Insurgent Legality: Law in the Making and Breaking of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

The Islamic State, which captured and controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria for more than three years between 2014 and 2017, has been widely documented and studied by scholars and journalists.The most prominent existing explanations for the group's rise—its recruitment of foreign fighters from more than 85 countries, its capture of valuable resources including weapons stockpiles and oil fields, and its ability to spread fear through extreme violence—do not fully explain its remarkable persistence in the face of the largest international military coalition since World War II. Nor do they explain an empirical puzzle: why so many Iraqi and Syrian civilians stayed in territory captured by the group in 2014 despite the possibility of exit, and why others who initially fled decided to return. In this talk, drawn from my book manuscript, I provide a new explanation grounded in a theory of “insurgent legality,” referring to a comprehensive system of law-like rules and institutions for the governance of people and territory that is internally consistent and predictable. I find support for this theory in several sources of qualitative and quantitative evidence collected over more than two years of field research in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria conducted between 2015 and 2021: an original household survey of 1,458 residents of Mosul, more than 300 semi-structured interviews with Syrians and Iraqis who lived in or traveled through areas controlled by the group, and a dataset that maps the expansion and eventual collapse of its various governing and extractive institutions including courts, police, municipal services, and taxation. The talk will highlight the ethical and methodological challenges associated with interviewing and surveying people who have lived through war and human rights violations.