Sexual Violence, Competitive State Building, and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

ABSTRACT

This article examines the practices of rape, sexual enslavement, and forced marriage used by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Most research see wartime sexual violence as solutions to battlefields challenges. Studies of civil war and competitive state building during civil wars have largely overlooked the implications of such violence for rebel governance. This article explores how efforts to regulate sexuality figure within processes of violent state formation. ISIS’s practices of sexual violence mirror previous efforts by the Iraqi and Syrian state to substantiate ethno-sectarian domination through violence. But ISIS creates new gendered and ethno-sectarian hierarchies. Repertoires of sexual and gender-based violence can help to sustain and create structures of state control and are thus integral to competitive state building.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic state
• Syria
• Iraq
• civil war
• sexual violence
• rape
• state building

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ariel I. Ahram is an associate professor in the Virginia Tech School of Public & International Affairs in Alexandria, Va. He is the author of Break All the Borders: Separatism and the Reshaping of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Notes

1 ISIS has gone through several permutations of names in the last decade. I refer to it as ISIS in order to specify its territorial dimensions in Iraq and Syria.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.