ISIS’s New Media Narrative is Oddly Historical: Appropriating the Sykes-Picot Agreement to Claim Legitimacy

• In Event: Mediating the Caliphate: Global, Regional and Digital Dimensions of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

Abstract

There is wide agreement among diverse public figures – from Glenn Beck to bin Laden to Condoleezza Rice – that contemporary Middle Eastern instability is due to the Arab state system’s descent from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement (1916) between France and the UK. The two WWI Entente powers drew the region’s borders to divvy up the Ottoman Empire. A content analysis of English, Arabic and French news and social media reveals “Sykes-Picot” is used as a “condensation symbol” (Edelman, 1985) for a) the current state system; b) its inherent artificiality as an imposed arrangement; and c) the dangers of foreign intervention (new “Sykes-Picot plans”). ISIS’s strategic narrative is that it’s the native, Islamic remedy to Sykes-Picot’s legacy of artificiality. However, ISIS’s appropriation of this Sykes-Picot narrative to legitimize its violent state formation fails to win Arab public support. Many in the region interpret ISIS, ironically, as analogous to Sykes-Picot: a foreign conspiracy.

Author

• William Lafi Youmans, The George Washington University