1 - Introduction: Revolution, Hybridity and Global Order

Summary

This is a book about Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shām (ISIS) and other discontents of the global order. It traces ISIS's continuous becoming as a revolutionary movement and its entanglements with the political order it seeks to overturn. It comprehensively compares this becoming to that of present and past revolutionaries operating within the Westphalian time frame that, despite its many tensions, persists as the basic underlying structure of global politics. It does so from the novel vantage point of continental social theory, benefiting in particular from Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the war machine (machine de guerre) and dialogical encounters with it.

A number of ontological claims have been made in the endeavour to understand ISIS – an actor that appeared seemingly out of nowhere and enacted a campaign of horrific violence informed by radically different ideological scripts from those upon which the current international order is based. This book treads a different path from most. It conceives of ISIS, and the other discontents examined here, as revolutionaries rather than, for instance, terrorists, insurgents or even prima facie (proto-)state builders. All these categories capture some of these movements’ activities and have been used – some more than others – to make sense of these movements. To render a picture that is more holistic and dynamic, the book introduces the category of the ‘hybrid revolutionary’ who seeks to overthrow, rather than capture, the dominant political order by means of transnational revolutionary practices, or at least enact a political utopia radically different from it. Yet, at the same time, this ‘hybrid revolutionary’ recodes rather than rejects the ideas and practices of the constitutive norms of this order – from sovereignty to the neoliberal fundaments of global economy – while also appropriating and repurposing more mundane practices for the everyday management of the revolution.

From the standpoint of the hegemonic discourse of international politics that has a (re)productive power over the system dominated by sovereign states, the performative practices of hybrid revolutionaries that challenge state apparatuses, while effecting authority and belonging outside of the ‘trap’ of the territorial state, are hardly intelligible or even perceivable. A novel theoretical perspective is therefore warranted for illuminating the operations of these hybrid revolutionaries practising sovereignty unbundled from the territorial state and exercising directional violence driven by certain political utopias on the one hand, and the responses that seek to confront, tame and ultimately eliminate these revolutionaries on the other.