Policing as Rebel Governance. The Islamic State Police

Abstract

This paper holds that ISIS employed a substantial, administratively cohesive, operable police organization that took care of ‘ordinary’ public order and law enforcement tasks. While the Departments of Public Security (emni) and Religious Compliance (hisba) have been at the center of most media coverage and popular literature on the Islamic State, ISIS’s policing capacities through its Islamic State Police (shurta) wing have not been studied so far. This paper adds to the literature by taking stock of the manner in which ISIS set up a working police force, designed rules of governance, developed ensuing practices of enforcement, and engendered support. In doing so, the authors situate the paper’s findings within the broader academic debate on governance by non-state actors. This also opens up the uneasy but highly relevant question of ISIS statehood, which can be related to the concept of ‘rebel governance.’ Such an approach offers a number of important policy implications—including a strategic understanding of ISIS’s sweeping initial successes—by addressing the ways in which ISIS generated and sustained public authority and legitimacy through a variety of police practices.