Who precisely determines whether a sufficient number of guns have been acquired to bestow statehood on a group? As in,
- Get a lot of guns
- ???
- Statehood!
What is step number two, in your view?
- Get a lot of guns (and the corresponding trigger pullers)
- Use those guns to takeover a large swath of territory and resources, enough that other states are forced to factor you in to their planning and enough that you can actually significantly harm other states.
- You’re a state if you have enough of #2 that no-one is willing to beat you down, and it’s sustainable.
This is absolutely the case. The USA doesn’t want another war, nor does Europe. So, while both these powers technically have the means to dislodge IS, they aren’t going to do it. Syria is losing badly - the refugee crisis to me indicates that. If half the population has fled, who is left to earn money/produce weapons and who is left to fight IS? Iraq doesn’t appear to have the means to retake their missing cities.
I say IS is a state if in 5 years, they control roughly the same boarder and there hasn’t been a consolidation of forces to let their territory be recaptured.
If, right now, you can reasonably predict that this will be true in 5 years, they are a state right now. (not quite sure they have enough stuff right now to make that prediction)
Conversely, this is why various rebel groups mentioned above are not states. Those rebel groups don’t have the firepower to stomp the authorities of the country they are in if the authorities show up in force. They rely on deception and corruption to remain uncaptured.
This is analagous to saying that if I successfully rob a bank, the bank may as well say that money legally is mine now.
In international affairs, that’s how it works. England did not stroll into uninhabited territory to found its North American colonies: they conquered and dispossessed the prior inhabitants, sometimes brutally. The USA expanded with similar tactics. Nobody on the international stage pretends that the US and its territorial claims are invalid just because it expanded through either military conquest or purchasing territories (Lousiana, Gadsden, Alaska) that other nations (France, Spain > Mexico, Russia) had acquired through conquest.
It is if you can openly shout from your hideout “I did it” and the local cops are afraid to show up because they would have to die by the tens or hundreds of thousands to beat you down.
No one recognized territorial gain by conquest any more. Why do you think Russia had to rig that election in Crimea?
When, precisely, did we stop?
I think that we are, de facto, recognizing that Crimea is part of Russia now. I don’t see anyone doing anything about it other than a little ineffective whining.
I don’t know. When was the last time we did?
I don’t know about that, but there was a vote involved which at least offered a fig leaf of validation. Let us know when there’s a vote in Da-esh controlled territory.
People can refuse to recognize right of conquest til they are blue in the face. It’s just talk. Only guns matter. Talk does nothing. Guns kill anyone who disagree. Only reason talk means anything at all in our current world is the people doing most of the talking have massive arrays of the biggest guns around backing them up.
Yes, but we have words for people who use force to hold territory in ways that don’t enjoy widespread legitimacy or is seen as a temporary gain in a larger battle. ISIS controls territory. ISIS occupies territory. These are common, widely used, accurate ways to describe what you are saying.
ISIS has not shown any ability to sustainably govern- handing out spoils in you main stronghold is not the same thing. Indeed, half the population is fleeing. That doesn’t sound like people being governed, that sounds like territory being occupied.
And ISIS is without a friend in the world. Everyone wants them gone- we are all just waiting to see who gets stuck doing the job.
The closest comparison in recent history is probably Tamil Eelam. The Tamil Tigers had a pseudo-state in Northern Sri Lanka for decades until they were wiped out in 2009. So we just gotta wait until 2035ish.
Some of these might depend on your POV.
Chechnya was conquered by Russia in 2009.
South Sudan split from Sudan in 2011 after winning the civil war in 2005.
East Timor by Indonesia in 1975 (with American assistance), became independent again in 2002.
South Vietnam by Vietnam in 1975.
Tibet by China in 1959.
Probably missed some.
Dr. Drake:
1945, when World War II ended and the UN was founded. Since that point, I don’t think there’s been any occasion where one sovereign nation forcibly seized land that was controlled by another sovereign nation and administered it as their own territory (i.e., did not set up a local puppet government for show) and had the claim recognized by any significant number of other nations.
I agree that IS is not (yet) “a state” in all the constructed aspects. My point, approximately along the lines of the articles I linked, has simply been that they are more state-like than most if not all of the (other) terrorist organizations and guerrilla insurgencies they have been compared to. (As a minor but somewhat telling example, they are regulating fishing in their own waters.)
They are much more state-like than most of their enemies wish to acknowledge.
No, I am arguing for the value of bringing labels more in line with physical facts. This is the opposite of the position that the terms of statehood are only the constructs and labels.
I don’t think a lot of people do appreciate what IS is, because their state-like nature is ignored or downplayed, by people from Obama down. Some people in this thread were not aware of state functions IS is conducting. More generally, I think most people outside their immediate region do not grasp how much population and infrastructure they administer.
You’re not understanding the question. What is the event that triggers statehood? Does the queen tap the caliph on the shoulders with a sword? Does ISIL mail its birth certificate and $50 to the records department of the UN? What makes the ISIL state official? It isn’t the possession of guns, to be sure.
This is among the most silly leaps of logic I have seen in Great Debates. If a child will be 21 in five years, he is 21 now, eh?
Your definition of a state gets more and more convoluted. It has to have guns. And it can’t rely on deception and corruption. Any more bogus criteria you want to simply invent? Might as well barf it all up now.
International law has very little do to with “lawyers deciding things.”
“Recognition” isn’t some abstract lawyerly thing. It is all about what other states think - remember, those guys who have armies, tanks and bombers?
What happens, in brutal reality, is this - if you are a “state”, meaning an entity actually recognized by other states, those other states hesitate to send their men with guns, bombers, etc. to trample over “your” territory, kill “your” people, and blow up “your” cities. Yes, they may do it anyway (by “declaring war” or by waging an undeclared war), but it tends to have serious consequences - other states frown on making war on a declared “state”.
On the other hand, if you are not a “state”, unless you have powerful friends who are “states”, states feel free to send their men with guns in, to blow up your shit with bombs, to do whatever the hell they want to, to you. Why? Because the territory their men with guns are sent into isn’t really “your” territory - it is someone elses’, you just stole it from them; the people being shot at by other states aren’t an “army” of a “state”, but rebels and terrorists; and very often, the original, “legitimate” owners of “your” territory are giving them signed and sealed permission to do these very things - and again, unless the non-state folks have powerful state friends, no-one can stop them.
That’s the difference between being a real, recognized “state” and not. It is a very important practical difference that translates directly into bombs and bullets.
Sure, being a “state” doesn’t automatically stop you from being hammered by others with a grudge, but it is a big game-changer in terms of consequences.
The point of the analogy with the bank, was that there is no point at which it’s in the bank’s interest to say the money is legitimately the robbers’. Even if the bank has no way of retrieving the money, and has internally written it off, they still would never give up that claim.
WRT ISIS, essentially the whole world is the bank. There is no benefit at all to calling ISIS a state, and several potential downsides if we actually followed it through to the letter of the law. This is a different issue from whether ISIS is capable of defending its borders.
(The different with, say, England annexing some island in days gone by, is that England was already a recognized state and had a number of allies that would accept the annexation. ISIS has neither of these things. Also, times were different back then).
Do you mean like the island England itself was on?
And yes, times were different: we says “times have changed,” but as marshmallow points out, it still goes on. The difference is that it’s much less common, and our strident insistence that it doesn’t.
OK when are the American Indians getting a referendum on whether to expel you all from stolen territory ?
I mean, really, come on, don’t tell us you don’t know the value of holding turf by means of arms. You can figure out the legalese later when you’ve established your dominance, if you can be bothered to honor treaties. at all.
Are you seriously proposing that we return to a time where we recognize the right of conquest? Seriously???