Ever snigger at that phrase, “Be careful what you wish for?” It’s time to give ISIS what they wish for: recognition as a state. A state is so much more than Weber’s “compulsory political organisation with centralised government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a territory.” No one would dispute Daesh is a political organisation. Or that they have an organisational structure, a fledgling bureaucracy and the ability to influence people to do what they ordinarily wouldn’t in territory the size of Jordan. ISIS exert some external influence via media slick propaganda. A state is also a political entity whose presence is definable and bounded, whose scope is limited logistically, and in terms of international law, which makes statehood for ISIS an important argument for Politweak this week. What we can do to combat ISIS is limited as long as we refer to them as non-state actors. Non-statehood confers the protection on many in the ISIS machinery as non-combatants. Traditionally, only states are the subjects of international laws like the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). LOAC is vital to war conduct as it is concerned with jus in bello, or limiting the kinds of force used. ISIS, as non-state actors, escape much of the culpability associated with the use of disproportionate force over and above military necessity, despite wielding legal weapons like rocket launchers and illegal weapons like Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP). EPFs are bombs that turn their copper casing into molten projectile, illegal according to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and responsible for civilian deaths and 18 percent of personnel fatalities. Not recognising ISIS as a state erodes our own freedoms and immunities by eschewing the crucial customary distinction between combatants and civilians. To the reader it is intuitive, we are non-combatants while ISIS are armed. However, in LOAC, war is traditionally between state actors, and only the armed forces and armed opposition are recognised as combatants. In Iraq and Syria, armed opposition is hard to keep track of, as every sect seems to have a militia to protect/avenge it. This is logistically problematic as combatants are required to wear identifiable fatigues to prevent civilians being attacked. ISIS fighters not having to comply give them the benefit of stealth and surprise attack, i.e. a head start on armed forces. Nevertheless, armed forces are still permitted to neutralise ISIS fighters as civilians directly participating in hostilities. Statehood for ISIS would aid counterinsurgency by obligating fighters to make themselves identifiable. Blurring civvy/combatant distinction is more insidious for us than it is for ISIS or their nemesis. Simply, the increase in asymmetric warfare (between insurgents and state forces) has meant international powers like the US have been able to ignore the important principle of distinction in their counterinsurgency efforts to the peril of the most vulnerable and politically marginalised in border areas like the North West Frontier Province. For instance, drone attacks are not only personality based (i.e. targeting known terrorists) but also include signature strikes (which target people who aren’t known terrorists but display similarities). The increasing use of signature strikes is alarming because it is possible for regular civilians to frequent the same Salafi mosques as ISIS fighters or to be from the same tribes, while not being terrorists themselves. The top-secret algorithms behind our increasingly remote control War on Terror necessitate oversight and a mainstreaming of humanitarian standards, especially since abuse thrives in the silence and secrecy surrounding experts. The international community must recognise the statehood of ISIS and any other territory-controlling terrorist organisations to make them identifiable to minimise civilian murders and address surprise attack. As the nature of war changes, in order to stop transnational violence from snowballing, it is time that our experts disengage from the hastily put together talk shops we call peace talks and evolve a taxonomy to objectively ascertain when it would be prudent to acquiesce to demands for statehood. It is time we purge the label ‘terrorist’ from our political vocabulary, at least as long as it is bandied about like some causeless cause, because it robs the reader of the enlightening opportunity to demystify what mistakenly seems like an ominous ‘post-9/11 monster’. Terrorism is nothing but those made weak by the cynical status quo trying to appear strong and fearsome, as they are fed up of waiting for a deus ex machina and for diplomats to abandon expediency for ethics. The oppressed, like the poor, are not a benign category as they are capable of (re-)acting in reprehensible, inexcusable ways. ISIS, like al-Qaeda, has preyed on frustrated regional struggles for stakeholdership in the political process. In Iraq, Daesh are embodiment of the US’s haphazard democracy promotion and hurried exit strategy, which put the ‘moron’ in oxymoron by insisting on Shia leadership (51 percent of the population) over organically elected identity-neutral leadership. Alienated Sunnis (42 percent), it fuelled sectarianism. In Syria, Daesh is the outcome of Assad’s ‘pyramidal leadership structure’ of Alawis (13 percent) over Sunnis (74 percent) to capture shrinking state resources during economic recession, says former ISIS captive Henin. Assad also took a leaf out of unwitting US blunders in Iraq, and deliberately released jihadists from jail to give the peaceful pro-democracy Arab Spring a sinister dimension. Assad created a bogeyman in ISIS to scare the international community into believing that regime change, internal or external, would destabilise the entire region by birthing a rabid and fanatical state wannabes like ISIS. This is not farfetched. We were simply not paying attention when Assad’s state refined oil from ISIS controlled territory. ISIS statehood would erode this profiteering alliance and give the oppressed majority a choice of opting in/out of these political units based on the rights they confer and the services they provide — a far better scenario than Syria at present where basic water provision is used as a weapon of war. ISIS cannot be eliminated as they and other armed organisations are supported by tribes looking for security and stakeholdership. Granting them statehood while they lose ground will contain them. They cannot be eliminated. They simply do not have the manpower to maintain a repressive or extensive state, which is why they fuel the apocalyptic narrative of Dabiq or the final fight between Islam and the Byzantines to attract foreign fighters to aid their attempt to control the state. Statehood would end ISIS’s claim to being wronged, which enables them to get away with using terror as a tactic to appear more powerful than they are and attract funding and recruits. Statehood would also mean border control and a reduction of teenagers from Europe and the Americas, who feel like they don’t belong in the white mainstream; ISIS fighters groom and lure them online to be their wives. We cannot stop ISIS’ indoctrination on the Internet, but recognising them as a state will bring the added benefit of other states being able to disallow the movement of people and goods to its territory and they need not stop their war against Daesh either. It is no secret that state-formation throughout history has been brutal — beheadings in public squares acting as deterrents in the absence of policing. Any reasonable person would balk at the idea of statehood for ISIS. However, rationality begs that we support statehood, while continuing to fight its brutality. It is far worse not to recognise powerful organised groups that have gained ground in Syria and Iraq because we cannot ‘sacrifice the bitter for the better’ by way of an ideal governance alternative, lest we doom these people to a dustbowl of a political culture where anyone wielding a weapon can come graze and move on. Heaven forbid, it is the contextually ignorant power-peacocking their dubious ‘responsibility to protect.’ South Asian ‘multi-nations’ must empower minorities, Christian, Shia or Ahmadiyya, lest they become vulnerable to recruiters for whom armed conflict is business. The scary but liberating takeaway is, states are not permanent unless fiscally and structurally representative. Even civilisations perish unless they are adaptable and inclusive. The writer is a politics and governance professional, integrated media strategist and Gross National Happiness researcher. Her column Politweak reimagines paths to peace in South Asia. She can be reached on Twitter @LatoyaFerns