TITLE:
Political Theory of Societal Association: Case of the Failed State of Syria—Part 3 ISIS
AUTHORS:
Frederick Betz
KEYWORDS:
Failed States, Nations, Political Theory, Middle East, Colonialism, Syria, ISIS
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.12,
December
16,
2020
ABSTRACT: This is the third paper (of five) analyzing the failure of the Syrian
state. It is important because it analyzes how a terrorist militia can take
over a failed state—when ISIS created a Caliphate instead of a modern state in
Iraqi and Syrian territories. It also adds to the theory of political association, a meta-model
technique for depicting the international context of a state. Five papers have
been required to model the Syrian civil war, because of the complicated
sequence of events in the history of Syria: 1) from being a territory in the
Ottoman Empire to European colonial states, 2) to independent states, 3) to a
near collapse under a terrorist caliphate, 4) with impacts upon Syria’s neighboring
state of Lebanon, and 5) with refugee impacts on its former colonial occupiers.
In this history, we have been testing the validity of the modern political of
association, as to how and why “state regression” occurs. After Syrian
independence, the history of Syria empirically illustrates and contributes to
the verification of a theory of political association—in that the theoretical
distinctions between “state” and “nation” are fundamental concepts in the
politics of a society. We continue to use the historical studies of Syria to
provide the empirical basis for building and grounding (verifying) the social
science theory of political association—through the analytical technique of
modeling historical events.