Anti-Militant Islamism and Self-determination in the Post-ISIS Era

Abstract

Since 2017, multinational joint efforts to combat the terrorist organization ‘Daesh’ (ISIS) have achieved crucial victories. As a regional quasi-sovereign state, ISIS is almost finished. For a certain period, a power vacuum emerged due to the lack of effective authority after ISIS’s reign. After the withdrawal of those cross-border extremists political elites have sought to design or modify their new regime based on reviewing and amending previous governance systems and political structures. In the postcolonial era and the post-cold-war era, religious nationalism has become an important impulsion of ethnic aggregation and group mobilization for self-determination. In the post-ISIS era, anti-militant Islamism and de-extremism have had to set up a political agenda for potential successful self-determination, secession to subsequent independent regime and widespread international recognition. The resulting dilemma is that the successors in the areas used to be controlled by ISIS, especially those insurgent forces, are deliberately constraining their external religious expressions in order to achieve their primary political goals, such as autonomy and self-determination. However, if the measures aiming at anti-militant Islamism were not followed by spontaneously development of indigenous religious consciousness, and if the accompanied by self-determination claimant ended in frustration, then constrained religious expression would accumulate in adherents’ sentiment and then cause retaliatory militarization threat to regional security in the future.