks whether and why civil wars involving armed Islamist actors last longer and resist resolution, a key prior question for the endurance of the region’s warscapes in the first place also based on a unique dataset.
I’m just thrilled that this long-gestating special issue is finally out — it has a wonderful combination of theoretical provocation and innovation, rich empirics, and methodological diversity which will hopefully spark useful discussion and progress in the study of armed Islamist groups.
Our special issue is nicely complemented by our book of the week, Jerome Drevon’s excellent new Oxford University Press book From Jihad to Politics [downloadable as a PDF via Open Access]. In the book, Drevon carefully traces the internal and external drivers of the adaptation of Syrian jihadists to the changing imperatives of a transnationalized civil war. He focuses on Ahrar al-Sham and Jubhat al-Nusra, amidst the bewildering proliferation of armed Syrian opposition groups of varying degrees and forms of Islamism. In contrast to the narrative from Iraq of al-Qaeda taking over a local jihad, Drevon argues that in Syria “the conflict transformed the jihadis themselves. While IS emancipated itself from al-Qaeda… and radicalized its ideas and practice, most of these militants actually rejected global jihad.” He finds the evolution of Ahrar al-Sham especially noteworthy: “instead of radicalizaing to survive in a competitive environment, Ahrar al-Sham increasingly opposed the relentless violence resulting from the practical application of core Salafi Jihadi ideological principles.”
Drevon argues that Islamist particularities do give them advantages at war, but disadvantages at winning the political battles which run through and follow active war-fighting. He also shows that different Islamist groups do indeed respond differently to strategic incentives, with internal organizational characteristics more important than ideology in determining how effectively they respond to the international and local political-strategic environment - Ahrar al-Sham, for instance, had a “relatively strong institutional makeup that has acted as a real constraint on the group’s successive leaders.” The book stands out for its empirical depth and richness, grounded in Drevon’s uniquely extensive field research inside of opposition controlled Syria. From Jihad to Politics immediately becomes a must-read for anyone working on issues related to Islamist politics, jihadist insurgencies, civil wars, or the Syrian war specifically.