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> That's playing a bit fast and loose with the facts there. ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people fo

> That's playing a bit fast and loose with the facts there. ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people for a labor force. That's textbook asymmetric warfare/terrorism. To me that just sounds like textbook nationhood. The defining feature of the state is having the monopoly on violence within its borders.

jlokier 7y ago
I think the question of treating ISIS territory as an independent state, with all the international law that would imply about respecting its independence and autonomy, treating it as a peer at the UN, etc., is a textbook case of why (international-legal) legitimacy is a status not granted automatically in the basis of territory and control alone, and should not be. The things ISIS members did to subpopulations people within that territory were almost universally condemned across the world as large-scale serious human abuse, and the territories were obtained through quite recent violence from other nations whose administrative borders had not stopped being recognised internationally. So I think it was widely regarded that ISIS should not be granted the international respect and autonomy of legal recognition, nor should it keep any power it had of a monopoly on violence within its borders (or any borders). That's not to say there aren't widely condemned things going on in other countries. But there is a kind of collective, sometimes grudging, but systematised respect for the autonomy of countries as nations, which I think was widely regarded as not something that would be right to grant to ISIS (or take away from the nations that ISIS had taken territory from).
- IIAOPSW 7y ago
  >as an independent state, with all the international law that would imply about respecting its independence and autonomy. The UN absolutely has provisions in its charter for approved wars. The Korean war was UN approved. A regime that is violent against civilians and outwardly genocidal towards religious minorities like ISIS is exactly the situation UN approved intervention was made for (designed with the Nazi's in mind). I reject the premise that calling them a state would entail granting them anything.

jlokier 7y ago

I think the question of treating ISIS territory as an independent state, with all the international law that would imply about respecting its independence and autonomy, treating it as a peer at the UN, etc., is a textbook case of why (international-legal) legitimacy is a status not granted automatically in the basis of territory and control alone, and should not be. The things ISIS members did to subpopulations people within that territory were almost universally condemned across the world as large-scale serious human abuse, and the territories were obtained through quite recent violence from other nations whose administrative borders had not stopped being recognised internationally. So I think it was widely regarded that ISIS should not be granted the international respect and autonomy of legal recognition, nor should it keep any power it had of a monopoly on violence within its borders (or any borders). That's not to say there aren't widely condemned things going on in other countries. But there is a kind of collective, sometimes grudging, but systematised respect for the autonomy of countries as nations, which I think was widely regarded as not something that would be right to grant to ISIS (or take away from the nations that ISIS had taken territory from).

IIAOPSW 7y ago
>as an independent state, with all the international law that would imply about respecting its independence and autonomy. The UN absolutely has provisions in its charter for approved wars. The Korean war was UN approved. A regime that is violent against civilians and outwardly genocidal towards religious minorities like ISIS is exactly the situation UN approved intervention was made for (designed with the Nazi's in mind). I reject the premise that calling them a state would entail granting them anything.