Caliphate for the 21st Century - The Role of Violence in the Construction of Daesh's "Islamic State"

Regardless of the so-called "Islamic State’s“ (Daesh) explicit dedication to its state-building project, the motivation, intention, even the effect of the different forms of violence orchestrated or inspired by the group on its members (inside), potential supporters, and declared enemies (outside) regularly are being explained in terms of religion, culture, ethnicity, sometimes economy. And without doubt, any empirically based research on the emergence, consolidation and expansion of Daesh necessarily has to include and do justice to the effects of sectarian grievances, possible path-dependencies of cultural patterns and the mobilizing potential of religious belief. Unfortunately, the focus on one of these factors – oftentimes rather arbitrarily – may result in the neglect, even exclusion, of the Political: Among the groups emerging from the global movement of Jihadī-Salafism, Daesh may be considered one of the most successful which propagate the movement’s ultimate goal of installing a new “imagined world order” to supplant and finally replace the international system of nation states, the global economic system of capitalism and the effects of liberal democratic values and lifestyles. This “alternative modernity,” a belief system in disguise of “tradition,” dissolves the complexities of our modern world and, in opposition to what Eisenstadt has described as the actual nature of modernity, the “multiplicity of cultural programs,” molds them into clear dogmata of black-and-white. This simplicity apparently speaks to the disoriented and disenfranchised – even more so during and after the “revolutionary situations” and thus social disruptions of the Arab Uprisings after 2010. Nonetheless, many current approaches are turning a blind eye on the political character of the jihadi-Salafist movement in general and the blatantly political dimension of Daesh’s state-building project in particular, missing the uber-politicized intention and effect of these violent acts in the region of the Middle East and towards the “Western” world. The Paper proposed here aims to offer an integrative approach towards the role of violence for the discursive and actual construction of Daesh’s Caliphate as a comprehensive polity and an alternative mode of governance to the model of the Western nation state, while explicitly including the group’s religious ideology as a “transcendent totalitarianism.” Formulated to install a monopoly of guidance for all individual, communal and social behavior within this polity, this alternative mode of governance is expected to potentially challenge the explanatory power of the current divisionary boundary between definitions of terrorism and state terror