Isis and revolts from the margins: the real threat to global security

After 15 years of the War on Terror, there have been more than 250,000 people killed, principally in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the majority of them civilians. The bitter civil war in Syria has been at least as costly, yet the Assad regime is mentioned far less as a target for regime termination as it successfully plays on the West’s greater fear of Isis. To add to Western concerns, Isis is now gaining support from other militant movements: in North Africa, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the Caucasus and even South Asia. Al-Qaeda may have been eclipsed, but extreme jihadist movements are growing. They are the focus of attention in international security circles and the subjects of many books and articles, and seemingly now form the greatest cause for concern.

This book takes a different view and sees Isis and related movements as part of a much wider phenomenon: what might loosely be called “revolts from the margins”. It does not regard Islam as the fundamental issue for the coming decades and is more concerned with the risk that we are moving into an “age of insurgencies” – rather than one of a “clash of civilisations” between the West and the Islamic world – and towards a global environment of fragility, instability, increasing violence and irregular war. This can be avoided, but not if the world’s elites, and especially the states of the North Atlantic community, continue with their posture of maintaining control by traditional means.

The conventional view, following the expansion of the air war with Isis, is that stable, Western states face a threat from extreme Islamists, principally embodied in Isis, but with strong elements across many countries: from sub-Saharan Africa right through the Middle East and on to South and South East Asia. This threat may not yet be existential but, in this view, requires forceful and persistent action, no longer with tens of thousands of boots on the ground, because of the problems that arose in Iraq and Afghanistan, but by means of remote control, including air strikes, armed drones, special forces, private militaries and other “below the radar” methods. Given time and commitment, this approach, the argument goes, will work: advanced states will remain secure; the neo-liberal free-market system will ensure that wealth will permeate downwards; the United States and its allies will lead the way, and Isis and its ilk will slowly wither away. As for climate change and all the other “red/green” issues, even now the view among many Western opinion formers and politicians is that people will come to their senses and see them as annoying diversions from the road to neo-liberal progress.

This book will argue that although Isis is certainly a major security problem, the real drivers of current global insecurity are quite different: deepening socio-economic divisions, which lead to the relative marginalisation of most people across the world, and the prospect of profound and lasting environmental constraints, caused by climate change. Isis, in short, should be seen as a warning of what could be to come, not as a fundamental trend in its own right. The geographer and politician Edwin Brooks argued more than 40 years ago that what we had to avoid was a dystopian future of a “crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force and endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes”.

These fundamental drivers of conflict – economic marginalisation and climate change – are exacerbated by two other factors. One is that a whole raft of welcome improvements in education and literacy is making far more people aware of their own marginalisation and unwilling to accept it, and the other is that there is an assumption in the West that security can best be assured, when other methods fail, by resort to military responses. This is greatly aided by the power and influence of what President Eisenhower called in 1961 the “military-industrial complex”, but is better described as the “military-industrial-academic-bureaucratic complex”. At its crudest level, what is sometimes termed the “control paradigm” might better be termed “liddism”: keeping the lid on problems rather than understanding their causes and manifestations.

The argument in this book is that Isis is an example of a revolt from the margins, one initially specific to the Middle East but with much wider implications. Other examples include Islamist militant groups Boko Haram and the al-Nusra Front, but also the little-recognised but highly significant neo-Maoist Naxalite rebellion in India, as well as, in the recent past, the neo-Maoists in Nepal and the Shining Path movement in Peru. All in their different ways are indicators of the problems likely to be faced if that “crowded glowering planet” is allowed to come into being. There are ways to stop it, but they go far beyond conventional thinking on security.

Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins by Paul Rogers is published by IB Tauris