Analysis – Cheap Research Essays

Paper instructions:
Two Competing Hypotheses for Non-State Actors
Hypothesis 1: Non-state actors are independent and important actors that cause change in the IR of the ME. They can be violent or non-violent in nature but given

the presence of weak or autocratic regimes in the region, the most significant ones use violence strategically to cause change in the IR of the ME.

Hypothesis 2: Non-state actors in the ME do not have causal power independent of the states in the region or in the international system. Violent Non-state Actors

(VSNAs) are simply derivative of the power of the states that sponsor them.

What do the readings tell us about these two hypotheses?

Things to keep in mind when doing this assignment:

Be sure to read/re-read the ACH material i have attached.

Building the Evidence Base:

Facts vs. Other Things
Strength of the Evidence
Quality of the Source
Contestability of the Evidence
Corroborating support
Relevance of the Evidence
Importance to a given hypothesis (how would you know?)
Materiality of the Impact (significance)
Gaps in the Evidence

A Good Hypothesis:
Is written as a definite statement, not as a question
Is based on observations and knowledge
Is testable and falsifiable
Predicts the anticipated results clearly
Contains a dependent and an independent variable
DV = phenomenon being explained
IV = explains the phenomenon

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THE SATURDAY ESSAY
The New Jihad
A new generation of Islamist extremists battle-hardened in Iraq and Syria sees the old
guard of al Qaeda as too passive
July 11, 2014 12:36 p.m. ET
Last week, a self-described heir to the Prophet Muhammad declared himself the supreme leader of a
new Islamic state stretching from eastern Syria to northern Iraq . How did Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
nom de guerre of a mediocre Iraqi religious scholar in his mid-40s, outmaneuver al Qaeda as the new
vanguard of jihadist ideology? How did he and his followers—armed with Kalashnikovs, smart phones
and their ominous black banner—so suddenly take over the campaign to rid the Muslim world of
Western and secular influence?
The rise of Mr. Baghdadi and his newly proclaimed “caliphate” highlights what had been a closely held
secret of the Sunni jihadist movement: a split in the ranks that had been festering for years. It pits a new
generation of shock troops hardened by battle in Iraq and Syria against al Qaeda veterans who had built
ISIS is rejecting the leadership of al Qaeda. What’s the difference between the two radical jihadist organizations? WSJ’s Jason
Bellini has #TheShortAnswer
By MARGARET COKER
the movement but were increasingly seen as too passive, both politically and theologically.
Mr. Baghdadi’s proclamation was stunningly brazen. The leader of a faction of puritanical Sunni militants
who have plagued Iraq with suicide bombings and beheadings, he was long considered a relatively
inconsequential cog in the larger al Qaeda machine. Few people outside jihadist circles had heard of
him, let alone seen him, before last month, when his followers in the militia known as the Islamic State of
Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, rolled across northern Iraq, conquering Mosul , one of the largest cities in the
country. Then on July 4, Mr. Baghdadi emerged at Mosul’s al-Nuri Grand Mosque, promising to restore
to his Sunni brethren their “dignity, might, rights and leadership,” according to a video of the sermon
distributed by his group.
Mr. Baghdadi’s military offensive has startled the U.S. and its Middle Eastern allies, who fear that it
portends prolonged regional instability and terrorist attacks far afield from Iraq. Yet for the man leading
what he now calls simply the Islamic State, the latest campaign has meant more than territorial
conquest. Mr. Baghdadi’s victories also mark the crescendo of a 10-year theological battle between
veterans of al Qaeda, the core organization started by Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and now led by
the Egyptian-born extremist Ayman al-Zawahiri, and its rebellious affiliate in Iraq, which Mr. Baghdadi
took over in 2010. The prize: purported leadership of the world’s estimated 1 billion Sunni Muslims and
of a jihad supposedly waged in their name.
The rupture between Mr. Zawahiri’s old guard and Mr. Baghdadi’s new guard escalated last year, when
Mr. Baghdadi refused Mr. Zawahiri’s demand to formally declare his obedience and instead called the al
Qaeda leader’s rulings antithetical to God’s commands. It was an audacious snub within the puritanical
circles of al Qaeda and its fellow travelers. It was also the start of a slow-moving coup against the
established jihadist hierarchy.
Islamic State militants drive a tank in a June 30 parade in Syria’s Raqqa province to celebrate the
declaration of a “caliphate” straddling Iraq and Syria. Reuters
Today’s strains flow from decades of wrangling over Islamist doctrines of religious and political
revolution. In the 1940s and 1950s, during heady days of nationalism and rebellion in the Middle East,
the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb —widely considered the father of contemporary jihadist thought—
merged Quranic verses, Islamic prophecies and Third World revolutionary fervor to produce a seminal
tract advocating Islamist political violence.
The early jihadist intelligentsia that adopted Qutb’s views included a young Saudi named Osama bin
Laden and other members of a fringe movement called Salafism, which holds that Muslim society
should adopt a governing and religious framework that adheres to Muslim practices from the early days
of Islam’s founding in the seventh century. Those who espouse using violence to achieve such a
puritanical state are known as Salafi jihadists.
Among the followers of this creed, the battle between Mr. Zawahiri and Mr. Baghdadi is a pivotal
development. “Like the old saying goes: The revolution devours its own,” says Jérôme Drevon, a fellow
at the Swiss National Science Foundation who specializes in Islamist movements. “What we are seeing
is a generational split between older jihadis who have learned pragmatic lessons [of overreach] …and a
younger, more brutal generation who don’t believe in or haven’t lived long enough to learn those
lessons.”
Al Qaeda (which is Arabic for “the base”) had significant though limited ideological appeal and recruiting
power throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Its charismatic leader, bin Laden, recruited Arab radicals and
others to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He also turned his sights on what he considered
impure and impious Arab tyrannies—above all in his native Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s two holiest
cities, Mecca and Medina.
Bin Laden also broadened his scope to target the U.S. and the West, which al Qaeda came to call “the
far enemy” for propping up Israel and Arab autocrats such as the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni
Mubarak . Al Qaeda’s allure was strengthened by its spectacular Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and by
satellite television and Internet technology that spread its message across the globe.
The group’s brain trust had always relied on a division of power between the ideologues—such as Mr.
Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s alongside Qutb and his followers
—and the executives like bin Laden and his military chiefs, who secured the money, inspired the recruits
and perfected the bombs and the battle tactics.
Mr. Zawahiri honed al Qaeda’s basic tenets. He declared that the world, including most Muslim
societies, languished in a state of impurity and that it was al Qaeda’s religious duty to cleanse it. The
main culprits, according to Mr. Zawahiri’s teachings, were the secular West and its Arab allies, both
marked as primary targets in al Qaeda’s holy war.
After 9/11, the U.S. and its partners drove al Qaeda out of its haven in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and
weakened its operational abilities. Mr. Zawahiri also became vulnerable to criticism from an even more
fanatical end of the jihadist spectrum over a doctrinal issue that lies at the core of the Salafi quest to
build a pure Islamist state.
The dispute centers on Mr. Zawahiri’s belief that a caliphate—a state that can demand allegiance from
all Muslims and declare jihad against the enemies of the faith—can emerge only after the wider Muslim
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world has been purified. Mr. Zawahiri hopes to bring Muslims out of their unredeemed state of jahiliyya
—the type of spiritual ignorance that existed before the Prophet—by excising all contact with corrupting
Western influences and placing governing institutions in the hands of administrators who share this
vision and can promulgate it to the mass of Muslims.
This religious interpretation was shared by the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar—which is why al
Qaeda didn’t declare a caliphate when the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in the 1990s, according
to Hassan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian scholar and former Salafi who is an independent expert in Islamist
groups. “A caliphate has to be based on the consent of the public,” Mr. Abu Hanieh said. “Afghan
society was at war, and thus, according to [al Qaeda’s] religious understanding, the time was not right
for this desired goal.”
But Mr. Baghdadi and his followers reject this doctrine of an evolving religious and social consensus.
They believe instead that a pure Islamic regime can be more swiftly imposed by force. This basic split
has existed for a decade between al Qaeda and its one-time offshoot in Iraq, which formed after the
U.S. invaded in 2003 and helped establish the first Shiite government in Iraq in centuries.
The doctrinal dispute first came to light in the mid-2000s in a set of letters that bin Laden and Mr.
Zawahiri wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the infamous founder of al Qaeda in Iraq—a Jordanian
responsible for a wave of beheadings, bombings and kidnappings. Bin Laden, in hiding after fleeing
Afghanistan after 9/11, scolded Zarqawi for attacks that targeted Iraq’s majority Shiites and shed Sunni
blood as well. Such tactics, he argued, divided Muslims, alienated many Iraqi Sunnis and diverted
efforts away from al Qaeda’s focus on killing Americans and toppling heretical Arab regimes.
But to Zarqawi and his followers, killing anyone who rejected their puritanical views—including Shiites or
even dissenting Sunnis—was a step toward purity. They chafed at bin Laden’s reprimand, but they didn’t
break ranks. Zarqawi formally pledged bay’a—or obedience—to bin Laden, effectively papering over the
ideological division.
By the late 2000s, however, U.S. forces had killed Zarqawi, and the Iraqi offshoots of al Qaeda had
gone through several incarnations. By then, Mr. Baghdadi had appeared on the scene. After years of
imprisonment by the U.S., he joined what was then known as the Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI. The group
had published a pamphlet titled “The Birth of the Islamic State Declaration,” reasserting its belief that
Muslims had a holy duty to create—by force if necessary—the conditions that would allow a caliphate to
re-emerge.
In many ways, the doctrinal differences among Salafi jihadist factions mirror the dispute that raged
among Russian communist factions at the start of the 20th century. The two major factions—the
Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin —split over the basic question of the party’s role. Should it
work to develop the social consciousness that would move humanity toward a perfect workers’ state, or
should it try to bring about such change immediately through violent revolution?
“Every radical movement has its wings, its pragmatists and
its puritanical firebrands,” said Haras Rafiq, a
counterterrorism adviser for the U.K. government and a
scholar at London’s Quilliam Foundation, which seeks to
counter Islamist extremism.
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Lenin supported the path of aggressive force and
outflanked his Menshevik opponents politically after 1903.
By 1918, he had solidified his rule over the communist
movement by leading it to victory over Czar Nicholas II’s
dying empire.
Mr. Baghdadi’s rise to power mirrors Lenin’s in its
efficiency and brutality. By 2010, Mr. Baghdadi—whose
main success up until that time was winning a doctorate in
religious studies from a mediocre Iraqi university—had taken over ISI. After U.S. forces killed bin Laden
in May 2011, Mr. Baghdadi gave up any pretense of unity with al Qaeda. His followers swore allegiance
to their own leader, not to Mr. Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor and longtime deputy—a stinging show of
defiance.
Mr. Baghdadi spent the next few years locked in ideological battles with Mr. Zawahiri, especially after
2011, when Sunni jihadists began to join the worsening civil war in Syria. Tension mounted in
September 2013, when Mr. Zawahiri issued a pamphlet called “General Guidelines of the Work of a
Jihadist,” codifying al Qaeda-approved rules of warfare. It circumscribed religiously sanctioned killings.
But followers of Mr. Baghdadi continued to insist that anyone who disagreed with their movement’s
harsh interpretation of Islam could be labeled an apostate—a practice used to justify the group’s
decadelong practice of killing Shiites and fellow Sunnis who rejected its views. As the struggle against
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad —the leader of a dictatorship dominated by Alawites, a small sect
descended from Shiite Islam—grew bloodier, Mr. Baghdadi rebuffed Mr. Zawahiri’s treatise as
incompatible with the war he was fighting in Syria and across the border in Iraq.
The power struggle finally came to a head on April 9, 2013, when Mr. Baghdadi launched his first
outright rebellion against al Qaeda. In an audio recording released online, he declared a hostile
takeover of the Nusra Front, a Syrian jihadist rebel militia linked to al Qaeda whose leader had pledged
allegiance to Mr. Zawahiri. Mr. Baghdadi declared that the two groups would merge under a single
name: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS.
Sunni jihadists were jolted by the move. The Nusra Front immediately rejected Mr. Baghdadi’s takeover
bid and refused to swear allegiance to him. In June, Mr. Zawahiri released a three-page letter intended
to extinguish “the fire of sedition” ignited by Mr. Baghdadi. In the missive, Mr. Zawahiri ordered Mr.
Baghdadi to retreat from Syria while retaining control of the jihadist project in Iraq. But in a reply
disseminated through the Internet, Mr. Baghdadi not only refused to retreat but also said he had “chosen
the command of God over the command in the letter [by Mr. Zawahiri] that contradicts it.”
Al Qaeda’s old guard was outraged at this affront to their gray-bearded leader. For months, several
elders of the movement had tried to reconcile Mr. Baghdadi to the larger al Qaeda group—to no avail.
On Feb. 3, Mr. Zawahiri formally disowned ISIS , and later that month, Mr. Zawahiri’s personal emissary
to mediate the Syrian struggle was killed by a suicide bomber. Syrian rebels accuse ISIS of the murder,
a charge that the splinter group denies.
By spring, Mr. Baghdadi was in full ascent, sweeping aside al Qaeda’s sanctimoniousness with tangible
military gains. His forces solidified control of a swath of Iraqi territory, and he prepared to launch a high-
profile operation to recruit others to his doctrinal and political views. His forces stunned the region by
conquering Mosul and marching south toward Baghdad.
Mr. Baghdadi’s expanding empire, which includes control over some of Iraq’s prime oil facilities, has put
al Qaeda on the back foot—and left the U.S. and its allies worrying about the security threats that could
emerge from this new, virulent form of jihadism. The chunk of territory that Mr. Baghdadi’s followers
have carved out of Iraq and Syria affords them a haven in which to train and plot—one that, unlike pre-9/11 Afghanistan, lies at the heart of the Arab world and close