Introduction
In a radio broadcast in 1939, Winston Churchill defined Russia in a famous quip as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The chain of metaphors in Churchill’s famous maxim was to point the difficulty of making sense of the great political transformation Russia had gone through. Though perplexed, Churchill had a key to solve the Russian riddle: the national interest or more precisely “historic-life interests.” The new Middle East is a riddle inside an enigma rolled up in a puzzle mat. The former is difficult to grasp even with metaphors. The advent of the non-state armed actors (NSAA) has been one of such riddles that can hardly be solved with the “key” of national interest. From suicide bombers to foreign fighters, the phenomenon has become a staple ingredient of the alarming and perilous agenda of Middle East and the world. Even though the NSAAs pose direct challenges to the nature of states and strategic balance among the regional states, they are not a new phenomenon in international politics. The existence of such actors has been a serious security problem in the Middle East well before the Arab Spring. According to some estimates, there was a 58% increase in the number of Salafi-jihadist groups from 2010 to 2013 due in part to the significant decline in governance capacities across the Middle East and North Africa (Jones 2014, p. 13). Although enjoying extensive coverage in regional and global media, the NSAAs have only recently received sustained interest from academic and policy circles (Mulaj 2013, p. 1).
The NSAAs refer to non-state organizations that have the capacity and means to deliver systematic violent action (Vince 2008, p. 229). NSAAs strive for the state and societal control that encourage the control of land as well as the enslavement or displacement of natives in order to grab their natural sources and develop shadow economies by sowing terror and using extreme violence. The advance of NSAAs challenges local, regional, and global welfare, international security, the rule of law, human rights, and socioeconomic development. They are increasingly upsetting the residents, not only those living in their vicinity but also regional and global audiences. There is a pressing need to grasp and react to the novelty of NSAAs. The authoritarian practices and ethno-sectarian exclusion to drive violent attack on state and governing regimes, both within home territories and abroad, are the main challenges for the society of states. Their significance comes from the fact that the NSAAs pervade the global landscape at almost all levels. First, they permeate into intra-state level by challenging the nation-state capacity/security/legitimacy, leading to collapsed, weak, or authoritarian state structures. Second, they work to disentangle regional security complexes, leading to the change in regional balance of power. Third, they challenge the international society of states and hasten globalization’s dark side by attacking soft targets through exploitation and subversion of the hard-won, centuries-old norms of international and global society using a variety of tools from suicide bombings to developing weapons of mass destruction. In each level, whether it is the weak state structure, the lack of socioeconomic welfare, or the weakness of counter-strategies, NSAAs are identified as the central protagonists of regime instability, political disorder, violent conflict giving way to the severe insecurity and violence. This is particularly so in the Middle East politics following the post-Arab spring era.
Despite their strong real-world impact, the existing scholarship on the NSAA is mostly confined to studies on the normative repercussions (e.g., challenges to international law or legitimate polity), political consequences (e.g., collapsed state), or theoretical debates (e.g., debating their “actorness” or aiming to establish a research agenda in terms of frameworks, methods, and approaches). Not only are studies on the NSAAs in the Middle East are rare, but there is also an urgent need for systematic exploration and detailed analysis of the organizational, ideological, and strategic preferences of these perplexing actors. Instead of the existing approaches that tackle the phenomenon from mostly normative, descriptive, or theoretical perspectives, the present volume aims to be informative and analytical.
The main challenge in studying the case of Middle East pertains to the question of developing a comprehensive framework of analysis in relation to the non-state armed groups that differ greatly in terms of size, objectives, structure, leadership, command capabilities, mode of operations, and resources and political discourses (Podder2013, p. 17). Despite their divergent forms, the NSAAs of the Middle East also share certain characteristics and contradictions. First, despite the brutal and grotesque nature of their violence, they depend on certain belief structures and need to legitimize the use of violent means for drawing moral and material support. Legitimation, belief structures, and ideologies are necessary also to construct, maintain, and mobilize the identities. Secondly, due to strategic as well as tactical reasons, they ought to simultaneously militarize various domestic and international audiences. The militarization of the latter and NSAAs themselves takes place through the gendered power relations which help to provide international legitimacy, new forms of authority, and protection (Cohn 2013, p. 26). The recruitment of female warriors inside a NSAAs appeals to the women and girls’ sense of equality, of being taken seriously, respect and liberation (as it was the case in Kobane War discussed in this volume). The women and girls serve not only as labor force or logistical support but also as demonstrate the “depth of power and determination” of the armed group as well as being a powerful symbolic move in “sustaining the groups” claim on legitimacy and, hence, power (Mazurana 2013, p. 166). Consequently, facing the context of radical and violent transformations in the Middle East, it is necessary to rethink the underlying assumptions about the NSAAs and device new tools for examining who these mostly new actors are and what their likely effects might be on the changing nature of sovereignty, violence, and regional security architecture.
As for the operational settings, although the NSAAs have been functional in the context of interstate conflict, the newly emerged NSAAs are better understood as part and parcel of the intra-state and civil war contexts as well as numerous proxy wars which reflect the non-Westphalian features of the contemporary conflict patterns particularly in the Middle East. The NSAAs are exceptional in that they get involved in what Holtsi (1996, p. 36) has termed “wars of the third kind, characterized by absence of the fixed territorial boundaries.” This is particularly true in the cases of the ISIS (also known as Islamic State), YPG (People’s Protection Units; Kurdish: Yekîneyên Parastina Gel), and PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK (Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), which help to transform and influence the conventional nature of the state conduct, for they create a new type of non-state practice of sovereignty, geopolitics, territoriality, and even a non-state foreign policy. As will be examined throughout the book, the NSAAs of the Middle East undergo a peculiar institutionalization process of military strategy and tactics since they employ different ideologies and conceptions of territoriality, having different sets of foreign policy practices and decision-making processes (Balcı 2017; Ogur and Baykal, in this volume).
This introduction surveys some of the central themes and highlights their relevance to our understanding of the new dynamics of NSAAs before providing an overview of the contributions in the volume. While there exist various subspecies with peculiar characteristics, it outlines the main factors and recent developments that have contributed to the emergence and proliferation of NSAAs in the Middle East following the post-Arab Spring and the hyper-localization of Syrian Civil War. It then focuses on the debates about the NSAAs so as to provide a framework of analysis by highlighting the new components of non-state armed groups in the Middle East.
The Conceptual Framework
One of the important issues regarding the NSAAs is how a non-state armed group should be conceptually defined as well as the threshold conditions for an organization to become a NSAA. There is no clear definition for the NSAAs as many disciplines have their own understanding based on differing theoretical frameworks. Krause and Milliken claim that the definitions about NSAAs are very broad and different from each other but in general “the traditional definitions revolve around the idea that it is ‘an armed, non-state actor in contemporary wars…[with] a minimal degree of cohesiveness as an organization (to be distinguished as an entity and to have a name, to have some kind of leadership) and a certain duration of its violent campaign’” (Krause and Milliken 2009, p. 202). A NSAA can be defined as an entity with an ideology and freedom of action which use (unpredictable) violent tactics or means to achieve political aims, to reach out to a range of constituency and have control over a particular territorial space or people. In this volume, we define it as an armed group, which is able to exercise successful and sustained control over a territory to carry out concerted military operations in order to achieve political goals. Articulated as such, NSAA’s common features would include the following: being organized and operating outside state control; use of violence to achieve political and military objectives; and the irregularity of military actions and semi-state structure to operationalize objectives (Roberto and Melos 2014, p. 247).1
In addition to the contested nature of NSAAs in the literature, it should be noted that they frequently come out in hybrid forms (Mulaj 2014) in which different types have a different set of agenda. A common denominator is that the NSAAs have strategic aims and use violent means to meet their political ends (Mishali-Ram2009; Kydd and Walter2006; Harmon2001). Some scholars prefer making a differentiation between religious NSAAs (Mendelsohn2005) and ethnic NSAAs (Mishali-Ram 2009), given the fact that in contemporary world politics these two types are more common outcomes than a classical intra-state conflict since the Cold War. The NSAAs can also be characterized by their actions as to whether they challenge or maintain the status quo and how their primary motivations and strategies come to conceptualize, securitize, and operationalize political and military settings vis-à-vis the conflict.
In this volume, we explore the NSAAs in the Middle East by examining their organizational structure, violent actions, goals, the conflict region where they operate, and the recruitment methods. The contributing articles of the volume examine the NSAAs by mainly focusing on three different levels: (1) geographical environment/territorial logic, (2) organizational structure, and (3) ideational preferences/identity. The first category seeks to provide contextual explanation by focusing on the political, economic, and social landscape to find out empirical commonalities. Within this context, it can be argued, for instance, that there are multidimensions driving the environmental forces behind the rise of PYD and ISIS as the main non-state armed actors in the Middle East. The second category focuses on the internal dynamics, structure, and recruitment patterns. The ways the Middle Eastern NSAAs are assembled are manifold. While the YPG is organizationally designed in accordance with the logistical and managerial experiences of its sister organization the PKK; the ISIS’s organizational structure and its internal dynamics are a novelty, compared to the YPG. It is, therefore, necessary to note the similarities and differences by way of looking at the organizational and internal dynamics. The organizational structure of NSAAs has an important role in their ability to expand, seize territory, and defend it. For instance, ISIS’s success in seizin...