Horror Vacui: Da’esh and the Inter-Territory Effect

ABSTRACT

The ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’, or Da’esh, claimed territorial control and declared itself a state and Caliphate, but scholars disagree on the quality of these claims. Some argue that Da’esh really was a state, others reject this as propaganda of a non-state actor, and still others highlight that Da’esh challenged the international order as a whole. This article combines the notions of the ‘territory effect’ and ‘inter-territory’ to explain why the (self-)presentation of Da’esh appeared as a challenge to the (non-)state dichotomy of the modern international and its territorial underpinnings. While contesting the inter-territorial compartmentalisation of the state system, Da’esh projected a counter-territoriality beyond this system. The resulting horror vacui and collective campaign against Da’esh in turn shed light on an inter-territory effect of assuming and re-enacting contiguous state territories in a globally encompassing system of states, which thus locates and contains – but also enables – violence within states.

Acknowledgements

I thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation for support provided to the project on Islam, the Modern Nation-State, and Transnational Movements. Different versions of this article were presented at the European Workshops in International Studies (EIWS) 2022 in Thessaloniki and at the European International Studies Association (EISA) 2022 Pan-European Conference on International Relations in Athens. I am grateful to the participants for their valuable feedback, and wish to extend special thanks to Maria Mälksoo, Dominik Sipinski, Dimitri Bouris, Regan Burles, and three anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments. All remaining errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The goal of re-establishing the Caliphate after the end of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 has been shared by many Islamist and Salafi scholars from the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna to Usama bin Laden, but Da’esh stands apart from others in proceeding with its declaration (see Bunzel 2015).

2. The ideal is so deeply inscribed in IR that it is unwittingly reproduced even in historical accounts meant to capture the original emergence of a world-wide international system (see Burles 2023).

3. As such, these stories also reflect 19^th century (Prussian and British) counterrevolutionary re-constructions of an ideal state system that time and again had to be preserved in the face of all-out challengers (Keene 2002).

4. Offenhuber (2017) has reproduced different types of maps that are usefully compared in his article.

5. On ‘ontological security’ provided by the state (and state system), see Zarakol (2017); Hom, Brent, and Steele (2020); Grzybowski (2022); Krickel-Choi (2022).