The questions asked to understand a phenomenon inform both the data collected and how research is operationalized. For instance, attempts to determine who joins the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria lead one to collect demographic data, which is typically utilized to construct a profile of those most likely to sympathize with the group, empowering national security and law enforcement agencies to single out groups of people for additional surveillance (or often entrapment). Attempts to understand why people have joined ISIS have typically focused on material concerns, psychology, or religion. The interventions which flow from this path have resulted in Countering Violent Extremism/De-Radicalization programs and attempts to restrict expressions of Islam to state-approved forms. Neither of these approaches has a promising track record; indeed, the latter is often a catalyst for increased sympathy for radical religious views. In this paper I attempt to answer a different question, namely, what does ISIS signify for Westerners aligned with the group? Narratives produced by ISIS’ Western sympathizers, defectors, and fighters will be collected and compiled into a searchable database--tagged by source and according to the demographic characteristics of the narrator (i.e., country of origin, sex, age, race/ethnicity). These will subsequently be broken into narrative packages, in order to determine which themes, descriptions or justifications are most common, and whether and how they seem to systematically vary along demographic dimensions or by source. This provides valuable information about how ISIS is constructed, both by its sympathizers and in the broader public discourse. It also demonstrates which features or objectives of the group seem the most compelling for different respondents. In order to determine how representative the narrative sample is, metadata about the narrators will be cross-referenced against data about who joins ISIS, collating available information from law enforcement, national security agency reports, arrest records, media investigations, and caches of ISIS documents into a parallel database. By simultaneously exploring what kinds of people are gravitating towards ISIS and the reasons they provide for their allegiance, one can glean robust insights into what ISIS signifies for those Westerners who find their cause compelling—leading to new and more productive means of undermining the Islamic State and engaging with its sympathizers.

One of the most important developments in the current Syrian conflict has been the emergence and articulation of alternative political projects that reimagine or replace the Syrian nation-state. Participants in the conflict are advocating for either a conservative Islamist state (i.e., various rebel groups), a democratic federal Syria (i.e., Rojava), a reinvigorated Syria under Ba’athist leadership, or a Sunni Muslim Caliphate (i.e., the Islamic State). With the collapse of the centralized education system at all levels in areas outside of regime control, various actors are attempting to translate their political ideas into alternative educational systems. These efforts are a part of a larger process of the reorganization of socio-political life. Education has always been a key instrument in any state-building project. Educational systems have been established, for instance, to instill national culture and cultivate a national identity. They have helped to produce subjects who enter into a particular relationship with the state. Moreover, education is central to the production of a national space and its territorial imaginary. In this paper, I examine the IS’ attempts to inculcate a non-national territorial imaginary or spatial consciousness through textbooks, print and visual media, and bodily practices. The analysis of English and Arabic-language materials, such as a geography school textbooks, videos, and magazines, reveals the complex nature of education that extends beyond conventional institutional curricular, and encompasses other materials, sites, and practices that are prescriptive in nature. I argue that the emerging education project of IS is an attempt to demarcate communal boundaries, reimagine space, and construct a certain subjectivity by narrating a spatial history of loss and humiliation. I illustrate how the confluence of violence, boundary formation, and spatial reimagining in the IS’ education project is attempting to produce a new type of (jihadi) subject, who is re-territorialized in the boundless Islamic State. Moreover, this “educational legacy” may outlast the collapse of ISIS as a political entity. This paper is in conversation with works in geography and area studies and contributes to the debates around the issues of education and state-building, space and material practices, violence and state-like political actors in the Middle Eastern context. Focusing on the spatiality of education is crucial to our understanding of how various territorial imaginaries are operationalized in today’s Syria and how they become attached to multiple political agendas.

This paper seeks to bring recent debates of secularization to speak to theological and eschatological transformations in the discourse and practices of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The traditional theory of secularization has been variably challenged and critiqued in ways that, I will argue, introduced a reformed/alternative theory of secularization which, in turn, emphasizes the more exogenous and syncretic nature of modern religious experiences. A prima facie component of this alternative theory, yet to be articulated as such, is the identification of discursive "religion" as pre-condition of power rather than mere relocation or rationalization of religious categories. To the extent that alternative theory of secularization draws on arguments of disruption and rationalization of memory, on convoluted endogenous idealization transformations, or on exogenic Foucauldian power dynamics, the new debates of secularization allow us to incorporate the most radical and ostensibly impervious radical religiosities in the unfolding of the secular. Consequently, I will be negotiating my way through this framework to look at the ISIS’ internalization and, equally, Islamization of erstwhile, but now globalized, Protestant eschatologies, to advance political and strategic goals. I will argue that other than serving as a mobilization strategy, the eschatology of ISIS, conveys more story of disruption of memory and invention of tradition, identified by many as central in the process of secularization. Simultaneously I am also arguing that such disruption and invention cannot be read off the syncretic, namely Christian fundamentalist, nature of many of the globalized religious experiences. My primary sources for advocating this polemical point will be ethnographic reports on ISIS’ as well as on ISIS discursive materials, namely its newspapers, online broadcast, pamphlets and brochures of mobilization and so forth.