Barely 20 years after the red Soviet flag had been lowered over Moscow's Kremlin, marking the end of the once all-powerful Soviet Union, a black flag was raised over many locations in the Arab Sunni heartlands of the Middle East, signaling the birth of a completely different type of a new “state.” On 8 April 2013, a largely unknown religious scholar from the small Iraqi town of Samarra with the nom de guerre of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had announced the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). A year later, Islamic State controlled large regions including some large cities such as Mosul, Ramadi, and Raqqa with possibly over 8 million inhabitants. It has attracted the allegiance of tens of thousands of young jihadists – men and women – from all over the world. It has branches in at least eighteen other countries and carries out terrorist attacks in may Muslim countries and throughout much of Europe. In June 2014, it turned into a self-proclaimed Caliphate, claiming the religious and political leadership over all Muslims in the world.

IS had its predecessor organizations, but this was the first time that a nonstate actor has begun to control large territories and populations and create a state. And despite appearing to us as an enigma, it proved quite resilient. After being militarily attacked on all sides by a powerful array of global, regional, and local powers for now over three years, it is still not defeated. IS grew out of the vacuum created by the virtual collapse of Iraq and Syria; without this, the emergence of such a historical paradox would not have been possible. If indeed IS is a historical paradox, only time will tell. It may very well be that we see other such strange state constructs driven by nonstate actors emerge from the ruins of collapsing nation-states. Such new types of “state building” points at another problem, that of failing and collapsing nation-states.

IS may hence be symbolic of a geopolitical development in which the insecurities caused by a fading post-Cold War peace order are now compounded by failing nation-states, the rise of belligerent nonstate actors, and the spreading of intrastate armed conflicts.