Pan-Islamism represents a radical search for Islamic unity and empowerment in the modern world. Today, Jihadi Salafists are the most aggressive proponents of pan-Islamic solidarity, yet paradoxically they are divided by intense ideological debates about sectarianism, anti-Muslim violence, and the need for a territorial state, rendering their movement ineffective.

In June 2014, ISIS fighters swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and easily defeated the Iraqi Security Forces, armed with advanced American weaponry but unready or unwilling to engage in close combat against the Salafist militants. The campaign to liberate Mosul from ISIS may be the purest expression yet of twenty-first-century warfare. It was highly politicized, ideologically charged, fought in a fractured state among civilians by a coalition of the willing, with great power involvement on all sides, exposed to the world on social media. The air war, too, represented an intensification of recent operational trends: enhanced command and control measures, universal employment of precision munitions, increased intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, ubiquity of remotely piloted aircraft, and decreased tolerance for civilian casualties. None of these factors was new in 2016, but each of them was manifested over Mosul to a degree not previously seen.

An increasing number of countries, especially the UK, have expanded their legal powers to deprive citizens of their nationality in response to terrorism. The trigger for the mounting focus on this tactic has been the advent of Islamic State and the phenomenon of Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) travelling to Iraq and Syria. The weaponization of nationality has therefore been adapted to this situation so that citizens can be treated as if they were foreigners. In this way, the FTFs can be divested of citizenship and of rights. This paper will explain these developments against the declining inspiration of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’. So, the paper first needs to explore notions of citizenship and then to look at the decline of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ which provides space for counter-terrorism weaponization. The paper does not contend that cosmopolitan citizenship forbids any weaponization but highlights important provisos which draw attention to human rights and other principled and policy constraints which also must be explored and weighed.

This chapter studies the idea that Americans and Europeans hold different views on global security. Generally, it is considered that the EU side demonstrates a stronger adherence to positivism in international law, while the US adopts policy-oriented methodologies. This translates into different views of the actual content of the UN Charter rules on the use of force, for example of the permissibility of self-defense against attacks by non-State actors, calls for new exceptions to the prohibition of the use of force and in relation to controversial issues, such as the legality of the anticipatory self-defense. The chapter offers a critical look at the alleged difference by studying the US-led military coalition fighting against the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. This reveals a gradual acceptance of the more expansionist interpretation put forward by the US. Indeed, the case of the US-led military coalition against IS is one where European States - and several other western States - originally steered clear from murky legal grounds only to find themselves ultimately embracing an extensive reading of the right of self-defense, and relying for the first time, whether explicitly or implicitly, on the controversial “unable and unwilling” doctrine to justify military operations abroad.

This chapter concludes with a summary of the work, as well as a discussion of the implications thereof. In particular, the book identifies implications for research on civil wars and insurgencies, governance and statebuilding, as well as revolution. Critically, if some forms of rebel governance are not directly related to rebels’ military strategy in that they do not necessarily confer resources and recruits, then the consequences of rebel governance institutions are not yet fully known. This chapter suggests instead that the consequences of rebel groups imitating burdensome governance learned from the Chinese Communist Party can affect international politics, national institutions, subnational social cohesion, and individual behavior in ways that have implications for scholars and policy practitioners. The chapter then discusses how the findings of this work relate to research on governance and state formation and calls for a greater synthesis of scholarship on these topics. Finally, it reviews the importance of governance to revolutionaries generally, beyond rebel groups, and demonstrates that learning and imitation about how to govern for revolution has persisted for centuries.

Why do some rebel groups undertake costly, burdensome governing projects that undermine their legitimacy, and even trigger resistance and violence that could put their own combatants at risk, while other rebel groups do not? The introductory chapter uses the contemporary cases of three rebel groups’ control of the city Raqqa in Syria to illustrate the empirical puzzle that motivates the book. The chapter then outlines existing works related to rebel governance and details why these approaches cannot explain rebel governance in Raqqa. Specifically, research generally assumes that rebel governance is popular and desirable in ways that confer material and organizational benefits to rebel groups. This chapter then puts forth an alternative conceptualization of rebel governance as varied in terms of its costs and benefits such that rebel leaders make decisions about whether to introduce more or less burdensome governance institutions during war. The chapter then outlines the central argument of the text: that rebel groups’ goals determine their governance strategy. It then describes how the book empirically tests this argument before concluding with a discussion of the importance of the topic.

A definitional modification has had the effect of greatly magnifying the perceived importance and frequency of terrorism. The United States failed in its military interventions in Libya and in the Syrian civil war, both of which replaced coherent if unpleasant regimes with chaos and murderous disorder. There was, however, a successful campaign against Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL, an especially vicious, ultimately self-destructive, insurgent group that had a genius for making enemies and owed its initial successes in 2014 primarily to the often-monumental incompetence of the US-trained Iraqi army. However, as with al-Qaeda after 9/11, ISIS scarcely presented a challenge to global security, inspired near-total hostility in the area, and was soon pushed back. In defense and in decline, ISIS relied primarily not on counteroffensives, but on planting booby traps, using snipers, and cowering among civilians, and the costs for defeating it might have been lower if the methods to do so had been more measured. The strategy against ISIS worked because of a couple of features not likely to be found in many other conflicts: local forces were prepared to do the fighting and dying, and ISIS inspired existential angst in the US public.

This chapter consists of three sections. First, I analyze PIJ’s view of the state as outlined in its political philosophy with the perceived need to control it. I then proceed to analyze the constituents of the state, the political and democratic processes as outlined by PIJ, and the framework in which these processes take place. We see that there are inherent democratic deficiencies and limitations to its outline of a just society. The future society of PIJ can, at best, be described as one that is non-liberal, yet rights based. Third, after assessing the conception of a just society, I conclude this chapter by arguing that PIJ’s desire to return to a perceived ideal past is reflected in its analysis of violence, which is of a conservative nature.

This chapter investigates the political career of a small Islamic State affiliate operating in this border zone. These jihadists have benefited not just from the stereotypical “porous border” but also from the way that complex conflicts in this region exacerbate animosity between ethnic groups and between civilian populations and national states. This animosity creates openings for jihadists to implicate themselves in local politics and for local communities to use jihadism as a weapon in local politics. The chapter argues, however, that the “Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS)” exemplifies the case of a coalition whose horizons are limited precisely because its religious messaging is highly underdeveloped. Even as ISGS finds some recruits and achieves some military and propaganda victories, such as ambushing a patrol of American and Nigerien soldiers in 2017, ISGS has struggled to build a serious political coalition and therefore may remain, ironically, a partial satellite of its ostensible rival al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

The Introduction lays out the analytical approach of the book, namely a focus on understanding jihadism at the meso level by examining the behaviors and perspectives of jihadist field commanders. This approach contrasts with macro-level approaches that foreground global doctrines and movements, and also contrasts with micro-level approaches that highlight issues of individual radicalization. The Introduction argues that at the meso level, politics and religion work differently for jihadists than at the macro level. At the meso level, politics is less about implementing one-size-fits-all ideologies and is more about building coalitions and managing relationships, while religion is less about one-size-fits-all theologies and more about generating narratives that explain and give meaning to fast-moving events and improvised decisions. It also provides context for understanding the local and regional dynamics of jihadism in the Sahel and North Africa.

The Conclusion draws out the analytical and policy implications of the book, concentrating on the ways that collective punishment by states allows jihadists to expand their ranks. The Conclusion also argues that the War on Terror needs to be fundamentally rethought, and that dialogue with jihadists might be viable.

This chapter analyzes how jurisprudence has supplied the language of dispute between rival jihadist factions in Libya. The chapter focuses on the northeastern coastal city of Derna, where al-Qada in the Islamic Maghreb's (AQIM’s) loose allies battled an Islamic State affiliate in 2014–2015. In Derna, jihadists first attempted to settle their differences through legal procedures, but soon had recourse to violence against one another. The case of Derna vividly exemplifies how jihadist jurisprudence attempts to grapple with rapidly shifting contexts and to provide and assess ex-post facto justifications for field commanders’ improvised decisions. Fiqh, moreover, can sometimes sharpen rather than resolve disputes, particularly when it is weaponized by hardliners against internal rivals. The chapter argues that intra-jihadist rifts in Libya reveal wider dynamics about the limits of competing strategies for jihadist coalition-building: more pragmatic strategies can alienate hardliners, but hardliners alienate civilians.Jihadists’ inability to sustain a cohesive coalition left them vulnerable to stronger factions within a multi-party civil war.