International Complicity in the Co-Production of Jihadist Sovereignty

This article discusses the emergence of a novel political formation: the Terrorist State model. Moving beyond conventional framings of “insurgent governance” or “failed state” dynamics, it identifies two distinct but convergent pathways through which transnational jihadist movements acquire the functional attributes of sovereignty—territory, taxation, adjudication, policing, and claims to legitimate authority—while preserving their ideological core and coercive repertoires. Mali exemplifies the endogenous route: jihadist state-building that emerges against international headwinds, exploiting the delegitimation produced by externalized security architectures and the vacuum of state meaning-production. Syria, by contrast, reveals the more dangerous exogenous pathway: the acceleration of jihadist polity-consolidation through premature international recognition, sanctions relief, and reconstruction finance that supplies the material scaffolding of statehood before credible transformation has occurred. International actors—particularly the European Union and the United States—are not neutral observers of these trajectories but active participants in incubating a replicable terrorist state model. In that framework, Rojava’s plural governance architecture functions as a counter-model that exposes the ideological claims underlying jihadist sovereignty projects, and its survival represents a critical test of whether the international system will normalize or resist the institutionalization of coercion.

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The Conceptual Crisis of Westphalian Order

The international system rests on a foundational—if often unstated—assumption: that statehood, whatever its internal pathologies, represents a fundamentally different category from terrorism. States may be authoritarian, repressive, or abusive; terrorist organizations may be locally powerful, ideologically coherent, or operationally sophisticated. But the boundary between them has been treated as categorical. States are subjects of international law; terrorist organizations are its objects. States negotiate; terrorist organizations are negotiated against. States receive development assistance; terrorist organizations are sanctioned, designated, and excluded from the formal economy.

This assumption is collapsing—not because the analytical distinction lacks merit, but because empirical reality is producing hybrid formations that escape it. Across multiple theaters of fragility, a new kind of polity is consolidating: not merely “insurgent governance” and not yet fully recognized statehood in the Westphalian sense, but something intermediate and more dangerous. These are institutionalizing jihadist orders that acquire the attributes of sovereignty—territory, taxation, courts, policing, and a claim to legitimate authority—while preserving the organizational lineage, coercive repertoire, and ideological core associated with transnational jihadism. The emergence of such formations poses a conceptual crisis for the International order. What happens when a recognized sovereign state becomes governed by a terrorist organization? What happens when international actors, through patterns of recognition, sanctions relief, and reconstruction finance, actively assist in the completion of such a project? These questions are no longer theoretical. Mali is the laboratory for an endogenous terrorist polity emerging against international resistance. Syria is where the international system is at risk of transforming that laboratory result into a replicable template—by participating in its construction.

This article develops a comparative analytical framework for understanding these trajectories and their implications. It proceeds in five parts. Part II establishes the theoretical foundations for analyzing jihadist polity-formation, distinguishing it from conventional insurgency studies and situating it within debates about sovereignty, legitimacy, and international recognition. Part III examines Mali as the paradigmatic case of endogenous jihadist state-making under conditions of state failure and securitized dependence. Part IV analyzes Syria as the more dangerous case of exogenous acceleration through premature internationalization. Part V addresses the role of Rojava as a counter-model that exposes the ideological claims underlying jihadist sovereignty projects. Part VI draws comparative lessons and articulates the policy implications that follow from the analysis. The conclusion argues that without fundamental changes in international approach, the current trajectory will produce a transferable terrorist state model with profound implications for global order.

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From Insurgent Governance to Jihadist Sovereignty

Armed non-state actors often do more than fight—they govern. The burgeoning literature on “rebel governance,” “insurgent institutions,” and “armed group order” has documented how insurgent movements establish taxation systems, adjudicate disputes, provide services, and regulate social life in territories under their control. In fact, insurgent governance is shaped by strategic incentives, it often responds to civilian preferences, it can be more or less institutionalized, and it has consequences for post-conflict political order. Yet this paradigm has significant limitations when applied to the contemporary phenomenon of jihadist polity-formation. Three limitations deserve particular attention.

First, there’s a tendancy in the insurgent governance literature to treat governance as instrumental—a strategic choice made to secure civilian cooperation, deny intelligence to counterinsurgents, or extract resources more efficiently. Jihadist governance, by contrast, is often constitutive: the establishment of sharia-based order is not merely a means to other ends but an end in itself, a direct expression of the movement’s theological-political project. The Groupe de Soutien à l’Islam et aux Musulmans (GSIM) in Mali does not govern merely to win; it governs because governing is what an Islamic polity does. Second, a distinction is being made between the insurgent period and the post-conflict settlement—governance as a wartime phenomenon that will eventually be superseded by state restoration or negotiated inclusion. Jihadist polity-formation disrupts this temporal assumption. The goal is not to negotiate entry into an existing state but to become the state, or rather, to instantiate a form of political order that supersedes the very category of the nation-state. This is not transition but transformation. Third, and most consequentially, the international dimension is not taken into account, at least for the most part. Scholars treats the local dyad—insurgent and civilian, insurgent and state—as the primary unit of analysis. But as the cases of Mali and Syria demonstrate, international actors are not external observers of insurgent governance trajectories; they are constitutive participants whose recognition practices, resource flows, and security interventions shape the possibility space within which jihadist polities emerge.

A more adequate framework must draw on the political sociology of sovereignty. Following the constructivist tradition in international relations, sovereignty is not merely a legal status conferred at the moment of state formation but an ongoing performance that requires continuous enactment and recognition. States perform sovereignty through the demonstration of territorial control, the provision of order, the extraction and redistribution of resources, and the monopolization of legitimate violence. These performances are directed at both domestic and international audiences, and their success depends on both internal capacity and external recognition. This framework illuminates what jihadist polities are attempting and what international responses enable. When GSIM in Mali establishes sharia courts, collects zakat-like taxation, and resolves disputes that the Malian state cannot adjudicate, it is performing sovereignty—claiming the attributes that legitimate the exercise of political authority. When the international community delists Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), lifts sanctions, and provides reconstruction finance, it is conferring recognition—supplying the external validation that transforms performed authority into usable sovereignty. The critical insight is that sovereignty is relational and co-produced. A jihadist movement cannot fully achieve statehood through internal performance alone; it requires that its performances be recognized—or at least not actively de-recognized—by the international community. Conversely, international recognition is not merely passive acknowledgment of pre-existing reality; it is a constitutive act that helps create the reality it ostensibly describes. When the European Union provides €620 million to “help the Syrian government restore services and rebuild state institutions,” it is not simply responding to a state; it is participating in making one.

In this article, I am presenting a central analytical distinction between endogenous and exogenous pathways to jihadist polity-formation. In other words, there exists two pathways to Jihadist Statehood. The endogenous pathway describes cases in which jihadist movements build state-like institutions from below, exploiting the vacuum created by state failure, social fragmentation, and the delegitimation of existing authorities. The trajectory moves from clandestine network to territorial presence to institutionalized governance—from “mobile and diffuse terrorism” to “institutionalized terrorism,” (see our article on Mali). This pathway proceeds against international headwinds: the international community may intervene militarily, impose sanctions, and refuse recognition, but these measures prove insufficient to prevent the consolidation of jihadist authority because they do not address the underlying legitimacy vacuum. The exogenous pathway describes cases in which international actors accelerate jihadist polity-formation from above, supplying the resources, recognition, and institutional support that resolve the hardest problems of insurgent state-building: liquidity, external market access, and international usability. In this pathway, the temporal sequence of conditionality is inverted: recognition precedes reform; resources precede safeguards. International actors do not merely fail to prevent a jihadist polity from consolidating; they actively assist in its completion.

Mali exemplifies the endogenous pathway. Syria represents the more dangerous exogenous pathway—and the precedent it establishes threatens to transform jihadist state-building from a difficult and contested project into a replicable template for international accommodation.

Mali: Endogenous Jihadist State-Making Under Conditions of Externalized Security

The Malian crisis is routinely misread as an exclusively operational counterterrorism problem—a matter of targeting, intelligence, and force application. This framing obscures the more fundamental dynamic: Mali is a political-institutional crisis in which the state has lost not only its monopoly on violence but also its capacity to produce political meaning and legitimacy. The genealogy of this crisis is complex, implicating colonial legacies, center-periphery tensions, the destabilization following Libya’s collapse, and the structural weakness of extractive governance in the Sahel. But for present purposes, the critical feature is the emergence of a legitimacy vacuum—a condition in which the state can neither protect its citizens nor provide the normative framework within which social life acquires meaning. In such conditions, armed actors offering alternative forms of order possess a structural advantage that no amount of counterterrorism pressure can eliminate. AQIM-linked actors—particularly GSIM—have exploited this vacuum with considerable sophistication. In a previous article, I have described a political metamorphosis: a shift from terrorism as clandestine disruption to terrorism as institutionalized governance. GSIM does not merely attack the state; it substitutes for the state. It arbitrates disputes that the Malian judiciary cannot reach. It enforces norms that the Malian police cannot maintain. It extracts resources through zakat-like mechanisms that possess greater legitimacy, for some populations, than the predatory taxation of a distant and corrupt administration. This is not merely insurgent governance in the conventional sense; it is jihadist sovereignty-construction. The goal is not to bargain for inclusion in an existing order but to instantiate a competing order—one grounded in a different theory of legitimate authority. The sharia-based adjudication offered by GSIM is not a service designed to win hearts and minds; it is the expression of a theological-political project that claims universal validity.

International intervention in Mali has not been absent; it has been extensive. French forces under Operation Barkhane, the EU Training Mission, and the UN’s MINUSMA represented significant investments of military and institutional resources. Yet these interventions—whatever their tactical achievements—have not restored state legitimacy. In some respects, they have undermined it. The mechanism is the delegitimating effect of externalized security. When the Malian state’s survival depends on foreign military forces, the state is revealed as incapable of the most basic sovereign function: protecting its citizens through its own capacity. The contrast with jihadist actors becomes starker: GSIM presents itself as an indigenous moral orderer, rooted in local communities and Islamic authority, while the Malian government appears as a dependent client of foreign powers. The very presence of external security providers confirms the narrative that jihadist actors are the authentic political force. This dynamic is exacerbated when counterterrorism operations produce civilian harm or are perceived as serving foreign rather than Malian interests. Each drone strike, each checkpoint incident, each raid that disrupts community life without producing durable security contributes to the delegitimation of the state that hosts these operations. The result is a perverse political economy: international counterterrorism investment increases, but state legitimacy decreases, and the structural conditions for jihadist governance become more favorable.

If jihadist control approaches an African capital, the international system confronts a situation in which a recognized sovereign state is governed by a terrorist organization. The Westphalian assumption—that statehood and terrorism occupy different categories—collapses. And the international community discovers that its counterterrorism investment has not prevented this outcome; it has, in some respects, contributed to it.

Understanding the Malian trajectory requires attention to what makes jihadist governance attractive in contexts of state failure. Three features deserve emphasis. First, jihadist governance provides predictability. In environments where state authority is arbitrary, absent, or predatory, the consistency of sharia-based adjudication—whatever its substantive content—offers a form of order that enables social and economic life to proceed. Merchants can transact knowing that contracts will be enforced. Families can resolve disputes knowing that outcomes will follow identifiable rules. This predictability is a public good that the failed state cannot provide. Second, jihadist governance provides accessibility. Sharia courts are often faster, cheaper, and more locally present than formal judicial institutions. They do not require the literacy, documentation, or urban access that formal courts demand. For rural populations far from state infrastructure, jihadist adjudication may be the only adjudication available. Third, jihadist governance provides moral coherence. In contexts where state authority has been discredited by corruption, predation, and association with foreign powers, the Islamic framing of jihadist governance offers a normative vocabulary that resonates with local religious identity. The state represents the failure of secular modernity; GSIM represents the recovery of authentic Islamic order. This is not merely a strategic framing; it is a theological claim that shapes how governance is experienced and evaluated.

These features explain why jihadist governance can scale despite its coercive dimensions. The question is not whether people prefer coercion; it is whether the jihadist package—predictability, accessibility, moral coherence—is preferable to the alternative, which is often no governance at all or predatory extraction by a distant state. In Mali, for significant populations in significant territories, the answer has increasingly been yes.

Syria: The Exogenous Pathway and the Internationalization of Jihadist State-Building

Syria’s post-Assad transition represents a categorically different—and more dangerous—phenomenon than Mali’s endogenous trajectory. The critical difference is the role of international actors not merely as observers or opponents of jihadist governance but as active participants in its consolidation.

The core dynamic is an inversion of the conditionality logic that has traditionally governed international engagement with problematic regimes. In the standard model, international recognition, sanctions relief, and development assistance are conditional on demonstrated reform: protection of minorities, respect for human rights, institutional accountability, and verifiable political transformation. The sequence is: reform first, reward later. This sequencing preserves leverage, creates incentives for behavioral change, and ensures that international resources support—rather than entrench—problematic governance. In Syria, this sequence has been inverted. Recognition has preceded reform. Resources have preceded safeguards. The institutional apparatus of governance is being constructed with international support before credible rule-of-law commitments, minority protections, security-sector reform, or verifiable accountability mechanisms exist. The result is that international actors are not responding to a reformed state; they are participating in the construction of a state whose transformation remains performative rather than substantive. The mechanics of this normalization are traceable through specific policy decisions:

1. U.S. sanctions architecture: in late June 2025, the United States announced an executive order terminating the comprehensive Syria sanctions program, explicitly framing the decision as enabling economic relief while maintaining some targeted measures. This represented a fundamental shift from the maximum-pressure approach that had characterized post-2011 policy
2. HTS delisting: in early July 2025, the United States revoked Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. This delisting removed legal barriers to engagement and signaled that HTS’s organizational lineage—rooted in al-Qaeda—was no longer disqualifying
3. EU institutional support package: in January 2026, the European Commission publicly announced a financial support package of approximately €620 million for 2026–2027, explicitly including support for “early reconstruction and the rebuilding of state institutions.”

The significance of these decisions extends beyond their immediate policy content. Collectively, they represent a theory of the case: that Syria’s new authorities can be treated as normal state interlocutors, that engagement and investment will produce moderation, and that the risks of normalization are outweighed by the costs of continued isolation. This theory may prove correct. Political transitions are inherently uncertain, and engagement can create pathways for influence that isolation forecloses. But the theory rests on assumptions that the evidence does not yet support—and that the sequencing of normalization makes increasingly difficult to test.

The character of Syria’s emerging governance order is visible in its treatment of populations and territories that do not accept centralized control. The events in Aleppo’s Kurdish neighborhoods in early January 2026 illustrate the logic of consolidation. Clashes in Aleppo’s Kurdish neighborhoods—Sheikh Maqsoud, Ashrafiyah, and Bani Zaid—triggered mass displacement. Reuters reported that the fighting drove more than 140,000 people from their homes, with Syrian authorities reporting civilian deaths. The state’s response framed the displacement as an “evacuation” and demanded that Kurdish forces leave within a fixed window. The strategic meaning of these events transcends their immediate context. What is visible in Aleppo is a familiar state-making technique: demography as governance, displacement as administrative reconfiguration, and “integration” as absorption under a singular coercive hierarchy. Kurdish officials warned of “dangerous demographic changes,” while the Kurdistan Regional Government’s prime minister publicly characterized the attacks as ethnic cleansing. Even where specific incidents are contested, credible monitoring outlets have reported serious abuses and targeting of civilian infrastructure in these neighborhoods. The structural point is clear: these operations function as polity-consolidation, not merely security operations. They establish that plural governance is impermissible, that alternative authorities will be eliminated, and that the new order’s claim to sovereignty is absolute.

Mali’s trajectory is dangerous because it may culminate in a jihadist polity acquiring de facto sovereignty without recognition—forcing international actors to respond to a new reality they could not prevent. Syria’s trajectory is more dangerous because it teaches jihadist-origin authorities that state capture is the shortest route to international accommodation. The lesson that Syria’s trajectory threatens to establish is transformational: that “governance performance” can be staged through rebranding while external actors supply the material scaffolding of statehood; that delisting and sanctions relief can be secured without substantive transformation; that reconstruction finance will flow once territorial control is demonstrated; and that the international community will prioritize stability over accountability. This is the co-production of sovereignty at its most consequential. The international system is not simply responding to a state that exists; it is participating in making one—by conferring economic normalcy and diplomatic usability on an authority whose transformation remains incomplete. When the EU describes its package as necessary to “help the government restore services and rebuild state institutions,” it is not funding recovery; it is underwriting the machinery of sovereign consolidation.

Rojava as Counter-Model: Why Plural Governance Threatens Jihadist Sovereignty

Rojava—the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES)—is routinely discussed as an ethnic or separatist question. This framing fundamentally misunderstands why it provokes such intense hostility from jihadist-origin centralizers and their enablers. Rojava is not merely a territorial challenge; it is an alternative theory of legitimate order.

From a political science standpoint, legitimacy is comparative. Political authorities do not merely claim to govern well; they claim to be the legitimate source of governance—to possess the right to rule. Jihadist polities make this claim with particular intensity because their authority rests on theological foundations: sharia-based governance is not one option among others but the only authentic form of Islamic polity. Alternative governance models—especially those that are pluralistic, rights-asserting, and institutionally resilient—threaten the ontological claim at the heart of jihadist sovereignty. Rojava’s institutional architecture embodies precisely this alternative. The DAANES Social Contract codifies principles that directly contradict the jihadist governance model: a co-chair system requiring gender balance in political leadership, multi-ethnic representation across administrative levels, plural legal arrangements that accommodate different community traditions, and a secular framework that separates religious authority from political power. These are not merely administrative arrangements; they are a competing theory of what legitimate order looks like. Rojava’s existence demonstrates that alternatives to jihadist governance are possible—that order, security, and moral coherence do not require the singular coercive hierarchy that jihadist polities claim as necessary.

Understanding why Rojava must be subordinated requires attention to the logic of jihadist state-making. Territorial control is necessary but not sufficient; what is required is monopoly over the definition of legitimate authority. Alternative governance models—particularly those that are functional and resilient—undermine this monopoly by their mere existence. This explains why the contest is not simply “center vs. periphery” in a neutral administrative sense. The framing of “one state” or “national unity” is not a neutral ideal; it is an ideological weapon deployed to delegitimize pluralism as treason and to reframe local self-government as an obstacle to national unity. The goal is not merely territorial integration but the elimination of competing theories of legitimate order. The events in Aleppo illustrate this logic in practice. Displacement is not merely a byproduct of conflict; it is a technique of governance—a means of eliminating populations whose presence sustains alternative political possibilities. “Demographic engineering” is the accurate term: the deliberate manipulation of population distribution to produce political outcomes that coercion alone cannot achieve.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) represent a unique phenomenon in contemporary international security: a non-state armed actor that provides a global public good. The SDF’s role in the territorial defeat of ISIS is well documented, but its ongoing function is equally significant. The SDF maintains the detention architecture that constrains ISIS reconstitution—holding tens of thousands of ISIS-linked detainees and family members whose repatriation most states have refused to accept. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented approximately 42,000 foreign ISIS suspects and family members from around 60 countries detained in northeast Syria, many of them children. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Counter-Terrorism Engagement Fund justification explicitly identifies support for vetted partner forces to “conduct defeat-ISIS missions, maintain secure and humane detention, and prevent resurgence” as a core strategic priority. This creates a trap. The SDF’s counterterrorism function is a global public good—it benefits states that do not bear its costs. But once a jihadist-origin authority is endowed with international legitimacy and reconstruction resources, the forces that resist it—even those performing this counterterrorism function—are recoded as obstacles to “sovereignty” and “state unity.”

International Incubation of a Replicable Model

The comparative analysis yields a clear pattern: Mali demonstrates that jihadist governance can scale from below through state failure, local dispute regulation, taxation, and security provision—while international securitization dynamics and externalized security contribute to delegitimizing the state and narrowing political alternatives. The trajectory is slow, contested, and proceeds against international resistance. Syria demonstrates that jihadist-origin governance can scale from above through international legalization and capitalization—delisting, sanctions relief, and reconstruction finance that rebuild the very institutions through which coercion becomes routine administration. The trajectory is accelerated, enabled, and proceeds with international participation.

Syria is thus the more dangerous model because it resolves—on behalf of jihadist-origin rulers—the hardest problems of insurgent state-building: liquidity, external market access, and international usability. When the EU describes its package as necessary to help the government “restore services and rebuild state institutions,” it is not funding recovery; it is underwriting the machinery of sovereign consolidation.

The strategic danger extends beyond the individual cases. If Syria’s trajectory succeeds—if a jihadist-origin authority can obtain delisting, sanctions relief, and reconstruction finance while using coercion and demographic engineering to extinguish rival governance—then it becomes a proven pathway. The model will be studied, imitated, and replicated. The logic is straightforward: armed movements in fragile states learn from each other. If the Syrian case demonstrates that the shortest route to international acceptance is not democratization but the performative grammar of “state reconstruction” backed by the brute facts of territorial control, then that lesson will shape strategic calculations across multiple theaters. In the Sahel, in the Horn of Africa, in parts of the Levant, and across fragile states worldwide, armed movements will observe that capturing a capital and performing governance produces international resources faster than negotiating with international conditions. This is the template effect: the creation of a replicable model that transforms the incentive structure facing armed movements globally. The international system is not merely accommodating individual cases; it is incubating a transferable terrorist state model.

A serious counterterrorism and governance policy cannot proceed from the assumption that “statehood” is morally neutral or that institutions are automatically liberalizing. Institutions are instruments; they can entrench pluralism, or they can professionalize coercion. The question is not whether Syria is rebuilding, but what kind of polity is being financed into existence. The current international approach treats institution-building as inherently positive—as if courts, police, and administrative systems are neutral goods whose existence is always preferable to their absence. This assumption is analytically indefensible. Courts that enforce coercive displacement are not the same as courts that protect rights. Police that target minorities are not the same as police that maintain public order. Administrative systems that enable demographic engineering are not the same as systems that serve all citizens.

If the EU and the U.S. insist on engagement—and there may be legitimate reasons for engagement—then engagement must be conditional in ways that are operationally credible. The SDF’s detention function is not a bargaining chip; it is a non-negotiable security externality. Undermining the SDF while proclaiming commitment to defeat ISIS is strategic incoherence. International policy must recognize that the detention architecture in northeast Syria serves global security interests that transcend the political preferences of Damascus. Rojava’s plural governance is not the problem to be “resolved” but a stabilizing alternative order that reduces ISIS rebound risk and provides a rights-based counter-model. International policy should explicitly support the preservation of plural governance arrangements rather than acquiescing to their elimination. The European Union, the United States, and other international actors must be called out—directly, publicly, and analytically—for what their current sequencing promotes. The pattern is clear: premature recognition, sanctions relief without safeguards, and reconstruction finance before transformation. Each of these decisions contributes to the emergence of a polity in which jihadist-origin movements acquire the full rewards of sovereign legitimacy while paying none of the transformation costs that conditionality was designed to impose. This is not a call for isolation or disengagement. It is a call for sequencing that preserves leverage: conditions before resources, safeguards before institution-building, verification before normalization. The current approach inverts this sequence, and the consequences will extend far beyond Syria.

The Stakes of the Present Moment

The international system stands at a decision point. The choices made regarding Mali and Syria in the coming months and years will establish precedents that shape the strategic environment for decades. Two future paths are possible. First, the international community recognizes the nature of the phenomenon it confronts: the emergence of jihadist polities that acquire the functional attributes of sovereignty while preserving their ideological core and coercive repertoires. It responds by reimposing conditionality, protecting alternative governance models, and refusing to provide the material scaffolding of statehood until substantive transformation has occurred. In this future path, jihadist state-building remains a difficult and contested project, and armed movements learn that capture of a capital does not automatically produce international accommodation. Second, the current trajectory continues. Jihadist-origin authorities obtain delisting, sanctions relief, and reconstruction finance while using coercion and demographic engineering to eliminate rival governance. The model succeeds, becomes replicable, and is studied and imitated across fragile theaters worldwide. Here, the international system has not merely failed to prevent terrorist polities; it has incubated a transferable template for their construction.

The frontline community that exposes this choice most clearly—the community whose survival most directly refutes the jihadist model—is the Kurdish pluralist experiment in Rojava. Its multi-ethnic governance, its gender-equal political structures, its secular legal framework, and its demonstrated capacity to contain ISIS represent everything that jihadist polities claim is impossible. If Rojava survives and thrives, it demonstrates that alternatives exist. If Rojava is subordinated or destroyed, the jihadist claim to monopoly on legitimate order is validated.

The international system must choose which future it will enable. The evidence presented here suggests that current policy is enabling the second path —and that only fundamental reorientation can prevent the institutionalization of jihadist sovereignty from becoming the template for state-making in the twenty-first century.

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The author acknowledges that this analysis draws on primary documentation from official government sources, including U.S. Department of State announcements, European Commission communications, and Department of Defense budget justifications, as well as reporting from international human rights organizations and major news agencies. The interpretive framework and policy recommendations are the author’s own.