Rebel in Society: Explaining Wartime Consolidation in the Islamic State

While the Islamic State inspires a variety of questions, the real mystery surrounds its emergence: a single rebel organization among many, rather suddenly, catapulted to administer control over territory the size of Great Britain. This project asks: What explains general patterns of wartime consolidation in civil wars? In particular, what accounts for the temporal and spatial variation of wartime consolidation experienced by the Islamic State? The conventional opinion on the hegemonic feat of rebel-state formation emphasizes the use of dispositional sources of rebel power – military strength, economic wealth, ideological commitment, and institutional robustness – in addition to the structural permissiveness of the environment. But these assertions represent an inaccurate reading of the historical case and, moreover, fail to explain variation in the organization’s consolidative behavior across Iraq and Syria, as well as over time within Iraq. This study situates a single armed actor – the Islamic State – within a comparative framework, whereby its relational ties vis-à-vis society are investigated across space and over time. It involved 40 months of field research, which occurred in every year between 2014 and 2022, and consisted of over 500 individuals interviewed in person across Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and the Gulf states of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In breaking down the conceptual illusion of “the rebel organization,” this dissertation puts forth a rebel-in-society approach to better understanding processes of consolidation. It argues that coercive power and traditional measurements of capabilities do not transfer evenly across varied social terrains and political contexts. Rebellion and more broadly, civil war, is not fought on some faraway and deserted field or on the open sea, whereby power and capabilities are projected without the inhibition, manipulation, or enablement of society. Instead, the main endeavor is to demonstrate that rebellion is a violent enterprise, uniquely expressed through society – not disentangled or contested above or in isolation of it. In turn, the analytical focus is placed on the nature, scope, and depth of the relationship between organization and society, which results in different patterns of wartime consolidation. Hence, while the Islamic State was a contiguous organization, its level of convergence versus displacement varied across society, thereby representing a different phenomenon across Iraq and Syria. This led to a domination model of consolidation failing in the Syrian rebellion and the first Iraqi rebellion, but a more cost-effective acquisition model employed in the second Iraqi rebellion, where it was able to rapidly establish rebel hegemony