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Lineages of the Islamic State: an international historical sociology of state (de-)formation in Iraq

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posted on 2023-06-09, 11:58 authored by Kamran MatinKamran Matin
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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Journal of Historical Sociology

ISSN

0952-1909

Publisher

Wiley

Issue

1

Volume

31

Page range

6-24

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Advanced International Theory Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2018-02-07

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-04-06

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2018-02-07

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