Jihadi Rebels in Civil War

Stathis N. Kalyvas

Abstract: In this essay, I decouple violent jihadism from both religion and terrorism and propose an alter-
native, nonexclusive understanding of jihadi groups as rebel groups engaged in civil wars. Arguing that ji-
hadi groups can be profitably approached as the current species of revolutionary insurgents, I offer a com-
parison with an older species, the Marxist rebels of the Cold War. I point to a few significant similarities
and differences between these two types of revolutionary rebels and draw some key implications, stressing
the great challenges facing jihadi rebels in civil wars.

The global spread of a militant or extremist strain

of political Islam, often referred to as “jihadi” Islam-
ism, ranks as one of the most important political de-
velopments in the post–Cold War world; it carries
implications for our understanding of both the pol-
itics of global security and contemporary trends in
political violence.1

Political Islam or Islamism, terms denoting the use
of Islam’s religious precepts for political mobiliza-
tion, takes many forms, some of which can be vio-
lent. Transnational terror is a particular form of po-
litical violence in the name of Islam that has attracted
obvious attention on account of its spectacular na-
ture. Because violent Islamists have resorted to ter-
rorist tactics, they are often referred to and thought of
exclusively as terrorists.2 However, radical Islamists
have also taken an active part in insurgencies: that
is, a rebellion or civil war. The persistent confusion
around these terms (terrorism, civil war, insurgency,
and so on) has fed a tendency to subsume jihadi re-
bellions under the general umbrella of terrorism, or
even to conflate the two as somehow equivalent or in-
terchangeable. isis, for example, is considered a ter-
rorist organization at the same time as it is engaged
in an insurgency or civil war, in both Syria and Iraq.
A parallel, though distinct, trend has been the inter-

STATHIS N. KALYVAS, a Fellow of
the American Academy since 2008,
is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of
Political Science and Director of
the Program on Order, Conflict,
and Violence at Yale University.
He is the author of Modern Greece:
What Everyone Needs to Know (2015)
and The Logic of Violence in Civil War
(2006).

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pretation of the violence undertaken by ji-
hadi militants as uniformly “religious vi-
olence.”3 However, while insurgent jihadi
groups are clearly inspired by an ideology
rooted in religion, they also act in ways that
parallel those of nonreligious insurgent ac-
tors; their violence is often influenced by
the context in which it unfolds and the in-
fluence of religion on it can be variable rath-
er than constant.

In this essay, I decouple violent Islamism
from both terrorism and religion. I am not
arguing that Islamists cannot engage in ter-
rorism or are not influenced by religion;
rather, I contend that too much emphasis
on terrorism and religion might conceal
two critical aspects of contemporary vio-
lent jihadism: its emergence in the context
of civil wars and its revolutionary dimen-
sion. Thus, I argue that jihadi groups can
be approached as a particular species of in-
surgent actors in civil wars: namely, revolu-
tionary insurgents. From this vantage point,
they can be fruitfully compared with anoth-
er well-known species of revolutionary ac-
tors, the Marxist rebels of the Cold War.

Planned and launched by Al Qaeda, the

spectacular attacks against the United States
in September 2001 were a watershed in the
development and spread of a powerful con-
ceptual linkage between jihadi Islamism, on
the one hand, and transnational terrorism,
on the other.4 Indeed, it can be argued that
the terms Islamic and terror have become as-
sociated so strongly in mainstream politi-
cal and media discourse that they have be-
come fused in the collective consciousness
of much of the Western world. However,
terrorism is only one among many streams
(or tactics) of violence deployed by various
jihadi groups to achieve concrete political
aims. Extending the term terrorism to en-
compass everything jihadi organizations
do could perhaps be politically useful, but
is very problematic from an analytical and
empirical perspective.

When, in 2014, a jihadi group stemming
from Syria and calling itself al-Dawla al-
Islamiya fil Iraq wa al-Sham (Islamic State
of Iraq and the Levant, or more common-
ly isil, isis, or is) invaded Iraq and con-
quered the city of Mosul along with large
swaths of Iraqi territory, most observers
were taken aback. The fact that this group
proclaimed itself a state and sought to take
over and rule territory was seen as puzzling
by analysts used to dealing with the much
more elusive, clandestine, and nonterrito-
rially based Al Qaeda network. Their sur-
prise was justified in great part by the ra-
pidity of isis’s territorial push, but it nev-
ertheless points to a key dimension of how
terrorism is understood: namely, its non-
territoriality. Complicating things further,
the sponsorship and/or organization of
several major terrorist attacks in Western
Europe, the United States, and elsewhere
by isis suggests that territorial and non-
territorial strategies can coexist within a
group’s diverse and variable repertoire of
violence. Add to this mix the use of highly
mediatized and shocking forms of violence
(or “terror”) in the territories ruled by isis
(such as the filmed beheadings of both for-
eign hostages and locals) and it is easy to
understand why terrorism has emerged as
a favorite descriptor of isis.

However, the interpretation of isis ex-
clusively or primarily through the lens
of terrorism comes with two significant
drawbacks. First, it promotes a view of
terrorism and insurgency as either totally
overlapping (“isis is an insurgent group
because it is a terrorist group”) or mutu-
ally exclusive (“isis cannot be compared
to insurgent groups because it is a ter-
rorist group”). In a way, this interpreta-
tion is both extremely expansive and ex-
tremely narrow; it reflects the manner in
which the disciplinary fields of terrorism
and civil war developed as distinct areas
of inquiry. Second, this interpretation de-
tracts from the study of isis and other ji-

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147 (1) Winter 2018Stathis N. Kalyvas

hadi groups as insurgent (or territorial)
groups and, therefore, excludes insights
that can be gleaned when such groups are
studied comparatively, either with each
other or with non-jihadi insurgent groups.
Among the key insights of recent the-
orizing and research about political vio-
lence is an understanding of terrorism and
insurgency as strategies that can be either
complementary or independent. This per-
spective privileges an “actor-based” under-
standing of terrorism, according to which
terrorist groups are seen to fully diverge
from insurgent groups only when they lack
the ability to occupy territory; in turn, this
is the result of an extreme asymmetry of
power between these groups and the state
they oppose and seek to challenge. Put oth-
erwise, when nonstate armed groups are
too weak vis-à-vis the state they challenge,
they may evolve into clandestine or under-
ground organizations, lacking the ability to
“liberate” and rule territory and focusing
instead on the type of actions we associate
with terrorism, such as bombings of soft
targets and hostage-taking. Alternatively,
stronger groups or those challenging more
fragile states are likely to focus on the acqui-
sition of territorial control where they can
set up their own state apparatus.5 Often, the
same armed group might deploy both terri-
torial and nonterritorial strategies simulta-
neously or successively; it may occupy terri-
tory where it is strong enough and act clan-
destinely (as a “terrorist group”) where it
lacks such strength, either domestically or
transnationally.6 Once we adopt this per-
spective, we may qualify the association be-
tween jihadism and terrorism, which be-
comes a variable rather than a constant.

It follows, then, that the terms insurgency
or rebellion, used here interchangeably, are
expressions of a particular balance of pow-
er between an opposition armed group and
the state it challenges, one that allows a
sustained armed confrontation centered
on the acquisition of territory and the up-

holding of territorial control.7 When this
armed confrontation crosses a conven-
tional fatality threshold, it is designated
in the scholarly literature as a civil war.8
It is now possible to proceed to the central

question: how do jihadi groups involved in
insurgencies, rebellions, or civil wars com-
pare with non-jihadi rebel groups? This
question calls for a final clarification: what
exactly is a jihadi group?

Jihadi Islamism is a type of political “ac-
tivism justified with primary reference to
Islam.”9 Islamism as a political movement
should not be conflated with Islam as a re-
ligion. There is a clear distinction between
the faith of Islam, on the one hand, and the
“religionized politics of Islamism,” on the
other; the latter employs religious symbols
for political ends and, as such, constitutes a
particular, narrow interpretation of Islam.10
Simply put, “Islam is both a religious faith
and a cultural system, but not a political ide-
ology.”11 Neither should Islamism or “po-
litical Islam” be conflated with its militant,
extremist, radical, or violent versions.

Modern “militant” or “jihadi” Islamism
is connected to Salafism, a religious reviv-
alist ideology that promotes the organiza-
tion of society and politics along pure reli-
gious lines and calls for a return of Islam to
its roots–hence the relative popularity of
the term “Islamic fundamentalism” among
several Western commentators.12 Salafism
can be traced back to the writings of think-
ers like Abu al-Ala Mawdudi (1903–1979),
Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), and espe-
cially Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966). It offers
a comprehensive political alternative not
just to liberal capitalism, but also to West-
ern modernity altogether. Salafism fueled a
wave of political activism that was initial-
ly harnessed by the Muslim Brotherhood,
an Egyptian political movement found-
ed in 1928 as a vanguard political party.
Contemporary jihadi Islamism emerged
in the context of the political turbulence

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesJihadi Rebels in Civil War

that characterized Egypt during the early
1980s, took off in Afghanistan in the midst
of the resistance against the Soviet occupa-
tion, and acquired its global notoriety after
the September 11 terrorist attacks against
the United States.13

Salafism is not necessarily violent and can
be apolitical.14 It should, therefore, not be
conflated with violent jihadism.15 Salafi po-
litical parties such as Al-Nour (Party of the
Light) in Egypt or the Reform Front in Tu-
nisia have adopted a radical ideology about
how society must be organized following
the precepts of Islamic Sharia, but have opt-
ed, at least at times, for the peaceful pursuit
of their political goals and the rejection of
the use of violence, very much like Western
European Communist Parties often paid lip
service to the idea of a violent revolution
while fully partaking in democratic politics.
Hence the term jihadi refers to a subset of
violent Salafists.

While it is possible to broadly paint the
core ideological message of jihadi groups
as radical, it is also the case that the specif-
ic contours of their ideology vary consider-
ably. After all, the content of what an ideal
“Islamic order” looks like is extensive
enough to allow ample room for interpre-
tation and creativity. For example, some of
the early rebel groups that articulated an Is-
lamist message, such as Darul Islam in Indo-
nesia or the Taliban in Afghanistan, adopted
an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam
heavily indebted to local traditional practic-
es; they lacked the kind of aggressive and
expansionary radical discourse that came
to characterize the most recent manifes-
tation of jihadism, exemplified by Al Qae-
da and isis. Some groups zigzag between
radical and more moderate, largely in re-
sponse to their political fortunes. For ex-
ample, the Egyptian al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya
at some point “reverted to a strategy of
struggle against the ‘distant enemy’ (Israel),
in the hope of broadening its base of sup-
port by attracting the sympathy of nation-

alists and people frustrated by the dead-
end of the peace process.”16 Other groups,
in contrast, accentuate their radical creden-
tials and seek to align themselves with more
powerful groups elsewhere so as to gain in-
ternational exposure: various groups across
the Middle East, North Africa, and Central
Asia aligned with isis after its military suc-
cesses in 2014, most notably the Nigerian
group Boko Haram.

To explore whether and how jihadi reb-
el groups differ (or not) from other rebel
groups, I start by singling out rebel groups
with jihadi features that have been active in
all major civil wars, as noted in the relevant
literature. The exercise yields a list of the
most important groups to date (Table 1). By
this count, thirty-nine jihadi rebel groups
were involved in at least eighteen civil wars.
This is a substantial number, both in abso-
lute and relative terms, suggesting that the
phenomenon is widespread.

In many ways, jihadi rebel groups come
across as rather undistinctive when com-
pared with other rebel groups. Ideology is a
flexible political tool even for jihadi groups,
and it is common for them to tailor their
ideological messages to the particular cir-
cumstances they find themselves in. De-
spite their utopian claims, including the
creation of a caliphate and the abolition
of national boundaries, they often rely on
nationalist and particularistic messages
tailored to win popular support. Drawing
from anticolonialist discourse, they typi-
cally castigate established elites as insuf-
ficiently patriotic (“apostate” in their par-
lance) and paint them as ineffective and
corrupt. They sometimes latch onto a seces-
sionist agenda, especially in countries with
non-Muslim majorities, and can adopt the
demands of a particular segment of society,
often on a sectarian basis (such as the Sun-
ni populations of Iraq and Syria). Tactical
alliances with politically disenfranchised
groups, such as former Ba’ath officials in
Iraq, are not uncommon either.

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147 (1) Winter 2018Stathis N. Kalyvas

Table 1: Jihadi Groups in Major Civil Wars

Insurgent Group

Hizb-i Islami-yi Afghanistan

Taliban

Haqqani Network

Groupe Islamique Armé (gia)

Takfir wa’l Hijra

Armée Islamique du Salut (ais)

Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (mujao)

aqim

Bosnian mujahideen

Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya

Wilayat Sinai

Egyptian Islamic Jihad

Darul Islam

Jemaah Islamiya

Jundallah

Ansar al-Islam

Reformation and Jihad Front (rjf)

isis

Al-Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi)

Ansar al-Sharia

Libya Dawn

Al-Murabitun (merger of mujao and Al-Mulathameen)

Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (mujao)

Ansar Dine

Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (Boko Haram)

Lashkar-e-Islam

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar

Lashkar-e-Jhangyi

Ansaar ul-Islam

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan

Abu Sayyaf Group

Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters

Imarat Kavkaz (Caucasus Emirate)

Al Shabaab

Hizbul Islam

Country

Afghanistan

Algeria

Algeria/Mali

Bosnia

Egypt

Indonesia

Iran

Iraq

Iraq/Syria

Iraq

Libya

Mali

Nigeria

Pakistan

Philippines

Russia

Somalia

Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (aiai)/Islamic Courts Union

Somalia/Ethiopia (Ogaden)

Jabhat al-Nusra li al-Sham

Syria

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (in Tajikistan: Forces of Mullo Abdullo)

Uzbekistan/Tajikistan/Kyrgyzstan

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

Yemen

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesJihadi Rebels in Civil War

As is the case with most rebel organiza-
tions, the creation and evolution of jihadi
groups is strongly influenced by a small core
of activists (a “revolutionary vanguard”
in Leninist terms) who are able to set up
strong organizational foundations while
operating under clandestine conditions.
Often, these individuals are intellectuals
whose political careers span a variety of
trajectories before they decide to undertake
armed action. Unlike the leaders of rebel
groups who are motivated primarily and
purely by the capture of power for its own
sake or the predation and looting of natu-
ral resources, the leaders of jihadi groups
appear to be driven by strong ideological
concerns. And like many other rebel orga-
nizations, jihadi groups take advantage of
safe havens in neighboring countries where
possible, and have benefited from their
own governments’ ill-designed counter-
insurgent measures, which often result in
indiscriminate violence against civilians.

The Egyptian group al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya

provides an example of how a jihadi group
can emerge and evolve. It got its start in
Egyptian universities during the 1970s,
growing out of student reading clubs. The
permission accorded by the Egyptian gov-
ernment to the Muslim Brotherhood to
be active on university campuses facili-
tated the activity of these clubs. Soon af-
ter, these students formed a group called
al-Jama’a al-Diniya (The Religious Group).
By the mid-1970s, this group had expand-
ed nationally, forming a nation-wide coun-
cil with a well-defined, underlying organi-
zational structure; at the same time, it re-
mained ideologically heterogeneous and
quite decentralized. The Muslim Brother-
hood tried to use the group as a recruiting
ground, but was not very successful; how-
ever, out of this experience grew the idea
of establishing a new Islamist group, which
would end up evolving into the highly cen-
tralized al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. This group

further consolidated during the post-Sadat
assassination crackdown and the incarcer-
ation of several of its most active members,
who were exposed to other Islamist factions
in prison. Hardened by their prison experi-
ence and inspired by the writings of Sayyid
Qutb, they internalized the core Salafist
precepts and gradually moved toward sus-
tained violent action, using a variety of tac-
tics that included spectacular terrorist at-
tacks, often against foreign tourists, as well
as an insurgency, centered in Upper Egypt,
which was eventually defeated by a violent
counterinsurgency campaign.17

When it comes to the interpretation of ji-
hadism as unique or exceptional, a lot rides
on descriptions of gruesome acts of violence,
which have acquired unprecedented promi-
nence through the technological revolution
brought by the emergence of the Internet
and social media.18 Without questioning
the horror of that violence, it is still impor-
tant to stress that there is nothing unique-
ly Islamic (or even jihadist) about such vi-
olence. Similar practices have been used
by a variety of insurgent (and also incum-
bent) actors in civil wars. Likewise, terror-
ism is not exclusive to jihadi groups. In fact,
the repertoire of violence varies consider-
ably across rebel groups and among jihadi
groups. Perhaps one type of violence that
has characterized these groups is the wide-
spread use of suicide missions; yet even this
is hardly a jihadi exclusivity.19

To say that jihadi rebel groups are not ex-
ceptional across all these dimensions is not
to deny the fact that they share several fea-
tures that set them apart from other rebel
groups. One is a geographic distinctiveness.
Jihadi rebel groups operate in the Muslim
world, primarily the Middle East and North
Africa region as well as Central Asia, though
they range as far as the Pacific Ocean, to
Indonesia and the Philippines. The rea-
son is that, unlike jihadist groups that op-
erate clandestinely and specialize in trans-
national terror, rebel groups must be root-

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147 (1) Winter 2018Stathis N. Kalyvas

ed in a population that is at least, in theory,
sympathetic to them. There is also tempo-
ral distinctiveness: jihadi groups have be-
come a key actor in civil wars only following
the end of the Cold War. Indeed, isis is nei-
ther an isolated nor a very recent phenome-
non. It is, rather, the latest manifestation of
the rise of jihadism in the post–Cold War
world. Without minimizing the diversity of
these groups and without imposing an arti-
ficial or outright false organizational unity
on what is a highly varied and fractious po-
litical and social movement, it is neverthe-
less possible to speak of a global or trans-
national jihadi movement.20

A key feature that sets jihadi groups
apart from many other rebel groups is their
transnational dimension: they are part of a
broader transnational social movement.21
Transnational ties between different
groups were already present in the 1980s
and 1990s, but have since grown exponen-
tially. Jihadi activists travel from country
to country in search of training and a cause
to fight for. The phenomenon of foreign
fighters joining isis in Syria is but the lat-
est testimony to this feature.22 In this re-
spect, it is worth pointing out that Afghan-
istan provided the initial trigger (the key
figure was Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, from
the town of Jenin in the West Bank), and
that Bosnia followed. According to some
estimates, as many as four thousand jihad-
ists went to Bosnia to fight, most of them
hailing from Saudi Arabia or other coun-
tries of the Arabian Peninsula.23

In turn, the transnational dimension of
jihadi groups points to a key feature of ji-
hadism: its revolutionary nature.24 As
such, it makes a lot of sense to think of ji-
hadi rebel groups as parts of a global, rev-
olutionary wave. This is precisely where
an exclusive focus on matters of religion
and faith can prove restrictive insofar as
it might point us to less than productive
comparisons. Indeed, jihadi rebel groups
share many similarities with their pre-

decessor in the history of transnational
revolutionary movements: namely, the
Marxist rebel groups of the Cold War era.
Conversely, they should be distinguished
from another prominent strand of civ-
il wars, the highly disorganized, natural-
resource-driven conflicts lacking any dis-
cernible ideological agenda and taking
place in “bottom billion” countries.25
The Marxist insurgencies of the Cold War

era can be characterized as “robust insur-
gencies,” in the sense that they were partic-
ularly well-suited to the demands of a type
of asymmetric form of warfare, typically de-
scribed as guerrilla warfare, in which the re-
gime in place has a pronounced military ad-
vantage.26 How exactly were they “robust?”
In spite of considerable variation, Marxist
insurgencies were characterized by com-
mon features across three dimensions: ex-
ternal support, beliefs, and doctrine.

First, as is well-known, the Soviet Union,
China, Cuba, and their allies provided ex-
tensive material assistance to Marxist
rebels, training them, sending advisors,
and providing financial and military sup-
port. That was not all, however. The ex-
ternal support enjoyed by many (but not
all) Marxist insurgencies included the role
of a large, transnational social movement
whose extensive network of leaders, agita-
tors, activists, and fighters met, exchanged
information, trained, and often fought in
each other’s wars.

Second, this transnational network fed
on and, in turn, propagated a set of revolu-
tionary beliefs that were consequential in
at least three ways. First, these beliefs were
rooted in an understanding of the world
that posited a credible alternative to liber-
al capitalism, and thus made possible the
emergence and perpetuation of a political
and social constellation of activities and or-
ganizations that was predicated on making
this alternative a reality. This understand-
ing of the world inspired millions of people

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesJihadi Rebels in Civil War

across the world and acted as a focal point
for the coordination of individuals harbor-
ing it. When it came crashing down in 1989,
it contributed to the end of the organiza-
tions that were associated with it. Second,
these beliefs were important as sources of
motivation for the crucial “first movers,”
those individuals willing to undertake high
levels of risk in collective action processes
whose outcome was uncertain and who of-
ten underwent enormous suffering for their
cause. They also informed a large number
of activists or “cadres” who acted, if not
selflessly, at least in a self-disciplined and
highly motivated manner, allowing their
actions to have more far-reaching conse-
quences than would otherwise be possible.
Lastly, these beliefs pointed to armed (or vi-
olent) action as a likely way to bring about
political change. The examples of Cuba or
Vietnam loomed large and bespoke the
real possibility of bringing about revolu-
tion through military action.

The third component of robust insur-
gency was its distinctive military doctrine.
In its simplest formulation, “revolution-
ary war” was seen as the optimal political
method that would translate the desire for
revolutionary change into its actual imple-
mentation. It was guerrilla warfare, cor-
rectly waged, rather than nonviolent con-
tentious action or other forms of violent
activity, that would produce the desired
outcome. Yet guerrilla warfare was never
a simple matter of warfare. Instead, it re-
quired the effective administration of “lib-
erated territory” and the mass mobiliza-
tion and sustained indoctrination of its
population. Only in this way could a weak-
er military force hope to prevail.

This capsule description of Marxist reb-
els provides a template for their comparison
with jihadi rebel groups. The parallels are
striking, as are some crucial differences.27
Clearly, it is impossible to understate the
power of beliefs in the case of the jihadis.
These beliefs are expressed in a variety of

documents and publications, but they also
take the form of a broad range of cultural
practices from poetry and music to film.28
Ideology is, in other words, central to the ji-
hadi identity, which is not to say that other
motivations do not exist alongside it, from
opportunism to shady criminal activities.29
In fact, the collapse of Marxism as the main
alternative to liberal capitalism appears to
have left a gaping hole in the world of al-
ternative ideological possibilities that Is-
lamists have effectively exploited in the
Muslim world and in Muslim enclaves in
the Western world. Certainly, the wide-
spread disillusionment caused by the fail-
ure of both Arab nationalism and socialism
gave a decisive push to the rise of jihadism
in the Middle East, while the material and
psychological frustrations of the Muslim
immigrant workers’ offspring in the West
were later grafted onto this movement. This
striking discontinuity has been particularly
visible in the way Marxist-inspired groups
such as the Palestinian Liberation Organi-
zation have been superseded by Islamist
groups such as Hamas. Seen from this per-
spective, jihadism has become a kind of
ideological focal point around which all
kinds of discontented and/or marginalized
elements–primarily “ascriptive” Muslims,
but also converts to Islam–have coordinat-
ed. To use political scientist Olivier Roy’s
apt expression, jihadism represents the Is-
lamization of radicalism rather than (just)
the radicalization of Islam.30

Without a focus on revolutionary beliefs
it would be hard to make sense of the ability
of jihadi rebel groups to mobilize thousands
of motivated cadres, the absence of which
the growth of groups such as isis or the
construction of extensive state-like appa-
ratuses in areas controlled by jihadi insur-
gents would have been impossible. These
“quasi-states” or “proto-states” share many
features with those built by Marxist rebels:
they tend to be intensely ideological, inter-
nationalist, and expansive. Their rulers de-

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147 (1) Winter 2018Stathis N. Kalyvas

vote significant resources to often effective,
if harsh, governance.31 In both instances,
the impact of such practices can be dou-
ble-edged. On the one hand, these revo-
lutionary state-builders are able to supply
public goods to the population they rule,
which makes them potentially attractive to
them. On the other hand, their rule is of-
ten highly interventionist, clashes with es-
tablished local norms and practices, includ-
ing (or especially) religiously conservative
ones, and generates considerable popular
opposition and resentment. In turn, this of-
ten leads to the emergence of grassroots dis-
sident activity that can easily be harnessed
by counterinsurgents to devastating effect.
This was most obviously the case in Iraq,
where the rise of the so-called Iraqi Awak-
ening–Sunni tribal militias fed by local dis-
content with jihadi rule–led to the defeat
of Al Qaeda in Iraq, but also appeared else-
where, such as in Bosnia.32

A crucial difference between jihadi and
Marxists rebels when it comes to the trans-
national dimension they share is the ab-
sence of external state sponsorship, includ-
ing superpower sponsorship, for the former.
One possible analogy for isis would be the
Chinese Communist rebels of the inter-
war period who, despite occasional Soviet
support, had to improvise on their own, or
the Maoist rebels of the Shining Path who
operated in Peru in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Ideologically purist, extremely violent, and
ruthless (but highly personalistic and isolat-
ed), the Shining Path was nevertheless able
to face off the much stronger Peruvian state
and was effectively defeated only after a long
and costly counterinsurgency campaign.

The absence of external state sponsor-
ship could well turn out to be the greatest
weakness of jihadi rebel groups. It is tell-
ing that their overall record in the wars in
which they are involved is dismal; their
peak was probably the Taliban victory
against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan,
and even that was won only with the direct

and pronounced backing of Pakistan. Like-
wise, isis’s conquest of Mosul that stunned
the world proved short-lived and its Syrian
conquest has been all but reversed. In fact,
something that stands out from the Marxist
insurgent experience is that, despite many
features that generally turned them into
“high-quality” rebels, they were defeated
much more often than they won victories.
To put it differently, Che Guevara in Bolivia
was a much more common occurrence than
Che Guevara in Cuba.33 There are a number
of reasons why this was the case. As already
pointed out, Marxist groups often alienated
the local population by imposing local re-
gimes that were too radical. Their ability to
pose a credible threat against the states they
fought elicited a superior counterinsurgent
effort, often with considerable external sup-
port, thus leading to their defeat. This fea-
ture may explain not only the high rate of
defeats experienced by Marxist groups, but
also the fact that the conflicts in which they
were engaged were less likely to be settled
through negotiations and peacekeeping
compared with other civil wars.34 It is pos-
sible to surmise then that civil wars entail-
ing jihadi groups are much less likely to be
settled via negotiations and require the type
of extensive peacekeeping operations that
have become almost the norm in most civil
wars.35 In a different formulation, this com-
parison suggests that the military defeat of
the rebels appears the most likely outcome
in civil wars involving jihadi rebels.

This essay suggests that, for all the publici-

ty surrounding them, jihadi rebels might, in
the end, represent less of a threat to their op-
ponents in civil war contexts than their old-
er, Marxist counterparts. Indeed, on top of
its lack of a powerful external sponsor, the
threat posed by isis has mobilized a pow-
erful international response against it. As a
result, isis is presently on the retreat, pri-
marily in Iraq but also in Syria. Its military
defeat appears to be a matter of time.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesJihadi Rebels in Civil War

What shall we expect if this turns out to
be the case? A likely outcome is that jihad-
ism might revert once more into a deterri-
torialized, clandestine network relying on
transnational terrorism, a strategy that can
be spectacular but tends to be much less ef-
fective at achieving tangible political goals
than armed rebellion. However, as past ex-
perience suggests, the failure of many re-
gimes in the Middle East, North Africa, and
Central Asia to respond to their citizens’ ex-
pectations may, once more, create the con-

ditions for the rise of a renewed revolution-
ary challenge in the form of civil war. In this
context, it might make sense to reflect on
the dangerous implications of blocking
any avenue of peaceful political mobiliza-
tion for Islamists.36 In its combination of
a strong Salafi ideological legacy, a poorly
performing authoritarian regime, and the
absence of peaceful options for Islamist par-
ties, Egypt might become once more a plau-
sible candidate for the emergence of violent
jihadi activity in the near future.

endnotes
1 Richard H. Shultz, “Global Insurgency Strategy and the Salafi Jihad Movement,” inss Occa-
sional Paper 66 (Colorado Springs, Colo.: United States Air Force Institute for National Se-
curity Studies, 2008); and Seth G. Jones, A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of Al Qa’ida and Other
Salafi Jihadists (Santa Monica, Calif.: rand Corporation, 2014).

2 See, for example, Martha Crenshaw, “Transnational Jihadism & Civil Wars,” Dædalus 146 (4)

(Fall 2017).

3 See, for example, Tanisha Fazal, “Religionist Rebels & the Sovereignty of the Divine,” Dædalus

147 (1) (Winter 2018).

4 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).
5 This is a view consistent with James Fearon and David Laitin’s “state capacity” theory of civil
war onset. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American
Political Science Review 97 (1) (2003).

6 Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca and Luis de la Calle, “Domestic Terrorism: The Hidden Side of Polit-
ical Violence,” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (1) (2009). See also Virginia Page Fortna, “Do
Terrorists Win? Rebels’ Use of Terrorism and Civil War Outcomes,” International Organization
69 (3) (2015).

7 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press,

2006).

8 Ibid.
9 Thomas Hegghammer, “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining Variation in Western Ji-
hadists’ Choice between Domestic and Foreign Fighting,” American Political Science Review 107
(1) (2013).

10 Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 7.
11 Ibid., ix.
12 Jihadists are almost always Salafi Sunnis; however, most Salafi Sunnis are not jihadists. See
Quintan Wiktorowicz, “The Salafi Movement: Violence and Fragmentation of Community,”
in Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop, ed. Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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147 (1) Winter 2018Stathis N. Kalyvas

13 Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2010); and Richard Alexander Nielsen, Deadly Clerics: Violent Convictions,
Blocked Ambitions, and the Paths to Jihad (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016).
14 Jeni Mitchell, “The Contradictory Effects of Ideology on Jihadist War-Fighting: The Bosnia

Precedent,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31 (9) (2008): 810.

15 Roel Meijer, ed., Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2009).

16 Gilles Keppel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 2002), 282.

17 Tal’at Fu’ad Qasim, Hisham Mubarak, Souhail Shadoud, and Steve Tamari, “What Does the
Gama’a Islamiyya Want? An Interview with Tal’at Fu’ad Qasim,” Middle East Report 198 (1996): 40;
and Omar Ashour, The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements (London:
Routledge, 2009), 45–50.

18 Stathis N. Kalyvas, “The Logic of Violence in the Islamic State’s War,” The Washington Post,
July 7, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/07/the
-logic-of-violence-in-islamic-states-war/.

19 Stathis N. Kalyvas and Ignacio-Sanchez Cuenca, “The Absence of Suicide Missions,” in Making

Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

20 Caitriona Dowd and Clionadh Raleigh, “The Myth of Global Islamic Terrorism and Local

Conflict in Mali and the Sahel,” African Affairs 112 (448) (2013).

21 See, for example, Eric Stollenwerk, Thomas Dörfler, and Julian Schibberges, “Taking a New
Perspective: Mapping the Al Qaeda Network Through the Eyes of the un Security Council,”
Terrorism and Political Violence 28 (5) (2016).

22 Hegghammer, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
23 Keppel, Jihad, 249.
24 Mitchell, “The Contradictory Effects of Ideology on Jihadist War-Fighting,” 810.
25 Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

26 Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, “International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How
the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict,” American Political Science Review 104 (3) (2010).
27 Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Is isis a Revolutionary Group and if Yes, What Are the Implications?”

Perspectives on Terrorism 9 (4) (2015).

28 Thomas Hegghammer, ed., Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

29 Luca Raineri and Francesco Strazzari, “State, Secession, and Jihad: The Micropolitical Economy

of Conflict in Northern Mali,” African Security 8 (4) (2015).

30 Isaac Chotiner, “The Islamization of Radicalism: Olivier Roy on the Misunderstood Con-
nection between Terror and Religion,” Slate, June 22, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/
news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/06/olivier_roy_on_isis_brexit_orlando_and_the_
islamization_of_radicalism.html.

31 Brynjar Lia, “Understanding Jihadi Proto-States,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9 (4) (2015); and
Mara Revkin, “The Legal Foundations of the Islamic State,” The Brookings Project on U.S.
Relations with the Islamic World Analysis Paper No. 23 (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings
Institution Press, 2016).

32 Mitchell, “The Contradictory Effects of Ideology on Jihadist War-Fighting,” 808–809.
33 Laia Balcells and Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Revolutionary Rebels and the ‘Marxist Paradox,’” un-

published paper.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesJihadi Rebels in Civil War

34 Ibid.
35 See James D. Fearon, “Civil War & the Current International System,” Dædalus 146 (4) (Fall
2017). This would be a way to interpret the absence of negotiated settlements involving ji-
hadi rebels that diverges from Fazal’s point about religious inspiration as a source of unwill-
ingness to negotiate: Marxist rebels were not “religionist.” See Fazal, “Religionist Rebels &
the Sovereignty of the Divine.”

36 Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Commitment Problems in Emerging Democracies: The Case of Religious

Parties,” Comparative Politics 32 (4) (2000).

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147 (1) Winter 2018Stathis N. Kalyvas
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