What is contemporary political violence? An interview with Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

How does one come to study the forms taken by the political today, only to arrive at the question of religious violence?

It starts off as a reflection on our times. My work was initially produced in reaction to emerging contemporary dynamics. What was the nature of the situation the world found itself facing then and today? My first book focused on the 1991 war in Iraq, examining Iraq’s decision to invade Kuwait in summer 1990. ¹ In that book, I tried to decipher the dynamics, the forces, and the historical patterns that had led to that episode. But it was also written in reaction to something that appeared to be characteristic of the broader debate on contemporary political violence, namely the congruence between state and non-state violence, since in the case of Iraq, the violence in 1990 was a relatively classic military invasion, perhaps one of the last great classic conflicts pitting one army against another. This work was also carried out in a context where the prevailing explanations were unsatisfying: from the start, mainstream analyses of the conflict consisted in shortcuts that prompted me, as a researcher, to ask deeper questions. Weren’t these conventional analyses themselves coded? Didn’t they contain a certain cultural bias? It didn’t take long to see how Orientalism, racialism, and islamophobia were at work.

So I was working on, and in reaction to, trends of a given era. It was only once this research was underway that I began to draw nearer to what is really constitutive of political violence. So, it’s not that I’m working on “jihadism”—an ahistorical neologism that I reject. I always try to remain within the most clinical analytical framework possible. When approaching material, not only do you need, at the very least, to apply the same initial reference base—whether you study the terrorism of the 1970s or that of the 2010s, for example—but you have to be even more cautious when the discussion rapidly begins to revolve around political Islam, a term that is certainly preferable to what today is called “radicalism” or “extremism.”

When it comes to a conflict like the Gulf War of 1990–1991, would you say that from the outset the questions were focused on violence? Do you tend to speak of a kind of metaphysics of violence, for example? Did you consider these questions to be central from the start, or did you come to them as a result of something else—that is to say, through a reflection on history, philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology, or another field?

I got there by reflecting on the political. Initially, I was looking at the nature of the political, its expression, and the diverse forms it can take in foreign policy, in domestic politics, and in questions concerning the sociopolitical transformation of societies. In observing this political, plural in its diverse forms, but singular in its space, one of the themes, one of the aspects that very quickly emerged was that of violence. And this is no longer a question of a single epoch, but of epochs.

We often see how political systems are subject to upheavals, disruptions, and convulsions, and that, the world over, violence quickly becomes present as a potential means to transform, to replace, to destroy, and to build. This perhaps means that the reflection is somehow tautological, since events of this type were abundant during the 1990s and 2000s.

The period in which this state violence manifested itself—which I deconstruct in Iraq and the Second Gulf War—is one of state systems: George H. W. Bush’s administration and the regime of Saddam Hussein. It’s the end of one historical moment and the beginning of another. It’s not just the “post-Cold War” period; it’s the advent of the American “unipolar moment,” the reflection on what the Pentagon called then the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA),” leading to contemporary asymmetrical wars. It’s also the moment of change for the political systems of the Middle East, which move rapidly in the direction of ever-greater militancy, as we see in Saddam Hussein’s “totalitarian” Iraq itself. The more these dissenting groups emerge, the more the state system is weakened.

And then what brings it all to a head, the great moment, is of course September 11, 2001. And on September 12, without delay, I got straight to work: I said to myself that there was something intrinsically new here, something like a repatriation of this violence back to the state. In particular, the fall of the Twin Towers, a kind of “castration” of the American political and economic system, was a de facto announcement of a new era. It is said that 9/11 “changed everything,” although quite often this point is exaggerated. Many other epochs have had their accelerators, their equally important moments of transformation, but I think that, objectively, 9/11—given al-Qaeda’s combination of power and ambition, the total reaction of the Bush administration, the global scale of the War on Terror, and the unprecedented nature of the operation itself—is the most significant terrorist attack in history, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It seemed to me that the question had to be broached starting from this level of observation. So, this work, imbued with a certain urgency, was published across three books in which I endeavored to find out more about the event itself. ² Today it all seems clear, but in 2001 it was not so obvious. We were confronted with a situation still shrouded in “mystery,” and which needed to be deciphered academically and not just journalistically, while keeping a safe distance from conspiracy theories. So I began with the 9/11 operation itself in Contre-croisade, and continued with the organization in Understanding Al Qaeda a few years later, then finished this work with A Theory of ISIS, a book that focuses on Islamic State—it tries to understand the transformation and the hybrid nature of this off-spring of al-Qaeda, which ends up being far more than that—but which closes, as the subtitle suggests, with a broader reflection on political violence.

You therefore seem to want to link together two things through an object common to them both, and which you came to because it imposed itself upon you. You speak of 9/11 as an accelerator, but then there comes a broader reflection on political militancy, and on phenomena of support and disaffiliation. In both senses, and in broader terms, is this what always precedes phenomena of political violence, in your opinion?

Violence, especially terrorist violence, is always a particular sociopolitical expression. Terrorism itself represents a logic of projection or counter-projection of force. This is why the history of terrorism is a history of political violence expressed against some object or other with the intention to punish, to replace, to establish, to react, to “terrorize.” Political violence of this type is contra mundum. Of course, political violence can also be state violence going in the opposite direction, with the intention of creating a totalitarian or authoritarian order. In this sense, the violence coming from a non-state group, an entity, or an individual, is fundamentally reactive. So it is useful for an academic to try to decode it and to link it to its object of action. What it reacts against will then be revealed as a springboard—a political or military situation for example, such as an occupation: as in the case of the terrorism of the 1940s to the 1960s in the colonial context in Algeria, and today still in Palestine, or in the case of social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s in Germany, Italy, France, and the United States, where state actions generated this reaction from the youth.

In fact, there is truly something missing in enquiries over the last twenty years on these so-called “radical,” “extremist,” or “terrorist” groups. Both in the West and in the East, analyses of these questions often dive straight into the microscopic dynamics of such actors—which first of all raises a methodological problem, since it narrows the perspective. Moreover, and this should be emphasized, the whole exercise is incomplete on a theoretical level because it only looks at the non-state actor that acts, and it simply cites what it is reacting against in a static manner: US foreign policy, the global War on Terror, the repressive regime of some autocrat—as if the interaction was fixed and unchangeable, when in reality it is a play of mirrors, an action-reaction, perhaps more than ever in the period following 9/11, because these actors became more sophisticated, more global, more multilayered and full of contradictions. These “groups” tend to be designated in a fairly uniform manner, but they are not at all uniform. As an example, in A Theory of ISIS I identify at least seven different levels of identity of Islamic State. That is why I think it is important to keep the following in mind: when we go about examining an actor that projects this kind of anti-state or anti-society or anti-power violence, we also need to inquire into the object of the projection: What are its actions? What is contained within it? What dynamics may have generated the resentment it now faces? Not in order to excuse or to rationalize, but simply to relate these two symmetrical and linked elements to one another.

In your thinking on the political, which for you, as we can see, precedes phenomena of violence, do you regard political violence as autonomous? You haven’t yet said anything about religion, for example. For many researchers, the Islamization of the explanation exists independently of any religious representations one might think it is based on.

Researchers cannot remain merely at the level of what actors themselves declare. If al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for instance, announces that it carried out such and such an operation for some religious reason, or for foreign policy reasons, such as France’s foreign policy in Afghanistan or in the Sahel, the researcher should of course take note of this. They should correlate it and historicize it, but does that mean that they should close their eyes on other dimensions that may appear during the analysis—for example, in this case, the corrupt nature of AQIM, which is hoping to create a terrorist rentier economy, by means of various kinds of ransom and trafficking? What importance should we give to this aspect? Are we to limit ourselves to declarations of the type: “In the name of God the Merciful,” and, echoing the actor’s discourse, remain captive to a theologization of political violence, prescribing that everything that follows must be understood in terms of actors fixated on religion and religion alone? And thus fail to consider other political reasons that may have driven them to act, or rather such reasons that they may have pursued independently? Finally, and most importantly, this problematically closes the door on the analysis of these actors as a sociological object.

Now, if we look at AQIM and its history, going back to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in Algeria, to the 1998 dispersal of the former Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and even further back to the beginning of the “Black Decade” in Algeria, we see the same actors at work. You can even go further back, to the early 1980s with Mustapha Bouyali’s Islamic Armed Movement (MIA) across Algeria, an organization that was itself traversed by criminal, mafia-style dynamics. In doing so, you discover a lineage, a “DNA,” which reveals to us, from the very beginning, entities that are semi-political and perhaps even simply criminal, but which emblazon themselves with religiosity. This was the case for example with the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), another political movement that played a part in the evolution of the Algerian political system, only to subsequently become part of a more globalized context. If we see only religion in these “Islamist” groups, which are in fact religious and political groups, then we fail to see the full picture of their sociogenesis, where the political and the social are usually essential elements.

This dominant reading is all the more important to deconstruct in that it harbors an unspoken culturalism. Look at the difference in treatment of those groups that used violence during the 1970s in Europe, like the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—German and Italian terrorists with a far-left ideology who sought to “punish” their societies, in pursuit of an ambitious, somewhat globalized revolutionary project. The analysis of these cases is political and sociological. It does not pay a great deal of attention to their rhetoric or their manifestos for a new society. Andreas Baader has plenty to say on this or that transformation in German society, but what we tend to look at is his sociological background and what was going on in Germany at the time, the condition of Germany twenty-five years after the Holocaust; that is what is used to explain the materialization of violence. Whereas, in the case of al-Qaeda or Islamic State, it is the liturgy of “Abu this” or “Abu that” that is put under the microscope in order to “understand” the “aberrations” of a homo islamicus that has “broken away from society.” In this way, a breach opens up between the cultural aspect and what I call the racialization of these questions, since the European identity of the Baader-Meinhof Group, of Action Directe, and of other Red Brigades is never an issue and, consequently, questions of stripping their members of their nationality are irrelevant. While in the Islamic case, we end up treating a whole section of society, a whole culture, a whole religion, on the basis of a dynamics of suspicion where the actors’ identity affiliation takes precedence.

So where exactly does religion fit, for you? Just now I mentioned the idea of a metaphysics of violence. Does it exist or “pre-exist”? For example, you mentioned Baader-Meinhof. Olivier Roy also uses this comparison. From his point of view, working from different presuppositions, he argues that in the case of certain people who feel attracted by Islamic State, the radicality precedes the engagement or pseudo-engagement with religion. How do you approach these aspects, while maintaining a distance from such questions?

Religion plays an important role, obviously. But it is not everything. It cannot be everything because we are talking about political violence, about the expression of the youth in general, and about a social crisis. To think otherwise just amounts to treating one level of analysis among others as the sole level of analysis. And this is what has been happening for the last twenty-five years, even more so since 9/11. We only talk about the religiosity of these actors, which leads to the criminalization of religiosity itself in the generic sense and, beyond that, of Islam in particular. In reality, religion is just the milieu within which militancy and then violent action are immersed. If religion plays an important role, even just objectively speaking, as the dominant groups in the global political violence of this period were al-Qaeda and Islamic State, it is because we are talking about groups that explicitly declare themselves to be aligned with radical Islam.

Even if we might believe that some of these actors are serious about their religious project, the violence is nonetheless an expression of a theatricalization of religion. Osama bin Laden had religious advisors, after all, such as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. But Bin Laden was a political animal, and his most significant conversations were those with his strategic advisor Ayman al-Zawahiri, and with the operators he was going to deploy in the context of a military operation, recruited in Hamburg and sent to the United States. This is what is most important in Bin Laden’s story, this military operation against US foreign policy, not his thoughts on the need to reinstate the Caliphate. The modus operandi is more important, we might say, than the modus essendi. Yes, all of this is shrouded in a religious discourse that is eminently present, but the question remains: Why ignore a political center of gravity that is so obvious and so historically present and limit oneself to this religious periphery that is so ornamental?

Why did Bin Laden become an emblematic figure? Was it as a Muslim?

On a personal level, Bin Laden had a strong sense of religion. To wit, he left Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s to take part in “Islamic humanitarianism.” He left to help his “brothers in arms”—Muslims—against what he considered to be an unjust Soviet invasion of a Muslim territory: Afghanistan. He did this in the name of his religion, because he saw that its message was being conveyed, because he had a religious affiliation with these actors. But once that connection was established, what did he do? What did he oppose? He opposed imperial superpowers: he opposed the Soviet Union, and then the United States. So there is indeed an ethically religious logic at work here, but also a political proposition.

Moreover, Bin Laden did this—and this is another crucial point in this “reflection on the epoch”—in the context of the global revival of religion from the 1980s onward. Globally, religion reappeared as soon as the Cold War ended. We see this void, which called out for something to fill it, right? There is no longer any ideology, in a structural and dogmatic sense. Samuel Huntington’s great statement was not this “call” to the clash of civilizations (which, incidentally, he did not make but which was incorrectly attributed to him). He put forward a historically factual statement—namely, that at the end of the 20th century, the substrate of identity replaced the prism of ideology. That is where we are. Some years later, that is what we see everywhere, in the retribalization of international politics. If Bin Laden acted along these lines, it is because the dominant tendency at the time was religion. In the 1960s he would have spoken in nationalist terms—that is how [Gamal Abdel] Nasser spoke. A Bin Laden of the 1990s and 2000s was bound to “speak” in religious terms.

Bin Laden is very often, indeed almost exclusively, presented as the actor or entrepreneur of a religious movement, but according to you, he was far more the product of a broader and more fundamental movement that took place across many decades. Was he more the product of that influence than he was an influencer?

He was both: he was conditioned by the context of his times, and he was an influencer who instigated a revolution. And herein lies the entire importance of the organization he founded, al-Qaeda. We tend to forget about it today, and we remember only the more recent Islamic State. But historically speaking, Al-Qaeda is more important. Bin Laden’s leadership signaled the triumph of global dynamics and of regional dystrophies. He left Saudi Arabia, taking off to Asia where he instigated an innovative project, even as the Cold War was still playing out. He formed his transnational military entity, and most of those who gravitated toward him were “Afghan Arabs,” as they were known, from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria, but very quickly all of this also took on a global dimension. I want to emphasize again the context of Afghanistan, which is extremely important: it was a martial environment. Al-Qaeda was born in the midst of war, not in social hardship or poverty as Western “experts in radicalism” like to repeat endlessly. It did not spring from the suburbs of Cairo, Algiers, or Tunis. It was fundamentally linked to a martial way of thinking: “We beat the Soviet Union,” its members cried in unison in 1989 so to speak, “Now let’s take the battle to another superpower.” There is a martial note, politics, and a foreign policy dimension that are omnipresent in Bin Laden, and which one cannot evade easily when analyzing the man.

Yet Bin Laden also triggered a new wave, facilitated by his very dynamic and fluid leadership style. The idea of having “franchises,” of distributing operators widely, rather than the old model of centralization of power, this was something new as far as the conceptual model of armed groups went. But that was al-Qaeda. The Islamic State makes things yet more complicated and, I would say, contradictory, because we end up with a return of religion in itself, along with an impoverishment of the political rhetoric that was characteristic of Bin Laden. Bin Laden delivered speeches that were commentaries on foreign policy. With Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, “Jihadi John,” and the “Beatles,” all of those entities that appeared subsequently, those youths from across the world, from Minneapolis to Hamburg, from Marseille to Brussels, we see something that is increasingly distant from what Bin Laden set out to do, which was relatively politically linear in this sense. He was very much working according to a political logic. Don’t forget that twice, in April 2004 and in January 2006, he offered a truce.

So, what you give us—and here we come back to the question you address in A Theory of ISIS—is a theory of continuity, of surpassing, and of contradiction in the case of Islamic State. In general, we often see that, once movements start to degenerate, they are nearing the point of decline. Bringing a certain sociology of social movements together with your work on different generations of jihadists, we might say that it is not so much a matter of getting tired of being a jihadist. Rather, from the moment that this political, ideological, militant, and religious experience ceases to be tightly framed, it is inevitable that it will peter out sooner or later.

“Surpassing” would be the most appropriate term. I think we should also bring another dimension into our thinking about the lineage or genealogy of Islamic State, because there is a paradox contained in the Islamic State’s [IS] comments on al-Qaeda. Bin Laden is mentioned every now and again in IS’s video messages. He is present, but he is not revered in the same way as say Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Since Bin Laden’s name has such power, and since his leadership was so long-standing and powerful, the Islamic State cannot easily call it into question. What’s more, the ideology of both groups is obviously Salafist, so it’s not a question of a difference in philosophy either. And yet, owing to its complexity, all that the Islamic State ultimately retains of al-Qaeda is its message and the notional objectives it expressed, while taking or leaving whatever it wants from them. It samples from al-Qaeda and asserts its right over the intellectual property, but in the end it is more interested in the spectacle, the choreography.

And this brings us back to the central question—namely, what is political violence, ultimately? It is, I would say, a projection of dystrophies, of societal frustrations, and of situations of dissatisfaction. Beyond all of this, there is an immanent symbolic projection, and not just a short-term military operation, a kidnapping or taking of hostages in an airplane at a given time. With al-Qaeda, terrorist violence became something much more powerful, more globalized, a production of sorts: and this shift is condensed literally in the image of the second airplane hitting the World Trade Center. All of this is something that the Islamic State, in the next generation, would absorb and remix.

Following David Rapoport, we can say that there is a certain periodicity (in his 2012 article he talks about “waves” ³ ) in the dominant trends of terrorism. My only critique of this perspective is that it is too descriptive and normative, and that we should bring to bear more analytical history and accept the unpredictable nature of the phenomenon. What were the accelerators of such a movement? What is contained within it? What are the unspoken and “unseen” aspects of the epoch? Approaching the Islamic State in this way, for example, allows us to observe more clearly its emphasis on spectacle, on staging in a literal sense. I talk about what they do in terms of “Hollywoodization.” We can then ultimately say that it is the modus operandi of these entities that reveals the most about what they are, rather than their rhetorical style. Hence my reaction against the insistence on only talking about the religious dimension.

How do you assess the role of religion in all of this, then, supposing that it’s possible to do so?

One can conduct this religious analysis without needing to go and check this or that verse of the Quran, like so many analysts who become “theologians” do. It’s not at all difficult to understand how, having lived through some traumatizing experience—the invasion of their country, rejection by society, stigmatization of their identity, demonization of their religion—actors might start to see the world in Manichaean terms and, alone or in a group, begin to develop representations that would allow them to regain some self-worth, and then choose violent action and execute this in the name of something that has been presented to them—this is the phase of rationalization—as lawful, desirable, and permissible. But in order to do so, we must be consistent and careful in our analysis. In which case, I would insist that we do the same thing with the Torah when we look at Israeli terrorists. And that we should read the Gospel to explain White supremacists in Tennessee. Yet, as you will agree, that doesn’t happen. These texts are rarely discussed in such contexts. Instead, we turn to the logic of “madness,” as we saw in 2019 when a whole series of eminently terrorist attacks in the United States were attributed to “mentally deranged men,” and this at the highest levels of Western public authorities. Has anyone ever described Islamic State in terms of mental derangement?

Some people have.

A minority.

A paradox, in fact, insofar as the objectives are increasingly formulated in religious terms. As you have said, this is especially the case for the Islamic State, which has in a way surpassed al-Qaeda, which was far more political. The Islamic State generation is a burgeoning religious, political, ideological, psychological generation—there’s a bit of everything. Hence the “success” of the movement, if it can be considered a success, can be linked to its capacity to capture just about anything that moves.

Look at what antiterrorism has done during this period. The changing profile of antiterrorism post-9/11 is the story of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By insisting on only talking about religion, we have lumped together all actors, concepts, and responses. Twenty years ago, we had accounts from terrorist actors that also embraced questions of politics, with Manichaean expressions in which all of this was mentioned and factually present. Today, we have discourses that immediately take on a pseudo-religious dimension. Individuals express themselves in a zealous, caricatured manner according to this logic. Yet these actors are themselves objects of socialization, particularly through the discourses they have absorbed. The conflicts they speak of are in reality not theirs to begin with; they are causes appropriated by children from France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States. What they do is transcend a local trauma, societal questions of racism, of discrimination, of failure, of confinement, of rejection, of dehumanization, of ghettoization, and this is why the great problem in this discussion on contemporary terrorism is that Western public and intellectual authorities have knowingly closed the door on the most important question, namely the racialization of antiterrorism. Antiterrorism has been widely racialized and culturalized.

According to you, this second generation is “impoverished” of its own narrative. But once more, we have seen this in other histories of terrorism. Is it in this sense that you speak of postmodern violence?

Exactly. For these actors, postmodernism is limited, in this case, to labels becoming identities, to the immediate relationships between vague expressions against some authority or other becoming something that transcends this initial notion of a more constructed, more linear discourse that would be based on these elements. That’s what happened with the previous wave. So, the fact that actors from both waves were present during this period, the fact that they collided with each other in different experiences, is very sociologically fertile. The Islamic State brought together Chileans, Chinese, Chechens, people from the Levant, the Maghreb and the Gulf, Somalians, Brazilians, Western Europeans, North Americans. These interpenetrating planetarized trajectories illustrate the dynamics of globalization and postmodernity—geographically, sociologically, but also visually and narratively, because we are living in an era that is principally one of images and stories.

If I understand you correctly, you see readings in terms of a break as largely unsatisfactory, since they leave out something very important—namely the fact that a certain number of actors are very simply acting in continuity with what came before. It is a case of a path taken to the extreme, rather than a break in relation to what is considered aberrant: it is abnormal to go to Syria, it is abnormal to demonstrate one’s violence, whereas in reality, according to you, sociologically this is all quite logical.

These readings of “abnormality” are hypocritical, in fact, as they imagine or pose a paternalistic norm with regard to their object of study. They pose and impose a norm for these individuals: the path that the analyst would normally imagine or accept for this young woman or that young man from Liverpool, Hamburg, or Minneapolis would be one where it is “impossible to become” the perpetrator of such a violent act on the basis of their own reflection. It would have been inconceivable for this person to have gotten to that point if there had not been a “break,” if there had not been a conspiracy, a brainwashing in the “basements of the mosques” where they were allegedly taken.

In a sectarian logic, in some cases . . .

Absolutely. There is a twofold denial of racialization at play. Let us transport all of this somewhere else: What happened in the late 1960s and the early 1970s within African-American communities in the United States? A fringe within these communities became radicalized in the face of police repression, segregation, the Vietnam War, and the persistence of glaring inequalities. And of course these small groups, such as the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Puerto Rican Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), groups that chose violence, made a choice: there was no “break,” as is suggested far too simplistically, because that would imply that their “normal” position would have been to remain in this dehumanizing political economy that put them in ghettos and kept them in socioeconomic apartheid. They made the choice to move toward a rejection of this order—a violent and criminal choice, of course, but one that is entirely visible and therefore legible to us. What happens in political violence after 9/11 is that there is a proto-colonial reading of terrorism. We see this very clearly in France, a country that has not mourned its colonial past, and a little less in Britain, where the question is posed in relation to Asian populations. And so you have these foundations, this milieu, this unspeakable aspect of the terrorism question during the 2010s in Europe and in the United States. In my opinion, this is the heart of the problem.

For you, then, it is far from a question of religion and violence. What has your work over these years taught you about violence and religion? I get the impression that you are not concerned with this question or that it does not interest you, because you have a vision that deliberately “inverts” the causalities. You start from below, not from above. The heavens have nothing to say to the earth. In the end, it is what happens on earth that counts, and the heavens remain in the heavens.

The heavens are the heavens. Religion is an individual, personal affair that takes on social implications with the construction of organized religion. But that’s an intimate, philosophical debate. When it comes to this social violence, when one can see it, as it is expressed by groups that themselves are religious or pseudo-religious, one can take note of this basic level, as I mentioned before. But what I have criticized in these three books and what I continue to criticize are those who consider only the rhetorical dimension, because in my view, whether consciously or unconsciously—and let’s give them the benefit of the doubt—in doing so they ignore causalities, paths, and factors that are quite present and can be reconstructed easily enough. They only mention geopolitics when they talk about the destination of the attacks—it isn’t considered when studying the intrinsic logic at play. The Kouachi brothers are treated as “lost souls” or the “lost children of the Republic.” And yet in their telephone conversation with the news channel BFM TV, which was not broadcast but which I transcribed in A Theory of ISIS, all they talk about is geopolitics . . .

The way I propose to describe them, in the first place, is simply to consider entities like al-Qaeda and Islamic State not as religious entities but as political entities. What I draw from this observation, from the legacy of these organizations and their genealogies, is the way in which they have altered the history of political violence. Al-Qaeda introduced the militarization of operations. It took further the transnationalization of operations that was already present in embryonic form in the 1970s. Bin Laden added to this a concept whereby he “held responsible” the citizens of the countries he attacked—what I call, in Understanding Al Qaeda, “the democratization of responsibility.” He spoke directly to American citizens in November 2004: “Your security is not in the hands of [John] Kerry or [George] Bush,” he said in a statement to Americans four days before the presidential election. “Your security is in your own hands.”

What lessons can we draw from the organization of Islamic State and its actions? Its attraction to spectacularly-staged violence and its multiform planetarization. Its revolutionary utilization of the spectacle of terrorism and of violence. The fact that its blitzkrieg in summer 2014 was not a series of operations but a media campaign. This allows us to see that this entity is indeed a postmodern one, based on communication, messaging, the modus operandi, and it therefore moves in the direction of a highly accelerated version of the al-Qaeda saga, which was more focused on operations and for which meeting and planning were necessary. We have now entered the virtual era; everything moves very quickly, and so it goes from one extreme to another. You can take a whole city, Mosul, in twenty-four hours and keep it for four years, then lose it overnight and disappear, as one can disappear and be reborn in a new version. All of which leads us—and in my research I draw some fundamental conclusions on this subject—to see this as a series of moments that illustrate the trajectory of political violence, tendencies that these groups bring out and modulate. If we imagine the end of the Islamic State episode, and that we are in a post-Islamic-State era, some kind of rebellion in the Levant or in northern Iraq would certainly be reborn in one form or another, as long as the conflicts in Iraq and the Levant are still ongoing. But as I say in the book, the legacy of the Islamic State will be its flag and not the entity itself—that is to say, its name, its label. Something which, all in all, seems quite logical again for a period in which branding and labeling matter more than reality.

Would you agree with this way of putting it: for al-Qaeda, what matters most is to do something, whereas what matters most for Islamic State is to make itself known?

Simply to appear, in fact. Yes, exactly.

Look at the terms themselves: al-Qaeda in Arabic means “the base.” Bin Laden established the organization so that others could act. The original name of the group was “Al-Qaeda al-’Askariya”—the military base. Off the bat, there is a form of military action here. The Islamic State is something different. It literally wants to be al-Dawla al-Islamiya, the Islamic State. There is an aspiration to become a state, which will never happen within the modern framework of international relations even if they were to develop a highly organized system. The logic we are dealing with here is the following: “We want to appear as a state, we want to project, we want to make an impression”; and they have succeeded in doing so. They are both success stories in their own way: Bin Laden’s legacy is al-Qaedism rather than al-Qaeda itself, and Islamic State has disseminated its message throughout the world, beyond its “state.” Today, we are living in an epoch in which the space between materiality and immateriality is shrinking, and so an entity like Islamic State is absolutely an entity of its epoch.

Ultimately, then, to finally deal with this question of religion and violence, supposing that’s possible: for you the question is largely secondary, or even meaningless . . .

Secondary. Religion is with us, once more. It is certainly important in this discussion, even if only because of the identity of its actors—actors who are themselves Islamist and who proclaim religion. And through their project, too: What kind of state? An Islamic one. Al-Qaeda also speaks of a Caliphate. It is not as prominent, but it is there. But beyond that, what do we have? Where does the future lie for the analyst who wants to look into the historical meaning of these actors and this moment? I would say that it lies in refusing to limit oneself to the religious angle alone, in taking a step back and seeing that all of this is situated in a history of conflict in the Middle East, in a history of international conflict, in postcolonial dynamics that are still ongoing, in social tensions, in identities that are still under construction or reconstruction, and in the context of a degeneration of international relations.