Warscapes and Reticulating Inhumanities: Ethnographic Lessons from Shia Militancy

Parts of Islamist Studies, Security and Conflict Studies, and Terrorism Studies reduce Shia combatants to indoctrinated masses due to their biased scholarship. Their approach remains top-down and macro-level, overlooking lived experiences and individual perceptions of those engaged in political violence. Accordingly, this article critically engages with such scholarship by highlighting how lived experiences and individual perceptions configure non-ideational paths toward political violence. I propose an ethnographically guided phenomenological inquiry of Shia nonstate armed actors and their situatedness in warscapes. I use the concept of warscapes and the complexities of individuation in warscapes to highlight the conceptual necessity of theorizing political violence from relational grounds that blurs the boundaries of micro-level and meso-level analysis. These relational grounds are shaped by inhumanities that predate conflicts and political violence reticulate inhumanities into a network that constitutes warscapes. I show this by combining the ethnography of Shia transnational militancy with the political histories of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. My critical interventions propose that Shia militancy is not only about sectarian divisions in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria or Yemen and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s defending its territories by other means. Shia militancy is also about individual worldviews, governing the multitudes, domestic politics, taming the Shia citizenry and the state keeping entropy and disorder low.