Jihad in a World of Sovereigns: Law, Violence, and Islam in the Bosnia Crisis
Law & Social Inquiry Volume 41, Issue 2, 371–401, Spring 2016 Jihad in a World of Sovereigns: Law, Violence, and Islam in the Bosnia Crisis Darryl Li This article argues that jihads waged in recent decades by “foreign fighter” volunteers invoking a sense of global Islamic solidarity can be usefully understood as attempts to enact an alternative to the interventions of the “International Community.” Drawing from ethnographic and archival research on Arab volunteers who joined the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article highlights the challenges and dilemmas facing such jihad fighters as they maneuvered at the edges of diverse legal orders, including international and Islamic law. Jihad fighters appealed to a divine authority above the global nation-state order while at the same time rooting themselves in that order through affiliation with the sovereign and avowedly secular nation-state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This article demonstrates an innovative approach to law, violence, and Islam that critically situates states and nonstate actors in relation to one another in transnational perspective. INTRODUCTION In recent decades, the phenomenon of jihad has attracted widespread notori- ety, especially insofar as the term has been invoked by transnational nonstate groups fighting in various conflicts. In Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere, so-called foreign fighter Muslim volunteers have gathered from all over the world in the name of waging jihad. Such foreign fighters have been the paradigmatic enemy invoked by the United States and other governments to justify their respective campaigns against alleged terrorism. What is the relationship between jihad and law in today’s world? Jihad is com- monly understood as entailing a repudiation of secular formsB of law in favor of a commitment to imposing classical Islamic law, or the sharı¯a.
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