Subverting the Anarchical Society – Religious Radicalism, Transnational Insurgency, and the Transformation of International Orders

In this paper, I attempt to chart a via media between transformationalist and sceptical positions on the long-term transformative significance of the 9/11 terror attacks and the ensuing war on terror for the Westphalian state system. I argue that in the absence of comparisons with prior episodes of transformative change in the history of the state system, debates on the transformative significance of the war on terror are in danger of polarizing around opposing caricatures of epochal change and obstinate durability. The tendency to organize at a transnational level, mobilize along religious lines, and employ terroristic violence internationally for the purposes of achieving far-reaching religious and political transformation of target societies is not unique to Al Qaeda, but can be seen also in the activities of the militant confessional networks that flourished in early modern Europe. By comparing the contemporary global struggle against Salafi-jihadist terrorism with early modern European rulers’ struggles against trans-polity confessional militants, I demonstrate that existing accounts of Al Qaeda’s transformative potential, both sceptical and transformationalist, have been seriously mis-specified and are thus in substantial need of revision. European confessional militant networks proved ultimately ephemeral as organizational forms, but their activities nevertheless catalysed a transformation in the social purposes of organized violence, yielding a radically modern conception of state legitimacy predicated on a Hobbesian social contract between sovereign and subject. As an international complement to this Hobbesian social contract, the Westphalian settlement also yielded the initial emergence of a sovereignty regime and associated norms of non-intervention explicitly designed to prevent European international society again being consumed by transnational religious insurgency. In the contemporary context, I argue that the transformative consequences of Salafi-jihadist terrorism are likely to be similarly indirect. Far from precipitating the collapse of the state system, jihadist terrorism is accelerating a displacement of the Hobbesian social contract from the national to a supra-national level, with strong states increasingly projecting force globally on the basis of internationalised responsibilities to suppress transnational security threats. Although these changes in state practice will not challenge the continued primacy of the sovereign state as the world’s modal form of political community, they are likely to jeopardize the survival of norms of sovereign equality and non-intervention between North and South in the long-term, marking a decisive shift away from the negative sovereignty regime that has mediated North-South relations throughout the post-colonial period. Is the contemporary state system on the cusp of transformation? The 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war on terror have spawned a vigorous debate on the state system’s long-term viability. Considering the case for incipient systemic case, it is possible to argue that the 9/11 attacks are emblematic of a broader diffusion of destructive capabilities to non-state actors, one that threatens the Weberian monopoly on organized violence that has historically been constitutive of the modern nation-state. Conversely, in opposition to such transformationalist claims, more sceptical commentators might cite the state system’s historic success in subduing violent non-state actors, as well as the renewed international commitment to statebuilding and the re-assertion of the state’s monopoly on organized violence that 9/11 has engendered. In this paper, I seek to chart a via media between transformationalist and sceptical positions on systems change in the post 9/11 context. My argument proceeds in three sections. Section one frames my inquiry by articulating in greater detail competing transformationalist and sceptical interpretations on post-9/11 systems change. I maintain that neither sceptical nor transformationalist positions on systems change can be particularly illuminating while contemporary developments are evaluated in isolation from a consideration of historical episodes of international systems change. In the absence of comparisons between the present situation and prior transformative crises, debates on systems change risk becoming unnecessarily polarized around competing caricatures of epochal change and obstinate durability. In order to resolve this impasse, a comparative analysis of systems change is required, a task that I begin in sections two and three by comparing the activities and significance of religiously motivated transnational insurgency networks in post-Reformation Europe and the contemporary Middle East. Section two focuses on the militant confessional networks active during the French wars of religion in the latter half of the sixteenth century, networks that played a decisive role in prolonging, intensifying, and internationalizing France’s religious civil wars. Their crucial importance for the course of the wars themselves notwithstanding, I argue that the true significance of these networks was largely indirect, with 1 See for example the collection of essays contained in Ken Booth, and Tim Dunne, eds. Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. 2 This line of argument is consistent for example with the theoretical position articulated in Munkler. The New Wars. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. It is also consistent with the Martin van Creveld’s pre 9/11 argument regarding the rise of post-trinitarian warfare as articulated in Martin van Creveld. The Transformation of War. New York: Free Press, 1991. 3 On the state system’s historical success in suppressing non-state violence, see for example Donald J. Puchala. "Of Pirates and Terrorists: What Experience and History Teach." Contemporary Security Policy 26, no. 1 (2005): 1-24. On the international community’s renewed recognition of the importance of state-building for preserving international peace and security, see Barnett R. Rubin. "Constructing Sovereignty for Security." Survival 47, no. 4 (2005): 93-106. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ the protracted chaos that they fuelled providing the essential normative justification for the seventeenth century consolidation of Absolutism, the assertion of limited public monopolies on organized violence within states’ territories, and the genesis of a Westphalian state system predicated on a formalized regime of sovereignty and non-intervention. Section three considers the nature and transformative significance of the contemporary Salafi-jihadist insurgency. I argue that the while the direct revolutionary potential of the jihadist insurgency is limited, it is nevertheless likely to exercise a profound indirect influence on the state system’s future evolution. In an environment in which strong states are increasingly compromised in their capacity to protect their citizenry from transnational threats derived in part from post-colonial state failure, I argue that strong states will increasingly be tempted to make good on the Hobbesian contract with their citizens by projecting force internationally to suppress transnational security threats. Such developments will not presage the eclipse of the sovereign state as the taken-for-granted security provider in the international system, but they will increasingly corrode the norms of sovereign equality that have mediated relations between North and South throughout the post-colonial period. I. THE SHOCK OF THE NEW? TRANSFORMATION AND CONTINUITY IN THE WORLD POLITY IN THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER 11 Four tendencies currently manifest in the state system can together be cited to support a transformationalist interpretation of 9/11. The first of these is the gaping structural dissonance between the nominal universalization of state sovereignty and the actual fragility of state structures in many parts of the developing world. In the decades immediately following World War II, the ethical imperative of conferring national self-determination on colonized peoples triggered the dissolution of Europe’s maritime empires and the imperfect imposition of the nation-state as the modal form of legitimate statehood throughout the world. While few have mourned the demise of European imperialism, the hypertrophic global diffusion of the nation-state has nevertheless bequeathed a large number of institutionally fragile Third World states that are functionally incapable of providing their citizens with fundamental political goods such as basic physical security or effective economic management. The causes of post-colonial state weakness are manifold, but two consequences of this weakness 4 On this point, see generally Robert H. Jackson. Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 5 On this point, see generally Bertrand Badie, and Claudia Royal. The Imported State : The Westernization of the Political Order. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ are particularly salient for transformationalists. Domestically, the state’s inability to provide basic political goods for its citizens dramatically diminishes its popular legitimacy, leaving incumbent governments much more susceptible to anti-systemic challenges of the kind exemplified in the transnational Salafi-jihadist insurgency. Globally, weak states’ anaemic institutional power severely limits the international community’s ability to address a host of global governance challenges ranging from terrorism and WMD proliferation, through to the management of international financial crises and the containment of global pandemics. To the inherent fragility of the state system must be added the altered balance of power between state and non-state actors induced by globalisation, a phenomenon that has again been particularly pronounced in the developing world. Al Qaeda’s ability to wage a prolonged campaign against the world’s sole superpower is a testament to the expanded political opportunity structures afforded to transnational non-state actors by globalisation. As Fiona Adamson has noted, the increased mobility of goods, people, capital and ideas attendant to globalisation has provided non-state actors with both transnational constituencies to mobilize and transnational resource pools to draw upon. Accelerated global economic integration has facilitated the diffusion of mobilization capacities and destructive capabilities to a range of non-state actors, leaving insurgent groups less dependent upon the sympathy or support of local populations as they draw instead on a globally dispersed supportive infrastructure of men, money, and materiel to sustain their struggles against beleaguered and institutionally fragile post-colonial states. Post-colonial state weakness and the empowerment of transnational non-state actors consequent to globalisation provide the permissive structural context for the third transformationalist trend, specifically the resurgence of private international violence and the global growth of asymmetric warfare. While the post-Cold War period has witnessed a declining incidence of both inter-state and civil wars, this trend has been offset by a growth in 6 Robert Rotberg. "Failed States in a World of Terror." Foreign Affairs 81, no. 4 (2002), p. 129. Francis Fukuyama. "The Imperative of State-Building." Journal of Democracy 15, no. 2 (2004), p.18. 8 Fiona B. Adamson. "Globalisation, Transnational Political Mobilisation, and Networks of Violence." Cambridge Review of International Affairs 18, no. 1 (2005), p. 33. 9 Ibid. See also Paul Staniland. "Defeating Transnational Insurgencies: The Best Offense Is a Good Fence." The Washington Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2005-06), p. 21. 10 The literature on the resurgence of private international violence and its implications for the changing nature of warfare is now extensive. See for example John Arquilla, and David Ronfeldt, eds. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Crime, Terror, and Militancy. Santa Monica: RAND, 2001; Philip Cerny, "Terrorism and the New Security Dilemma," Naval War College Review (2005).Robert M. Cassidy. "Feeding Bread to the Luddites: The Radical Fundamentalist Islamic Revolution in Guerrilla Warfare." Small Wars and Insurgencies 16, no. 3 (2005): 334-59; and Andrew Latham. "A Braudelian Perspective on the Revolution in Military Affairs." European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 2 (2002): 231-66. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ mass casualty terrorism. The 9/11 attacks can be said to represent only the most conspicuous recent example of ‘bond-relationship targeting’, whereby a conventionally inferior employs mass casualty attacks in the hopes of breaking the political will of target populations and thereby destroying the social bonds uniting its adversaries. In a unipolar era in which American military might is conventionally unassailable, Al Qaeda has employed asymmetric tactics in the hope of severing the bond between the ‘far enemy’ (the United States) and the ‘near enemy’ (authoritarian and ‘apostate’ Middle Eastern regimes), thereby leaving the latter without US support and thus exposed to the prospect of revolution. Seen through a transformationalist lens, 9/11 can thus be construed as a manifestation of a radically changing security environment, in which states must increasingly contend with networked non-state adversaries employing asymmetric tactics to realise a range of anti-systemic goals. The final tendency, relevant to transformationalists is the global growth of religious fundamentalism. The discrediting of secular ideologies such as nationalism and socialism in many weak post-colonial polities has helped nurture a revival in religious observance, bringing with it the rise of politically engaged religious fundamentalism, particularly within Islamic states. Although the majority of Islamists have reconciled themselves to the existence of the nation-state, a minority have embraced a radically anti-systemic ideology that challenges the nation-state at two levels. Where the nation-state is sustained by the legitimacy concept of popular sovereignty, organizations as Al Qaeda conversely stress that sovereignty lies with God alone, thereby necessitating popular submission to God’s laws as revealed to the Prophet and codified in sharia law. Similarly, where the nation-state rests on the division of the world into precisely bordered and mutually exclusive national jurisdictions, jihadists emphasize the artificiality of the nation-state, decrying it as a Western imposition designed to fragment the global community of believers (the ummah). In transformationalist lights, the ideology of Salafi-jihadism can be read as symptomatic of a normative fragmentation within international society, a post-colonial ‘revolt against the West’ fuelled by the perceived failures of the nation-state in the developing world, and one underpinned by a Human Security Report 2005 War and Peace in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 1-2. The report identifies a 40% decline in the number of armed conflicts in the world since the early 1990s, but also reports that there has been a dramatic upsurge in terrorist attacks in the years following 2001. 12 On bond-relationship targeting and its relevance in the context of asymmetric warfare, see for example Robert J. Bunker, and Matt Begert. "Operational Combat Analysis of the Al Qaeda Network." Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 11, no. 2-3 (2002): 316-39. 13 On transnational jihadists’ distinction between the near and far enemy, see Fawaz A. Gerges. The Far Enemy Why the Jihad Went Global. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 1. 14 On this point, see for example Barak Mendelsohn. "Sovereignty under Attack: The International Society Meets the Al Qaeda Network." Review of International Studies 31, no. 1 (2005), pp. 60-63. 15 Ibid. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ principled repudiation of the division between the sacred and the secular that has informed European international society from the Peace of Westphalia. The foregoing comments suggest that it is entirely possible to see 9/11 and the war on terror as symptoms of deeper structural changes transforming the state system. The infrastructural weakness and popular illegitimacy of developing polities, globalisation’s empowerment of transnational non-state actors, the global rise of asymmetric warfare and networked adversaries, and the rise of a radically anti-systemic ideology challenging the state system’s normative foundations – the influence of each of these macro-processes can be divined in the destruction of the Twin Towers and Al Qaeda’s continuing campaign against America and its allies. Conversely, it is also possible to construct a plausible counter-narrative emphasizing the state system’s resilience in the face of the Global War on Terrorism, and citing this resilience as evidence of the state system’s long-term durability. While the weakness of many post-colonial polities cannot be denied, September 11 has starkly illuminated the security interdependence of North and South, as well as highlighting the negative global security externalities flowing from peripheral state weakness. Although failing states’ control over organized violence remains far from assured, the authority of the state as the rightful monopolist of organized violence within its borders has if anything been vocally re-affirmed by the international community in the course of the war on terrorism. Strong states such as America have sought to strengthen client polities through intelligence sharing and the provision of enhanced financial and military assistance, while the war has also seen an intensified commitment to Third World state-building as a prophylaxis against transnational security threats. Prior historical examples of states’ collaborative suppression of private international violence, whereby international norms against non-state violence were invoked to extend states’ powers of surveillance and control over their respective societies, further attest to the regenerative capacities of the state system in the face of non-state challengers. 16 On the ‘revolt against the West’ as a central tendency in the contemporary international system, see generally Hedley Bull. "The Revolt against the West." In The Expansion of International Society, edited by Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, 217-28. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. 17 On the important distinction between state authority and control and its relevance for assessing the real import of putatively transformative trends in international systems, see Janice E. Thomson. "State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research." International Studies Quarterly 39 (1995), pp. 222-223. 18 On the renewed importance now accorded Third World state-building as a prophylaxis against transnational security threats, see Stewart Patrick. "Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?" The Washington Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2006), p. 28. 19 On the role played by norms against private international violence in consolidating states’ collective control over their citizenry in the 19 century, see Janice E. Thomson. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns StateBuilding and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 145. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ Sceptics may also question the transformative significance of both globalisation and its empowerment of non-state actors at the expense of sovereign states. Globalisation may have enhanced the mobilizational and destructive capabilities of non-state actors, but the use of transnational networks of support by insurgents is not new, with organizations such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) drawing upon extensive trans-Atlantic diaspora networks to sustain their struggle against Great Britain as far back as the late 19 century. Admittedly, the global flows upon which contemporary insurgents depend are far more intensive than those that sustained their historical forebears during the belle époque, while the destructive capabilities available to earlier insurgents pale into insignificance compared to those afforded to Al Qaeda and its affiliates. But if the violence interaction capacity of the state system has definitively increased, it has done so off the back of global flows that are enabled by the liberalizing measures of sovereign states, and that are consequently at least partially reversible. Moreover, even in instances where states lack the will or the capacity to constrict the flows upon which transnational actors depend, the raw fact remains that even weak states stand as more formidable loci of administrative and coercive power than even the most sophisticated violent non-state actors. The transformative significance of the growth of asymmetric warfare can also be questioned. That anti-systemic forces are compelled to resort to asymmetric terror tactics, as opposed to conventional warfare or even mass-based guerrilla insurgencies, is reflective of the limited material power and popular support they enjoy vis-à-vis national governments. While Al Qaeda was capable of inflicting major psychological shock and egregious human losses on the United States on September 11, it has been unable to translate this tactical triumph into the strategic victory of compelling US withdrawal from the Middle East, much less precipitating the collapse of America’s allies in the region. This failure is a testament to the weaknesses inherent in networked forms of adversary – while their networked morphology carries major defensive advantages, groups such as Al Qaeda are generally incapable of launching a sustained ‘pulsing’ series of attacks of the severity and frequency necessary to compel target 20 See for example Michael Hanagan. "Irish Transnational Social Movements, Deterritorialized Migrants, and the State System: The Last One Hundred and Forty Years." Mobilization: An International Journal 3, no. 1 (1998): 107-26. 21 The concept of ‘violence interaction capacity’ as a key structural variable within international systems is taken from Daniel H. Deudney. "Regrounding Realism: Anarchy, Security, and Changing Material Contexts." Security Studies 10, no. 1 (2000), p. 2. On the decisive influence played by strong states in structuring the environment within which transnational flows and actors must operate, see generally Stephen Krasner. "Power Politics, Institutions, and Transnational Relations." In Bringing Transnational Relations Back In, edited by Thomas Risse-Kappen, 257-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ states to compromise vital interests. Still less are networked non-state actors capable of posing an existential threat to state actors, even in the unlikely event that they were to acquire and successfully deploy Weapons of Mass Destruction. In light of such observations, sceptics may argue that the growth of asymmetric warfare at best complicates the contemporary security environment rather than fundamentally transforming it. Finally, the marginality of transnational jihadists within fundamentalist Islam – and for that matter, even within the global jihadist movement substantially qualifies the import of Salafi-jihadist terrorism as a normative challenge to Westphalian international society. Certainly, the intensity of Salafi-jihadist opposition to the present international order is undeniable, with jihadist ideologues explicitly denouncing popular sovereignty, the nationstate and the modern state system as Western innovations that are incompatible with Islam. But the significance of this challenge is immediately undercut once one acknowledges the extent to which Muslims have internalized national subjectivities even within weak states, even while becoming more self-conscious about their identity as members of the global ummah. Setting aside this crucial disconnect between Al Qaeda’s ideology and popular sentiments within the Islamic world, the attacks of 9/11 have further had the unintended sideeffect of estranging Al Qaeda from national jihadist organizations, who have opposed bin Laden’s escalation of hostilities with America and resort to mass casualty terrorism on both principled and pragmatic grounds. Without diminishing the incompatibility of Westphalian international society with Salafi-jihadist ideology, bin Laden’s ideology when viewed through a sceptical lens would appear to present no more of a threat to international society in the long term than the ideology that informed 19 century anarchist terrorism, and would certainly not be expected to exert any enduring effects on the normative composition of the world polity. The point of the preceding remarks is not to pass definitive judgement in favour of either transformationalist or sceptical positions on systems change. Instead, I have merely sought to illustrate the empirical complexity and indeterminacy of the current situation, and the futility of making definitive assessments either way in the absence of a comparison with prior transformative episodes in the history of the state system. In what follows, I seek to On on the importance of sustainable pulsing, or the maintenance of swarmed attacks over time, as a major feature of successful asymmetric ‘net-war’, see Brad McAllister. "Al Qaeda and the Innovative Firm: Demythologizing the Network." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27, no. 4 (2004), p. 303. 23 An argument along these lines can be found in Colin S. Gray. "How Has War Changed since the End of the Cold War?" Parameters 35, no. 1 (2005), 22-23. 24 On the marginality of transnational jihadists within the broader global jihadist movement, see Gerges, ‘The Far Enemy’, 109-111. 25 On this point, see generally Mendelsohn, ‘Sovereignty Under Attack’, pp.60-63. 26 On this point, see Mohammed Ayoob. "Deciphering Islam's Multiple Voices: Intellectual Luxury or Strategic Necessity?" Middle East Policy 12, no. 3 (2005), p. 83. 27 Gerges, ‘The Far Enemy’, pp. 189-192. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ demonstrate the value of a comparative historical approach to systems change by contrasting international society’s current struggle against the global jihadist insurgency with European rulers’ contests against transnational networks of confessional militants over the course of the Reformation. II. CONFESSIONAL NETWORKS, RELIGIOUS CONFLICT, AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTPHALIAN INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY From 1562 to 1598, France – along with Habsburg Spain one of the two superpowers of 16 century Europe – was wracked by no less than eight different wars of religion between Catholics and their Calvinist Huguenot rivals. While never constituting more than ten percent of the French population, the Huguenot rebels were capable of waging a prolonged campaign of armed resistance against the crown over a period of almost four decades, eventually compelling the king to grant the Huguenots a measure of toleration through the Edict of Nantes. The Huguenots’ resilience in the face of pogroms, royal oppression and the intermittent attempts by Spain to aid the suppression of heresy in France are a testament to the transnational character of the resistance movement, recognition of which invites parallels with the contemporary Salafi-jihadist insurgency. The transnational character of Huguenot insurgency can be observed through a consideration of its ideology, leadership, organization, and sources of material support. Ideologically, foremost emphasis must be placed on the influence of John Calvin, the French Protestant pastor who formulated the Huguenots’ theology from exile in Geneva. While radical in its theological implications, Calvinism was initially politically quiescent, reiterating the Pauline injunction that the established authorities are divinely ordained and are thus owed unconditional obedience by Christian subjects. Nevertheless, Calvin’s rejection of traditional Church practices as idolatrous, his denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation (and with it, of the Church’s claims to exercise a monopoly on the means of salvation) and his insistence on the doctrine of predestination each explicitly challenged the normative foundations of Catholic France. Had Calvin’s influence been limited to Geneva, his ideas would have constituted a heretical but remote threat to the French monarchy. However, Calvin’s life-long vocation was the evangelization of his French homeland, and in this project he was aided by the existence of precociously well-developed printing industries in Geneva and Berne. With the aid of Swiss printing presses, Calvin and his successors were able to 28 Mack Holt. The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 24. Ibid, p. 25. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ direct a constant stream of Calvinist theology and propaganda into France, and eventually also into the Spanish Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the Empire. At the outset of France’s religious wars, Geneva thus served as Calvinism’s intellectual epicentre, an incubator of religious heresy – and later, of theories of resistance that explicitly sanctified as a divine imperative armed revolt against the French crown – that remained obstinately beyond the grasp of the Valois dynasty. In addition to providing the ideas that fuelled the Huguenot insurgency, Calvin’s Geneva also supplied much of the ecclesiastical and intellectual leadership for the rebellion. In France as elsewhere, the military leadership of insurgency networks derived from the higher nobility. As part of a conscious strategy of proselytisation, the Genevan Academy had targeted the higher nobility for conversion, in the understanding that through the operation of the extensive clientage networks maintained by the nobility, conversion of one noble would normally bring with it his entire network of dependents. So successful was this strategy – particularly in southern and western France, where Calvinism’s diffusion was likened by contemporaries to the spread of an oil stain – that at its high tide, an estimated forty percent of the higher nobility had converted to the Huguenot cause. While aristocratic conversions provided Calvinism with a potential military base, Geneva trained and dispatched the missionaries who supplied the ecclesiastical (and later, diplomatic) leadership for the Protestant cause in France. The remarkable consistency of Huguenot theology and rites of worship across France’s Calvinist communities is directly attributable to the centrally administered, standardized, methodical training of missionaries undertaken at the Genevan academy, a consistency that continued even after sister academies were later established on French soil. The Huguenots thus synthesized the strengths and social power resources of two core leadership groups, specifically the military power of the higher nobility and the intellectual and ideological power of an internationally trained cadre of Calvinist missionaries. This dualism expressed itself also in the organizational form of Calvinist networks. The elaborate patron-client networks and kinship ties linking the Huguenot higher nobility provided an extremely powerful latent source of social capital and court influence that could be activated at the prospect of official attacks on Huguenot communities. Overlaying these informal 30 Robert M. Kingdon. Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555-1563. Geneva: Droz, 1956, p. 93. 31 H.G. Koenigsberger. "The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands During the Sixteenth Century." The Journal of Modern History 27, no. 4 (1955), p. 337. 32 Robert Jean Knecht. The French Wars of Religion, 1559-1598. London: Longman, 1989, p.14. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 7. 35 Ibid. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ networks was a hierarchical and richly articulated structure of church government that provided a national coordinating structure for Huguenot worship in times of peace, as well as a powerful mobilizational infrastructure in times of war. From 1559 onwards, again under Geneva’s guidance, France’s scattered Huguenot communities were organized under a governance structure comprised of a national synod, provincial synods, regional colloquys of pastors, and local churches with accompanying consistories. As the prospect of civil war beckoned in 1560-61, these local consistories, penetrating the lowest reaches of social organization, were employed as recruitment vehicles for Calvinist militants organizing for the defence of their faith. The availability of this infrastructure enabled Prince Condé, the Huguenot leader for France’s first three religious wars, to field a far larger force in 1562 than the crown could possibly have anticipated, thereby preserving the Huguenot cause and ensuring a decades-long prolongation of France’s religious wars. By 1562, a profoundly heretical movement had thus become deeply entrenched in the country, drawing missionaries and ideas from neighbouring Geneva to establish a nation-wide ecclesiastical infrastructure capable of coordinating and sustaining a prolonged religious insurgency against the crown. Huguenot confessional networks combined the strength and resilience of affective bonds derived from aristocratic kinship and patron-client ties with the command and control capabilities of a rationally organized church bureaucracy to establish a highly effective form of insurgent organization. To these inherent strengths of the Huguenot networks was added the sponsorship and occasionally even the direct military assistance of confessional allies beyond France. From the 1570s onwards, Huguenot rebels enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with Dutch Calvinist rebels revolting against Philip II in the neighbouring Spanish Netherlands, while both Huguenots and Dutch rebels also enjoyed intermittent assistance from Elizabethan England and Palatinate. Such state-sponsored assistance as was provided to the Huguenots was neither as comprehensive as devout Calvinists would have wished, nor was it provided purely in the spirit of confessional solidarity, with reasons of state playing at least as significant a role in Elizabeth’s assistance to the Huguenots as enthusiasm for the Protestant cause. These qualifications notwithstanding, international assistance in the form of soldiers, subsidies, sanctuary for 36 Robert M. Kingdon. "The Political Resistance of the Calvinists in France and the Low Countries." Church History 27, no. 3 (1958), p. 222. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Graeme Murdock. Beyond Calvin the Intellectual, Political, and Cultural World of Europe's Reformed Churches. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp 48-51. 40 Ibid., p. 49. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ exiles, and occasionally even direct military support was far from insignificant, and served to further fortify Huguenot resolve in the face of royal power. The foregoing comments highlight the inherently transnational character of sectarian conflict in early modern Europe, as well as illuminating the centrality of a transnationally organized supportive infrastructure for the survival of the Huguenot cause in 16 century France. It must be noted that the transnational characteristics of the Huguenot resistance movement were far from unique to it, finding their orthodox answer in the militant Catholic League organized around the house of Guise, spiritually inspired by Rome, and dependent upon Spain and Savoy for material support. Beyond France, internationally connected insurgency networks also played vital roles in both the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years’ war. Nevertheless, and in spite of their military and political effectiveness, early modern insurgency networks did not endure as distinct organizational forms, being typically dismantled by their aristocratic leaders when the political goals of their sponsors had been realised, or alternatively when the conflicting political aspirations of their aristocratic and bourgeois elements forced the networks’ premature dissolution. In the absence of a direct organizational legacy, the significance of confessional insurgency networks was therefore indirect, and can be observed in its effects on the course of the wars of religion, as well as on the polity forms and systemic organizing principles that emerged in the 17 century as the remedy for Europe’s cataclysmic religious conflicts. In the specific instance of the French wars of religion, transnational confessional insurgent networks played a crucial role in prolonging, intensifying, and internationalizing the conflict. The survival of the Huguenot resistance even following the extermination of their higher echelon leadership in the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre is a testament to the regenerative capacities of the insurgency, capacities that derived at least in part from the Huguenots’ ability to draw upon international networks of sympathy and support to sustain their struggle over a prolonged period. In addition to prolonging the war, confessional networks also served to aggregate the social grievances of their constituents and re-frame them around questions of religious identity. In mobilizing popular support on the basis of religion, confessional networks were able to forge coalitions of unprecedented breadth that transcended the established class and occupational divisions characteristic of a rigidly stratified social order. However, the consequence of re-framing diverse social and factional grievances as essentially religious disputes was to radically intensify the conflict, leaving 41 Koenigsberger, ‘Organization of Revolutionary Parties’, p. 346. 42 Ibid., p. 338. 43 Ibid., pp. 350-351. 44 Ibid., p 350. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ minimal room for compromise from either party. The routine ferocity of religious riots and acts of desecration perpetrated by Catholic and Huguenot mobs cannot be explained by reference to a bare strategic logic, but is explicable only through a recognition of the cultural frameworks – sponsored and circulated by confessional networks – that mandated religious violence as imperative for the task of purging the body social of spiritual pollutants. Finally, the transnational character of confessional networks internationalized the French civil wars, drawing foreign parties – both rulers and non-state co-religionists – inexorably into the fray. Their historical rivalry notwithstanding, both the French Valois rulers and the Spanish Habsburgs could find common cause in suppressing heresy in an environment in which routine collaboration and armed support linked Huguenot and Dutch rebels in common cause against Catholic monarchies. Conversely, the extensive links between the Huguenots and transnational networks of Calvinist missionaries and merchants provided a crucial influence vector in galvanizing neighbouring Protestant states to support the Huguenot cause following the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre. The transnational character of religious insurgency in Reformation Europe thus had decisive effects for the course of the French wars of religion, enabling an armed minority to ensnare one of Europe’s contemporary superpowers in a decades-long struggle, as well as enabling that same minority to extract significant (if ultimately revocable) concessions from the crown following a peace of mutual exhaustion. Much more significant than these direct effects, however, were the indirect effects of the wars of religion on the evolution of polity forms in early modern Europe. Most fundamentally, Europe’s transnational religious wars were a catalyst for the development of the ideology and institutional structures of Absolutism. The strife unleashed by Europe’s religious wars produced a yearning for order that yielded qualitatively new theories of government emphasizing the requirement of absolute popular obedience to the sovereign. Absolutism answered the theories of resistance formulated during the wars of religion by insisting on the monarch’s indispensible function as the central ordering mechanism holding a multitude of wills together within a divinely ordained and organically conceived social order. Although theorists such as Thomas Hobbes rejected religious justifications for absolute rule in favour of conceptions of the state as a contractually On the cultural meaning and symbolic importance of ritualistic mob violence and acts of desecration in France’s wars of religion, see Natalie Zemon Davis. "The Rites of Violence: Religious Violence in Sixteenth Century France." Past and Present 59 (1973): 51-91. 46 On the catalysing role played by the wars of religion in stimulating the growth of Absolutist ideology, see Reinhart Koselleck. Critique and Crisis Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Oxford: Berg, 1988, pp. 16-18. 47 On this point, see Nannerl O. Keohane. Philosophy and the State in France the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 254. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ articulated human artifice, both Hobbesian and continental Absolutist ideologies lent their support to rulers’ growing monopolization of the use of organized violence from the mid 17 century onwards. The exchange of popular obedience in exchange for protection from foreign invasion and civil strife became crucial to the legitimation of political authority in Absolutist Europe, and found its institutional expression in the establishment of permanent standing armies and powers of taxation throughout post-Westphalian Europe. The wars of religion also begat a dramatic increase in patterns of cultural standardization across Europe – while the goal of confessional uniformity proved elusive for many states, a long-term effect of Europe’s religious wars was the de jure or de facto nationalization of religious authority, involving rulers much more directly in the moral supervision and enculturation of their subjects than had hitherto been the case. In addition to its direct effects on the course of Europe’s religious wars and its indirect effects on the subsequent evolution of polity forms, transnational religious insurgency fundamentally altered core systemic features of European international society. Most crucially, transnational religious insurgency left in its wake the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention, principles articulated in embryonic form at Westphalia and subsequently systematically developed as part of a corpus of naturalist international law binding international society together. The Westphalian settlement in effect provided a systemic normative carapace behind which individual rulers could engage in the project of state formation and consolidation without fear of molestation by neighbouring rulers. Transnational insurgency networks – as mechanisms of conflict escalation and contagion within Western Europe – had operated in an environment populated by sprawling composite monarchies comprised of portfolios of geographically non-contiguous and culturally distinct territories, in which elaborate ties of genealogy linked Europe’s ruling houses and in which modern distinctions between the domestic and the international did not exist. As such, the transnational character of early modern religious insurgency was largely an artefact of the structural characteristics of European international society at that time. By contrast, the Westphalian settlement that closed Europe’s era of religious wars endorsed notions of sovereign territoriality and the cordoning off of Europe’s rulers within mutually exclusive 48 Koselleck, ‘Critique and Crisis’, p. 24. 49 Samuel E. Finer. "State and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military." In The Formation of National States in Western Europe, edited by Charles Tilly, 84-163. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. See specifically pp. 87-88. 50 Philip S. Gorsky. The Disciplinary Revolution Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, 158-159. 51 On the distinctive character of composite monarchies and the clear differences they exhibit vis-à-vis modern nation-states, see generally J.H. Elliott. "A Europe of Composite Monarchies." Past and Present 137 (1992): 4871. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ jurisdictions, thus enabling the subsequent enclosure of social power within a sovereignterritorial framework that was progressively accomplished by state-builders from the mid-17 century onwards. What made the Westphalian settlement possible – indeed necessitated its establishment – was rulers’ collective recognition of the intractability of sectarian conflict and its inherently destabilizing potential for established political authority. By articulating organizing principles of sovereignty and non-intervention alongside binding principles of religious toleration (at least for the states of the Empire), Europe’s rulers institutionalized barriers to the transnational spread of religious conflict. In so doing, they enabled both accelerated state-building along Absolutist lines, as well as inadvertently laying the foundations for a European – and eventually global – state system predicated on the organizing principle of sovereign anarchy. III. TRANSNATIONAL SALAFI-JIHADIST INSURGENCY AND THE CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGE TO INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY Westphalian international society was thus forged out of the crucible of Europe’s religious wars, with its basic organizing principles – the sovereignty regime and its associated norm of non-intervention – arising directly in response to the chaos precipitated by transnational religious insurgency. Today, the normative foundations of Westphalian international society are now being challenged by another religiously motivated transnational insurgency. Salafi-jihadism traces its origins to a broader movement calling for the regeneration of Islamic societies by a return to the form of Islam allegedly practiced by the initial companions (salaf) of the Prophet. Salafism embraces a literalist interpretation of the Koran and calls for the purging of innovations in religious practice introduced into Islam over subsequent generations. Salafis are particularly critical of innovations introduced into Islamic societies as a result of Western influences. Two innovations that are vociferously opposed are the distinction between the secular and the sacred – which contradicts Salafis’ doctrinal emphasis on the ‘Unity of God’ – and the division of the Islamic world into separate nation-states, nationalism being seen by Salafis as a form of idolatry that artificially divides 52 Daniel Philpott. Revolutions in Sovereignty : How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 148. 53 On the ideology of Salafism, see for example Olivier Roy. Globalised Islam the Search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst and Company, 2005, pp. 244-247, and more generally Quintan Wiktorowicz. "A Genealogy of Radical Islam." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 28 (2005): 75-97. 54 Roy, ‘Globalised Islam’, p. 265. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ the Islamic community. Salafis compare the contemporary period with the jahiliyya, the time of ignorance in the Arab world before the coming of Islam, and call for the establishment of sharia law and the dissolution of nation-states in favour of an Islamic caliphate as remedies to the spiritual and moral malaise they see gripping the Islamic world. As a violent offshoot of Salafism, Salafi-jihadism endorses Salafist theology and further claims that it is the permanent and individual duty of all Muslims to engage in perpetual holy war against the enemies of Islam. Salafi-jihadists distinguish between the ‘near enemy’, comprised of apostate rulers in the Greater Middle East, and the ‘far enemy’, consisting of non-Muslim powers (predominantly the United States) that provide apostate rulers with the military and financial wherewithal necessary to sustain themselves in power. In the absence of a recognized caliph to unite the Islamic world and command its armies, Salafi-jihadists argue that it is incumbent upon all individual Muslims to wage ceaseless struggle against Islam’s enemies, asserting (contrary to Islamic orthodoxy) that this obligation constitutes nothing less than the sixth pillar of Islam, as binding on all Muslims as the five recognized pillars of profession of faith, prayer, fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimage. Ideologically, the contradiction between Salafi-jihadism and the contemporary international order is clearly evident. The separation between the sacred and the secular, the principle of popular sovereignty as realized in the institutional form of the nation-state, even the monopolization of legitimate physical force by sovereign states – each of these foundational principles of international order are explicitly repudiated by the jihadists. Jihadist ideology presents a full frontal challenge to the legitimacy of Islamic rulers and the foundational principles of international society, while jihadist actions – in the form of mass casualty terrorism – directly compromise the Hobbesian social contract of protection in exchange for obedience that has historically been central to the legitimation of state power from the Peace of Westphalia onwards. The organizational vehicle through which this challenge has been directed is a diffuse global coalition of jihadist networks of which Al Qaeda forms merely a part. Nevertheless, given its prominence among transnational jihadists, the analysis below concentrates predominantly on Al Qaeda as a contemporary example of a religious transnational insurgency network. 55 On the supreme emphasis placed on the notion of divine sovereignty (hakimiya) within Salafi thought, a notion that is inconsistent with ideas of popular sovereignty and the nation-state, see Gerges, ‘The Far Enemy’, pp. 4-5. 56 The notion of a ‘modern jahiliyya’ was first introduced into Salafi thought by Mawlana Abdul A’la Mawdudi in the 1930s; see Wiktorowicz, ‘Genealogy of Radical Islam’, p. 78. 57 On the clear distinction between Salafism and Salafi-jihadism, see "Indonesia Backgrounder: Why Salafism and Terrorism Mostly Don't Mix." Southeast Asia/Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2004, p.1. 58 Gerges, ‘The Far Enemy’, p. 1. 59 Wiktorowicz, ‘Genealogy of Radical Islam’, p. 80. 60 Mendelsohn, ‘Sovereignty Under Attack’, pp. 62-64. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ Al Qaeda’s origins can be traced to Abdullah Azzam’s establishment of the Services Bureau, an information clearing-house on the status and whereabouts of Arab volunteers waging jihad against the Red Army following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. On the eve of the Soviets’ defeat in Afghanistan, Azzam and bin Laden established Al Qaeda (Arabic: the base) to serve as a data-base of jihadists who could potentially be mobilized to wage jihad against Islam’s enemies in future conflicts. Al Qaeda’s subsequent evolution has been exhaustively documented elsewhere and the tale will not be recapitulated here, save to observe that Al Qaeda has from the beginning consisted of a network of networks, with jihadists from the Maghreb to Southeast Asia being bonded in their common commitment to Salafi-jihadist ideology and also in their shared experiences waging jihad in Afghanistan. With the 1998 merger between Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad and bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda assumed its pre-9/11 organizational form as a coalition of allied jihadist networks, with a core leadership group coordinating and directing individuals and cells in the commissioning of major attacks such as the 1998 African embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole and of course September 11. Following 9/11 and under the impact of intensified international counter-terrorism efforts, Al Qaeda has morphed from a hub-andspokes network to a much more loosely organized chain network, in which connections between individual cells have become significantly more attenuated and in which the central leadership’s capacity to organize and coordinate large-scale attacks has been significantly – perhaps fatally – degraded. With a significant proportion of Al Qaeda’s pre-9/11 leadership either killed or captured, the network’s infrastructural power and coordinating capacity has been dramatically diminished, but this setback has been partially offset by Al Qaeda’s enhanced post 9/11 capacity to inspire dispersed autonomous jihadist cells to perpetrate atrocities such as the Madrid and London bombings. Writing on the dynamics of emergent power agglomerations in relation to ideological, economic, military and political sources of social power, Michael Mann observes: ‘When an independent source of power it emerges, it is promiscuous in relation to ‘factors’, gathering them from all crannies of social life, giving them only a distinctive organization 61 Marc Sageman. Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, pp. 35-37. 62 Ibid, p. 37. 63 For comprehensive overviews of Al Qaeda’s origins and evolution, see for example Peter Bergen. Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden. New York: Free Press, 2002; Jason Burke. Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003; and Rohan Gunaratna. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. On the achievements and limitations of the Bush Administration’s leadership interdiction strategy against Al Qaeda, see Michael Kenney. "From Pablo to Osama: Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the War on Drugs." Survival 45, no. 3 (2003), pp.193-195. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ configuration.’ This observation relates particularly well to Al Qaeda, which has been able to draw from global flows of people, capital, ideas and materiel to forge a unique form of globalised insurgency, more analogous in some ways to a transnational social movement than to a guerrilla organization. Where Calvinist networks in Reformation Europe were quick to exploit the propagandistic and mobilizational opportunities provided by the printing press, Al Qaeda and its affiliates have masterfully exploited the information technology revolution to propagate the message of Salafi-jihadism and glorify the deeds of jihadist martyrs. Unlike their early modern European counterparts, Al Qaeda has not been able to rely on the direct military or economic assistance of state actors, although allied Salafi-jihadist organizations (e.g. Lashkar e-Tayyiba in Indian Kashmir) have enjoyed sponsorship from states such as Pakistan. Al Qaeda has nevertheless been able to tap into various global financial flows, ranging from funds diverted from Islamic charities to profits garnered from the sale of African conflict diamonds, to finance the global jihad. Finally, the accelerated global diffusion of dual-use technologies and the post-Cold War glut in the small arms market have significantly increased the pool of military resources and disruptive capabilities available to non-state actors, providing ample materiel with which to arm a transnational jihadist community already battle-hardened from experience in the anti-Soviet jihad and now, presumably also, from experience in the anti-American Iraqi jihad. Today’s transnational jihadist networks enjoy a geographical reach and destructive capabilities that far surpass that possessed by Europe’s confessional militant networks. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, the jihadists are unlikely to have the same transformative effects on the societies they have targeted as did their early modern counterparts. Recall that the Huguenots were able to synthesize the strengths of aristocratic patronage and kinship networks with a nation-wide bureaucratic church hierarchy to create an insurgent apparatus of exceptional resilience and strength. The ties linking Huguenots to a transnational supportive infrastructure were critical in sustaining their struggle and internationalizing the conflict, but these linkages proved effectual in empowering a resistance movement that was already deeply embedded in the social fabric of Valois France. Conversely, Al Qaeda does not possess a pre-established, bureaucratically governed and hierarchically organized religious infrastructure upon which to piggy-back when mobilizing its military power, and even if it did, such an infrastructure would likely be rapidly detected and dismembered by the international community. It is true that Al Qaeda and affiliated 65 Michael Mann. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 22.. 66 On the eminent suitability of on-line media for the oral traditions preferred by many of Al Qaeda’s tribal consistuents, see David Ronfeldt. "Al Qaeda and Its Affiliates: A Global Tribe Waging Segmental Warfare?" First Monday 10, no. 3 (2005), p. 10. 67 On Al Qaeda’s diverse financial resources, see McAllister, ‘Al Qaeda and the Innovative Firm’, p. 305. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ jihadist organizations have derived strength from pre-existing social and kinship networks – witness for example the importance of the Ngruki network of pesantren alumni in forming the core personnel of Jemaah Islamiyah, as well as the self-conscious strategy of network preservation through the inter-marriage of jihadist families pursued by both Al Qaeda and JI. But such linkages and social arrangements pale in comparison with the size and sophistication of the patronage and kinship networks of the Huguenot nobility, networks that yoked fanatical religious commitment together with the affective ties of kinship to produce a deeply rooted structure of resistance to central authority. Whereas Huguenot networks were deeply embedded in French society in addition to being plugged into a dispersed transnational supportive infrastructure, Al Qaeda’s degree of social penetration within host societies is generally shallow, with the possible exceptions of southern Afghanistan and the adjoining tribal border provinces of Pakistan. The network has at its core a ‘jihad jet set’ of nomadic leaders radicalized by their experience of the Afghan jihad, while the network’s foot-soldiers have been disproportionately drawn from socially marginalized first or second generation immigrants living in Western Europe and North America. In this respect, the network’s form is analogous to that of rhizomic plants such as creeping ivy, organisms that spread rapidly but are only shallowly embedded in the top-soil through thousands of tiny shoots. Like a rhizomic plant, Al Qaeda possesses a powerful regenerative capacity, with its chain-like network structure ensuring that the elimination of a large number of independent cells will not lead to the network’s collapse. However, partially off-setting this advantage is the network’s shallow penetration of host societies, a structural defect that has severely limited the effectiveness of Al Qaeda’s outreach activities to local militants in host societies. One of the greatest strengths of the transnationally connected but socially embedded Huguenot confessional networks resided in their capacity to mobilize a popular base in defence of their Calvinist faith. The networks accomplished this task by aggregating the diverse social and factional grievances of a wide range of actors and re-framing these grievances as being essentially and irreducibly religious in character. In an effort to broaden 68 On the importance of the ‘Ngruki’ alumni network for Jemaah Islamiyah, see generally ‘Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia: The Case of the ‘Ngruki Network’ in Indonesia’, International Crisis Group Asia Briefing No. 20, 8 August 2002. The significance of pre-existing social networks for the jihadist insurgency more generally is noted in David J. Kilcullen. "Countering Global Insurgency." The Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2005), 600-603 passim. 69 On the deterritorialised character of Salafi-jihadism, see Roy, ‘Globalised Islam’, pp. 288-290. On the role played by Salafi-jihadism in recasting social identities in Pakistan’s tribal areas along fundamentalist lines in response to the encroaching power of the Pakistani state, see Ibid., p. 284. 70 On the social networks that jointly comprise the global jihadist movement, see generally Sageman, ‘Understanding Terror Networks’, chapter 5, passim. 71 Koenigsberger, ‘Organization of Revolutionary Parties’, p. 350. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ the popular base of the jihadist insurgency, Al Qaeda has also sought to insinuate itself into local conflicts involving Muslims with a view towards re-framing these struggles as part of a broader global jihad against the enemies of Islam. However, from Bosnia to Chechnya to present-day Iraq, Muslim nationalists have instrumentally accepted Al Qaeda’s offers of men and materiel without embracing their cause of global jihad. The jihadists’ failure to win more than a minority of converts in war-torn societies can be credited in no small part to the socially disembedded character of their networks along with Salafi-jihadism’s uncompromising intolerance of any interpretations of Islam that differ from its own. Across a broad range of theatres, jihadist radicals have consistently alienated themselves from host societies by arrogantly denouncing indigenous folk religious practices as un-Islamic, thereby earning the enduring hostility of resident populations. Paradoxically, the very same features of Salafi-jihadism that make it attractive to deracinated migrants and exiles (e.g. its dogmatic repudiation of all innovations in religious thought and practice that have accumulated since the time of the Prophet) make it unappealing to most Muslims, thereby limiting its potential to broaden its appeal and thus pose a genuine threat to incumbent rulers. The limited threat posed by Al Qaeda to the state system is further illustrated through a comparison of the relationship between religious insurgency and state failure in the early modern and contemporary contexts. In Valois France, the weakening of centralized political power was very much the consequence of religious radicalism and the withdrawal of support for the monarchy by Huguenot converts among the higher nobility. In France as throughout early modern Europe, comprehensive rational-legal bureaucracies had yet to be established, forcing rulers to rely on the higher nobility to execute the day-to-day tasks of government in territories beyond the direct grasp of the crown. This patrimonial style of government ensured a dramatic involution of state power upon the outbreak of religious war in all areas where Huguenot conversion amongst the nobility was high. Across the ‘Huguenot crescent’ in On this point with specific reference to Al Qaeda’s collective action framing activities in Southeast Asia and their relevance for Al Qaeda’s efforts to broaden its popular support base, see generally David Leheny. "Terrorism, Social Movements, and International Security: How Al Qaeda Affects Southeast Asia." Japanese Journal of Political Science 6 (2005): 87-109. 73 On the failure of Al Qaeda to achieve its goal of creating a fundamentalist state in Bosnia for wont of local support, see Evan F. Kohlman. Al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe the Afghan-Bosnian Network. New York: Berg, 2004, p. 229. On a similar failure to win popular acceptance of the Chechen war as part of a global jihad, see Mark Galeotti. "'Brotherhoods' and 'Associates': Chechen Networks of Crime and Resistance." Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement 11, no. 2/3 (2002), p. 349. On the growing tensions between indigenous Iraqi insurgents and foreign insurgents, a tension that bodes poorly for Al Qaeda’s attempts to fully exploit popular resentment of the Allied occupation for jihadist ends, see Sabrina Tavernise and Dexter Filkins. "Local Insurgents Tell of Clashes with Al Qaeda's Forces in Iraq." New York Times, January 12 2006 2006, 1. 74 Sageman notes that this cultural and ideological disconnect between transnational jihadis and their hosts manifested itself as earlier as the Afghan jihad in the 1980s; see Sageman, ‘Understanding Terror Networks’, pp. 59-60. 75 Roy, ‘Globalised Islam’, pp. 288-290. 76 Koenigsberger, ‘Organization of Revolutionary Parties’, p. 339. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ southern and western France, the crown’s influence evaporated on the initiation of religious hostilities as noble office-holders simply redirected the machinery of local and provincial government in support of the Calvinist insurgency. Conversely, Salafi-jihadism has not by itself been the cause of post-colonial state failure. On the contrary, contemporary jihadist extremists have simply exploited already pre-existing power vacuums in weak and failing states for their own purposes – their activities have thus in effect been a symptom of deeper structural problems within the state system rather than being their underlying cause. The final consideration indicating the limited threat posed by Salafi-jihadism is perhaps the most obvious, and that is simply the deeply internalized and comprehensively institutionalized character of the state system itself. Put bluntly, jihadist aspirations to overthrow the state system in favour of a transnational caliphate are fanciful. The material strength of even the brittle and unpopular authoritarian regimes of the Middle East far exceeds that of the global jihadist community. This is evidenced most clearly in the fact that the jihad against apostate rulers first went global precisely because groups like Egyptian Islamic Jihad were unable to overthrow secular regimes through resort to conventional strategies of revolutionary mobilization, guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism. The military defeat of Islamists in Algeria and Egypt in the late 1990s may have done much to convince Al Qaeda ideologues of the virtues of re-directing their energies towards the ‘far enemy’, but what it simultaneously demonstrated was the relative powerlessness of the jihadist movement vis-àvis its state adversaries. Perhaps even more important than this material imbalance of capabilities, however, are the normative barriers to Salafi-jihadism that are encoded within the very constitution of the state system. Where early modern confessional networks were capable of augmenting autochtonously generated military capabilities by tapping a deep and unregulated international market for mercenaries, this option has been foreclosed for contemporary insurgents following the 19 century growth of republican government and the consequent delegitimation and elimination of mercenarism. More broadly, principles of popular sovereignty and republican government that are anathema to Salafi-jihadism have become institutionalized at both a supra-national level through the UN system and at a unit level through the generalization of the nation-state as the world’s hegemonic polity form. Rather than displacing the nation as an object of popular loyalty, the growth of Islamic religious observance has occurred in tandem with the consolidation of national subjectivities 77 Ibid. 78 Gilles Kepel. "The Origins and Development of the Jihadist Movement: From Anti-Communism to Terrorism." Asian Affairs XXXIV, no. II (2003), pp. 98-100. 79 Ibid. 80 On the relationship between the rise in republican government in the 19 century and the delegitimation and elimination of mercenarism, see Thomson, ‘Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns’, p. 148. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ in many parts of the developing world, further diminishing the prospects of a global caliphate rising phoenix-like from the ashes of Islam’s unpopular secular autocracies. For all its considerable fragility, the contemporary Westphalian system is thus sufficiently institutionalized and internalized at both an elite and popular level as to make its direct overthrow by the jihadist insurgency a distinctly remote possibility. These observations aside, my argument should not be construed as a vindication of the sceptical position on post 9/11 systems change. The limited revolutionary potential of Salafijihadism should not blind scholars to the reality that the insurgency is merely symptomatic of a profoundly entrenched set of structural tendencies in the state system that will persist long after jihadism has been eliminated. Post-colonial state failure, the enhanced empowerment of networked non-state actors consequent to globalisation, the growth of religious fundamentalism, and the persistence of inequalities between North and South that contribute to the growth of anti-systemic ideologies and movements – each of these structural tendencies contributed to the jihadist insurgency, and none are likely to abate in the near future. While jihadism is transient, the enduring structural tendencies that helped to produce it will together conspire to undermine the most basic of the state’s legitimating functions, namely its Hobbesian capacity to provide protection to its citizenry in exchange for obedience. The breakdown in the state’s coercive monopoly in parts of the developing world has facilitated the genesis of global threats that compromise the integrity of the state’s monopoly on violence in the developed core of the state system. With 9/11 and subsequent mass casualty terrorist attacks, the hard protective shell of the sovereign state been definitively breached and the strategic distance between North and South has become radically compressed, producing a political imperative for governments in strong states to take drastic ameliorative measures to restore public confidence in the state’s capacity to provide for their protection. What 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror have brought to the fore is a growing tension – not yet a contradiction – between two of the core constitutional norms of contemporary international society, specifically the Hobbesian protection bargain that legitimates the modern state in the eyes of its citizens, and norms of sovereign equality and non-intervention that have mediated relations between strong states and weak states alike throughout the modern era. During the immediate post-colonial period, when peripheral state weakness posed no obvious threat to core states’ interests, Western governments were prepared to ignore the dissonance between post-colonial states’ juridical status as formally equal 81 Ayoob, ‘Islam’s Multiple Voices’, p. 83. 82 The traditional notion of the state as the ‘hard shell’ protecting its subjects from external attack was initially articulated by John Herz, whose observations about the eminent permeability of the state’s hard shell in the atomic age have arguably even greater validity in relation to transnational non-state threats. See John Herz. "Rise and Demise of the Territorial State." World Politics 9, no. 4 (1957): 473-93. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ sovereign entities and their actual character as fragile and frequently highly dysfunctional governance units. However, this liberal attitude to the discrepancy between prescriptive norm and material fact has evaporated with the war on terror as the nexus between state failure and global threats has become apparent to Western policy-makers. Enhanced security interdependence between North and South has already seen a waning commitment to a negative sovereignty regime in which the imperative of respecting self-determination mandated sovereign recognition of governments regardless of their capacity to project power effectively throughout their territory. I suggest that this trend will continue in future, with strong states increasingly making the granting of sovereign recognition dependent upon a state’s demonstrated capacity to project its power and authority effectively within its territory. This trend will be accompanied by an internationalization of strong states’ Hobbesian protection compact, with newly conceived international responsibilities to prevent the emergence of global threats increasingly taking precedence over established norms of sovereign equality and non-intervention. Both the Hobbesian protection bargain and the sovereignty regime were the unintended by-products of Europe’s religious wars, intended to bring a modicum of domestic and international order to the Continent following over a century of cataclysmic ideological strife and transnational insurgency. For the better part of the state system’s subsequent history these constitutional norms evolved in tandem, but with the advent of Third World state failure and the inter-related emergence of transnational security threats, these norms are now in danger of diverging. Increasingly, norms of non-intervention and sovereign equality – procedural norms that have long being seen as fundamental to the realization of substantive values of collective self-determination and human equality – will be qualified by strong states seeking to minimize the leakage of transnational security threats from failing post-colonial states to the developed world. Should strong states’ extension of policing functions to the transnational level be accompanied by sincere and comprehensive attempts to re-establish viable state structures in the developing world, both the Hobbesian compact and traditional norms of non-intervention might again be reconciled. Conversely, if transnational policing is 83 On Western policy-makers’ increased sensitivity to the link between state failure and global threats, see Patrick, ‘Weak States and Global Threats’, p. 28. 84 This line of argument echoes speculation advanced by Stephen Krasner about the likely future of the sovereignty regime in the wake of a hypothetical future increase in catastrophic terrorism; see Stephen D. Krasner. "The Day After." Foreign Policy, no. 146 (2005): 68-70. 85 On the notion of responsibilities to prevent as a potentially sovereignty-compromising moral obligation of governments analogous to the responsibility to protect already being cited as a justification for humanitarian intervention, see generally Lee Feinstein, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. "A Duty to Prevent." Foreign Affairs 83, no. 1 (2004): 136-50. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’ pursued in an exclusively prophylactic manner, with developed states’ interests in containing transnational threats being exclusively privileged over the need to re-establish reliable state structures and state monopolies on organized violence in the developing world, a far more unequal, disordered, and bloody future awaits. Andrew Phillips ‘Subverting the Anarchical Society’