Lineages of the Islamic State: An International Historical Sociology of State (De‐)Formation in Iraq

Abstract

Existing accounts of the Islamic State (IS) tend to rely on orientalist and technicist assumptions and hence insufficiently sensitive to the historical, sociological, and international conditions of the possibility of IS. The present article provides an alternative account through a conjunctural analysis that is anchored in an international historical sociology of modern Iraq informed by Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined development’. It foregrounds the concatenation of Iraq's contradictory (post‐)colonial nation‐state formation with the neoliberal conjuncture of 1990‐2014. It shows that the former process involved the tension‐prone fusion of governing institutions of the modern state and the intermittent but steady reproduction, valorization, and politicization of supra‐national (religious‐sectarian) and sub‐national (ethno‐tribal) collective identities, which subverted the emergence of an Iraqi nation. The international sanctions regime of the 1990s transformed sectarian and tribal difference into communitarian tension by fatally undermining the integrative efficacy of the Ba’ath party's authoritarian welfare‐state. Concurrently, the neo‐liberal demolition of the post‐colonial authoritarian welfare states in the region gave rise to the Arab Spring revolutions. The Arab Spring however elicited a successful authoritarian counter‐revolution that eliminated secular‐nationalist forms of oppositional politics. This illiberal neoliberalisation of the region's political economy valorised the religionisation of the domestic effects of the 2003 US‐led destruction of the Iraqi state and its reconstruction on a majoritarian basis favouring the Shi’as and hence transforming sectarian tension into sectarian conflict culminating in IS. Thus, IS is, the paper demonstrates, the result of neither an internal cultural pathology nor sheerly external forces. Rather, it is the novel product of an utterly historical congealment of the intrinsically interactive and multilinear dynamics of socio‐political change.

The bifurcated trajectory of nation formation in Kurdistan: Democratic confederalism, nationalism, and the crisis of capitalist modernity

“…Finally, the state institutions through which nation formation might potentially take place are either shared among the parties or the parties have set up competing institutions. For instance, Peshmerga forces appear to be united, but are under the command of the respective party structures (Aziz, 2017;Kirmanj, 2014;Leezenberg, 2006Leezenberg, , 2015Leezenberg, , 2018Matin, 2018).…”

Multiplicity, group identity and the spectre of the social

“…In the last decade, uneven and combined development (UCD) has quickly gained traction in IR theory (Anievas and Matin 2016;Anievas and Nişanciog lu 2015;Cooper 2015;Matin 2007Matin , 2018, thanks in large part to the work of Justin Rosenberg. In accounting for and theorising the distinct causal dimension arising from societal multiplicity-the international itself-the renaissance of UCD has opened up a distinct path for research aimed at grasping 'the enormous constitutive significance of the international for the social world in all its dimensions' (Rosenberg 2016a, 148).…”