Insurgent Legality: The Rise and Failure of the Islamic State

• In Event: Law and Political Development: Learning about Politics from the Court Records

Abstract

Insurgent Legality argues that the insurgent group that calls itself the “Islamic State” exploited longstanding grievances with state corruption, human rights violations, and sectarian discrimination to build local support for a utopian state-building project in the form of a modern-day “caliphate.” Most accounts of the Islamic State’s rapid rise to power in 2014 attribute its success to extreme violence, brainwashing of foreign recruits with well-produced propaganda videos, or its capture of valuable resources including oil fields, banks, armored vehicles, and weapons stockpiles. Although these factors were important, I propose an alternative explanation: The Islamic State offered an alternative system of law, order, and governance—including its own courts, police, and legislation-like rules— that initially appealed to a critical mass of Syrians and Iraqis whose governments were failing to provide justice, basic services, and security. However, these same institutions ultimately contributed to the Islamic State’s decline and eventual military defeat as the group failed to fulfill its ambitious promises and became increasingly corrupt, repressive, and discriminatory over time. I find support for this explanation in qualitative and quantitative data collected over the course of more than two years of field research in Iraq and southern Turkey including an original household survey of 1,458 residents of the Islamic State’s former capital city, Mosul, in-depth interviews with more than 300 Syrians and Iraqis who lived under the Islamic State’s rule, and a dataset of more than 1,500 Arabic primary source documents that maps the expansion and eventual retreat of the Islamic State’s governance and lawmaking activities across time and space.

Author

• Mara Revkin, Duke University School of Law