The Origins of the Islamic State

As a new actor on the Middle Eastern scene, the Islamic State (IS) has been the focus of all attention ever since its official appearance on June 29, 2014. This owes mainly to the group’s modus operandi (the beheading of Westerners dressed as Guantanamo prisoners), its rhetoric marked by equally extreme violence, its sudden challenging of state partitions established since the 1916 Cambon-Grey agreement (also known as Sykes-Picot), and its confrontation of the new Western coalition that launched a bombing campaign in Iraq in September 2014. The media have rapidly presented IS – most often in the mode of terror – as the new protagonist that is to globally redefine the local, and even regional, political order. The group’s dramatic advance, massive conquest, and disruption of the Middle East map constitute different entry points for analysing what is, in political terms, a relatively exceptional phenomenon. We do not propose here to reconsider the relevance of this assessment; nor do we wish to estimate the lasting or ephemeral character of this actor, or the reality of its access to material, human and symbolic resources that might bring about the great upheaval foretold. Rather, we seek to interrogate the meaning of its name, and to understand how a series of disruptions in Iraq and Syria generated this form of public authority.