Insurgent Legality: Law in the Making and Breaking of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
Mara Revkin/ Associate Professor of Law and Political Science, Duke University
The Islamic State, which captured and controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria for more than three years between 2014 and 2017, has been widely documented and studied by scholars and journalists.The most prominent existing explanations for the group's rise—its recruitment of foreign fighters from more than 85 countries, its capture of valuable resources including weapons stockpiles and oil fields, and its ability to spread fear through extreme violence—do not fully explain its remarkable persistence in the face of the largest international military coalition since World War II. Nor do they explain an empirical puzzle: why so many Iraqi and Syrian civilians stayed in territory captured by the group in 2014 despite the possibility of exit, and why others who initially fled decided to return. In this talk, drawn from my book manuscript, I provide a new explanation grounded in a theory of “insurgent legality,” referring to a comprehensive system of law-like rules and institutions for the governance of people and territory that is internally consistent and predictable. I find support for this theory in several sources of qualitative and quantitative evidence collected over more than two years of field research in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria conducted between 2015 and 2021: an original household survey of 1,458 residents of Mosul, more than 300 semi-structured interviews with Syrians and Iraqis who lived in or traveled through areas controlled by the group, and a dataset that maps the expansion and eventual collapse of its various governing and extractive institutions including courts, police, municipal services, and taxation. The talk will highlight the ethical and methodological challenges associated with interviewing and surveying people who have lived through war and human rights violations.
About the Speaker:
Welcome! I am an Associate Professor of Law at Duke University with a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. My research and teaching interests include armed conflict, peace-building, transitional justice, migration, and policing. I use empirical mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) with a regional focus on the Middle East. My work is informed by field research and professional experience with humanitarian and human rights organizations in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Oman.
I hold a J.D. from Yale Law School (2016) and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University (2019), where my dissertation examined the Islamic State's governance of civilians in Iraq and Syria. My methods include door-to-door household surveys, experiments, interviews, and archival research to build original datasets based on newspapers and social media posts.
In addition to my academic research, I work with humanitarian, human rights, and development organizations to support evidence-based programs that aim to strengthen rule of law, support peaceful reconciliation after conflict, and mitigate the root causes of political violence and extremism. Previously, I served as the lead researcher on Iraq and Syria for United Nations University, the research wing of the United Nations system, leading case studies on the recruitment of children by armed groups and prospects for transitional justice after the Islamic State. I have also conducted research with the International Organization for Migration on perceptions of police in Iraq and with the United Nations Development Programme on reintegration of displaced persons with family ties to the Islamic State. Closer to home, I have served as a pro bono expert witness for Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR), which provides legal representation to Muslim and other communities targeted by law enforcement on national security grounds. During law school, I worked for Human Rights Watch in Egypt conducting research on human trafficking in the Sinai Peninsula and the violent repression of Muslim Brotherhood supporters following the 2013 military coup.
My work has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal of Politics, The American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Journal of Global Security Studies, World Development, The Yale Law Journal, The Yale Journal of International Law, The Harvard National Security Journal, The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Foreign Affairs, and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law. My research has been funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Innovations for Poverty Action, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, United Nations University, The Program on Governance and Local Development, The American Political Science Association, and The Project on Middle East Political Science, among others.
Before entering academia, I was the Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Middle East Program), a Critical Language Scholar in Jordan, and a Fulbright Fellow in Oman. I hold a B.A. in Political Science with minors in Arabic and Anthropology from Swarthmore College.
Additional Location Information
DUMESC Faculty Talk Series
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies