Updated, 11/14/14 with new content.

President Obama is traveling this week in the Asia-Pacific region. He is attending the APEC Summit in Beijing Monday and Tuesday; the ASEAN Summit and the East Asia Summit in Myanmar Tuesday; and the G-20 Summit in Brisbane Saturday and Sunday. Brookings experts have offered significant commentary on the president's agenda and challenges during this trip:

Richard Bush, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and the Michael H. Armacost Chair, reflects on what Presidents Obama and Xi said about the situation in Hong Kong during their summit.

Charles Freeman, a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center, reflects on Chinese President Xi's address to business executives during APEC during which Xi discussed the "new normal" of Chinese economic growth and more open visa policies. His remarks, Freeman notes, "sounded a contrasting note to those he made just a month earlier" and "were also out of tune with the well-chronicled anxieties of foreign investors about the souring business environment they face in China."

Neil Ruiz, a senior policy analyst and associate fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, says that the new visa rules agreed to by Presidents Obama and Xi "is an important step in building economic bridges between Chinese cities and U.S. metropolitan areas."

Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon, the Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair in International Security, focuses on two prospective agreements on military matters, dealing with confidence-building and operational safety issues, reached between the U.S. and China. "The Obama and Xi teams should be proud of a good summit," writes O'Hanlon, "But situating these accords in a broader framework underscores how much work remains to be done."

On the U.S.-China climate agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions: Brookings Managing Director William Antholis calls it "dramatic" for both diplomatic and domestic political reasons; and Fellow Tim Boersma, acting director of the Energy Security Initiative, says it is "a big deal."

Miriam Sapiro, a visiting fellow and former deputy U.S. trade representative, says that the trip "gives the White House the chance to emphasize foreign and economic policy goals that can be broadly embraced by Democrats and Republicans." Sapiro also commented on the importance of trade policy, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, in a recent Brookings Cafeteria podcast.

Experts recently joined together in a full-day conference to examine the economic, environmental, political, and security implications of President Obama's trip to China and his interactions with President Xi Jinping. Full audio, video, and a transcript of remarks by former U.S. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon are available.

Six experts from the John L. Thornton China Center recently offered their views on how President Obama can have a productive visit with President Xi. Their comments covered issues including Hong Kong, trade, and domestic Chinese reforms, among others.

Lynn Kuok, a nonresident fellow with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, offers her perspectives on Obama's trip to Myanmar. 

In Think Tank 20, experts from Brookings and around the world address interrelated debates about growth, convergence, and income distribution—three elements likely to shape policy debates beyond the G-20 Summit. Use the handy globe interactive to navigate to countries and regions.

Kemal Derviş—vice president and director of Global Economy and Development and the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar—and Peter Drysdale—emeritus professor of economics at Australian National University—are the editors of a new volume on the G-20 summit at five years. They explore questions including, Will these summits add ongoing value to global economic governance, or will they will become purely ceremonial gatherings, which continue to take place because of the inertia in such processes?

Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in Economic Studies, explains new research on the growing longevity gap between high-income and low-income Americans, especially among the aged.

“Life expectancy difference of low income workers, middle income workers, and high income workers has been increasing over time,” Burtless says. “For people born in 1920 their life expectancy was not as long typically as the life expectancy of people who were born in 1940. But those gains between those two birth years were very unequally distributed if we compare people with low mid-career earnings and people with high mid-career earnings.” Burtless also discusses retirement trends among the educated and non-educated, income inequality among different age groups, and how these trends affect early or late retirement rates.

Also stay tuned for our regular economic update with David Wessel, who also looks at the new research and offers his thoughts on what it means for Social Security.

Show Notes

Later retirement, inequality and old age, and the growing gap in longevity between rich and poor

Disparity in Life Spans of the Rich and the Poor Is Growing

Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen on Stitcher, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.

For more than a decade, government assistance to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan (the so-called AIP countries) has dominated United States aid efforts. And as the examples below illustrate, American institutions and mindsets found it extraordinarily difficult to adjust to aid in unsafe places. Cameron Munter draws on his experience as the head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Mosul, Iraq in 2006 and as ambassador of the United States to Pakistan in Islamabad in 2011, with a description of U.S. reconstruction and state-building from which we may find lessons to consider in the future.

In 2006, when he went to Mosul as the first leader of the first PRT, the American civilian and military authorities in Baghdad painfully learned that the post-conflict situation would not correct itself. The undergrowth of our own bureaucratic structure prevented us from gaining a sophisticated understanding of our surroundings. Members of the PRT came and left after a few months, without passing on their hard-obtained knowledge. Local authorities quickly realized that the PRT had neither the money nor the firepower of the brigade commanders. And most of all, the guiding principles in place were still the creation of a kind of constitutional framework where political leaders, police, courts, businesspeople, and citizens would have institutions familiar to Americans, institutions that would work as we knew how to make them work.

Munter arrived in Pakistan at a time of great hope for U.S.-Pakistani relations. In 2011, in a series of meetings with the U.S. deputy secretary of state for resources and the head of USAID, Kerry-Lugar-Berman priorities took center stage: education, energy efficiency, job creation, special projects in the tribal areas, and public health. It is one thing to define a task and quite another to apply it to the specific context of a country in which security considerations prevent most USAID workers from even laying eyes on their projects. Overall, it seems the United States was much better at measuring its commitment to a prosperous, democratic Pakistan at peace with its neighbors by counting how much it spent and how fast rather than creating the proper relationship with those on the ground with whom it might have partnered.

Under these circumstances, what are lessons learned? When security is shaky, assistance is difficult. It may be that in situations like the AIP countries, we only have the capacity to engage in humanitarian aid and immediate reconstruction. If that is so, then the whole question of engagement in dangerous places is reopened: In a military setting, with military tasks, and thus a military system of organization, can civilian assistance succeed? Money spent is the way we measure commitment in such a setting, and that doesn’t bring the results we need.

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• Imagining assistance: Tales from the American aid experience in Iraq in 2006 and Pakistan in 2011

Five years pass so quickly. It seems like only yesterday that EU leaders were emerging from an unseemly and apparently ad hoc appointment process to announce that Catherine Ashton, a member of the British House of Lords and a recently appointed European trade commissioner, would be the first-ever high representative for foreign affairs and security policy -- a sort of EU foreign minister. One existential currency crisis and two Russian invasions of Ukraine later, the EU is picking her successor.

With the passage of time and the rush of events, the stakes have become much higher. Yet the EU continues to select its leaders as if its postmodern continental paradise were not under siege from the south, because of the disintegration of the Arab world, and to the east, thanks to Russian aggression. Just like last time, the selection of the new high representative, Federica Mogherini, was undignified, full of haggling, and more focused on her gender, party affiliation, and nationality than on her actual qualifications for the job. And those are few: Mogherini emerged from obscurity just a few months ago to become Italy’s foreign minister.

Critics look at Mogherini’s lack of experience and assume that the EU’s underperformance in foreign policy will continue. This is a real possibility, and with crises brewing to Europe’s east and south, this is a particularly bad moment for the EU to descend into a bout of internal squabbling. But Mogherini can transcend the process that selected her and be the foreign policy representative the EU needs if she learns a few lessons from the recent past.

Back in 2009, pundits were filled with hope about the new EU foreign policy chief. The post was new and newly empowered to set up a diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service (EEAS). Against this backdrop, the choice of Ashton, an unknown British politician with no foreign policy experience, came as a cold shower. Her appointment reinforced the perception that the EU leaders’ stated resolve to raise the union’s foreign policy profile was rhetorical rather than real.

Although understandable, both the high expectations and the subsequent disappointment were misplaced. Even a high representative with an impeccable résumé would not have turned the EU into a foreign policy juggernaut. After all, the EU high representative is not a U.S. secretary of state with plenty of space to set U.S. foreign policy, but a bureaucrat operating within the much narrower limits of intergovernmental decision-making. In the EU, it is the member states -- not Brussels -- that make decisions on the most consequential issues of foreign policy.

Ashton has operated well within this limited sphere and carefully picked her issues. She has understood that the role of the high representative must change depending on the degree of agreement among the states. When there is a strong consensus, the high representative’s role most closely resembles that of a normal foreign minister -- he or she has great leeway to devise and implement policies. The 2013 normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo is a good case in point: there was sufficient consensus among member states that Ashton was able to spearhead an agreement between the two countries, for which she deservedly earned credit.

If there is a lack of consensus but also an imbalance of interest among member states, ad hoc groups of interested member states tend to take the initiative -- as did the United Kingdom, France, and Germany in 2003 on Iran’s nuclear program and Poland and Lithuania during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. The high representative’s task here is not to lead but to help devise a policy course acceptable to all member states and, once the policy has been created, lend it the political weight of the whole EU. Ashton has carefully interpreted this role in the nuclear talks with Iran, which she has conducted on behalf of the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany).

Finally, when member states have conflicting interests and all care about a particular issue, as they often do with regard to Russia, the high representative is limited to proposing lowest-common-denominator options that, however unsatisfying, represent what the EU can reasonably do. Ukraine, for better or for worse, is an example in which it would serve the EU little for the high representative to try to lead the member states to a destination that they have not (at least yet) agreed they want to go.

The high representative’s job description thus includes policy shaping, consensus building, and conflict management skills. The measure of his or her success is less a function of foreign policy chops than of the interpersonal skills the representative brings to the job. Measured against these requirements, Ashton’s record is decent. By the same token, there might be less reason to worry about Mogherini than some expect.

Mogherini is the high representative that EU leaders want. She is a woman, she is from the center-left, and she compensates the Italians for their recent losses in the international ranking of influential countries. Perhaps most significant, thanks to her lack of experience and high profile, she is unlikely to be able to challenge the member states’ principal role in EU foreign policy. Attesting to this is the fact that a number of EU member states agreed to her appointment despite having expressed concerns about Italy’s tendency to seek accommodation with Russia at a moment when Russia is invading its neighbor. However unhappy these countries may be with Mogherini’s selection, they are confident that her personal opinion on Russia will not affect the EU’s consensus-based foreign-policy-making process.

Mogherini’s weaknesses are real, but if she concentrates on what the EU high representative can realistically do, she can turn them into strengths. Her lack of defined policy positions on most issues will allow her to reflect consensus when it exists and to rely on the EEAS, which Ashton so assiduously built, to implement policies. This might make her an effective bridge builder between member states that disagree and also allows her to be more supportive than someone with a more established profile when vanguard groups of interested states want to move forward on specific issues on their own. Her lack of gravitas is more an issue of relative inexperience than a lack of personality. If she interprets correctly the multitasking role of the high representative, her standing will grow accordingly, as has happened with Ashton. Even on Russia policy, Mogherini has a unique opportunity. Although EU members are divided on what to do, Russia’s escalating aggression in Ukraine is slowly bringing them together. As an Italian associated with a relatively pro-Russian stance, her eventual calls to confront the Kremlin could be all the more effective.

The EU and the United States need a more unified and effective European foreign policy. But the EU is what it is. A U.S.-style secretary of state with a strong vision and lust for the spotlight would not transform the union because he or she would lack the legal authority and political legitimacy to do so. But a good high representative can still move the EU in the right direction, as long as he or she understands the subtleties of the role. And with the support of skilled advisers from the EEAS, Mogherini can be the high representative the EU needs.

This piece was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

As noted in our recent Brookings Institution report, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, are an emerging technology that requires the attention of local governments. Unfortunately, regulations governing their usage are significantly lagging the pace of innovation. Individual citizens who do not want these devices flying over (or even near) their property due to privacy or safety concerns have limited options. You can stay in your home and turn the music up until it goes away. Or you can go about your business and ignore the possibility that the drone has a camera to see inside your home. Others might prefer a more active response. In fact, there have been several recent instances where residents have taken it upon themselves to remove these drones from the skies…by force.

Misuses of drones

The usage of UAVs and the lack of a functional regulatory environment have not been without incident. Fire personnel in southern San Bernardino County were fighting the first major fire of the season and had to abort their tanker flights due to someone flying a drone at approximately 12,000 feet and interfering with the safety of the pilots. Just two weeks later, firefighters in Southern California were using several manned aircraft to help put out 20 car fires on an interstate highway that were caused when a wildfire jumped the highway unexpectedly.  Pilots had to ground the planes when it was reported that five drones were flying around the area to get a good look at the fires (two of which were witnessed actually chasing the tanker planes!).

In addition to the general lack of common sense by a few users interfering with life-saving aircraft around the U.S., Britain, Poland, and elsewhere, there have been an increasing number of incidents involving drones accused of serving as remote “peeping toms.” UAVs have also crashed into cars and homes; they have even been used to smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border in addition to smuggling marijuana into prisons in South Carolina and in Ohio.

Uneven regulations

When it comes to regulations around drones, we are living in the proverbial wild-west. A few states, like Nevada and Wisconsin, have passed legislation to prevent the weaponization of drones. But in July, a YouTube video went viral of a teenager in Connecticut who modified his drone to fire a semi-automatic handgun successfully. When confronted by law enforcement officials, they determined that no laws had actually been broken. Virginia was the first state legislature to put in place a two-year moratorium on drone usage by state or law enforcement agencies. That moratorium expired July 1^st. By the end of 2014, 36 states had introduced legislation aimed at protecting individual privacy in some manner. Only four of those passed last year. Currently, there are 17 states with some form of drone regulation on their books, and several other states still have legislation pending. Most of the laws that have passed, such as those in Idaho and Florida, focus on limiting police usage of drones by requiring probable cause warrants.

Nevada has been one of the more active states in the drone legislation arena. In addition to their legislation prohibiting the weaponization of civilian drones, the state also has passed legislation to provide homeowners rights to sue drone owners who fly their drones over personal property in certain circumstances. Furthermore, Nevada now requires law enforcement agencies to get warrants when using drones near any home “where there is an expectation of privacy.”

Potential benefits and rulemaking challenges

We do acknowledge and are excited about the positive benefits that drone technology is poised to provide. Amazon has been testing their commercial “Prime Air” package delivery system under an experimental testing agreement with the FAA since early 2015, which will likely impact the nature of their almost two year old partnership with the U.S. Postal Service. Drone startup company Flirtey successfully demonstrated their ability to deliver medicine to a rural medical facility in Virginia as part of their proof of concept efforts this July. Drones may even represent the future of pizza delivery.

The challenge this rapidly developing technology is creating is well ahead of local government efforts to rein in excessive activities. State and local governments need to engage on this policy issue more proactively. To do so, however, requires a delicate balancing act of the multiple competing interests of legitimate commercial uses, policing, public safety, privacy, and private property concerns. And this balancing has to take place in an environment where federal law remains unsettled too.

One thing we would definitely caution against is ‘regulation by default.’ To date, the efforts to regulate drone policy has focused on the drones themselves. As is commonly the case with new technology, governments typically engaged with a heavy hand that sometimes misses the opportunities afforded by the new technologies to improve city services and quality of life. Examples of this possible overreaction is Iowa City, Iowa and Charlottesville, Virginia, both of which were early adopters of complete bans on all surveillance drones within city limits back in 2013.

Local governments need to accept that drone technology is here for the near future. They must recognize that technology is not the problem, but how it is used can be a potential problem. Given the potential drawbacks and benefits, there is justification for reasoned regulation of drone technology.

How to react to presidential candidates who are running, in part or wholly, on their experience in private business?

It’s impossible for anyone to come into the White House with all the skills required to be a good president. We can know that key traits include intelligence, both cognitive and emotional; self-confidence; and decisiveness. Also needed are the ability to communicate; to listen and learn; to delegate; to recognize problems–and a sense of humor and humility.

Candidates’ stands on the issues are critical in primaries and in the general election, but I suspect that the views of many independent voters–whose ranks are growing–may not be as intensely held as those of partisan voters.

Given Americans’ widespread frustration with traditional politicians, it is understandable why a few candidates with at least some business experience have entered the fray. Having run a business exposes one to how government affects the private sector, which is the engine of economic growth and drives improvements in living standards.

But running a private-sector business is very different from heading a federal government that employs millions, and that takes in and spends trillions, while also dealing with a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues, many of which demand immediate attention. These things require dexterity–and the combined challenges are ones that no business ever comes close to dealing with. (Probably the closest experience to the presidency is running a large state. But even then, no governor has had to confront the range of foreign policy challenges facing the president.)

A critical difference between running a business and government is that CEOs can usually make sure that their orders are carried out; and if they’re not, those who didn’t do their jobs can be fired. Imagine a president tried working with Congress that way. “My way or the highway” won’t cut it.

One might think that military leaders would face the same problem, but successful generals, especially in recent times, have had to develop and hone political skills as well as knowing how to fight. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower is now regarded as a good president not only because of his military experience but because he also was a politician-administrator while commanding allied forces during World War II. George Washington had both a military and business background, but he was a politician too–and the government he oversaw wasn’t much larger than his (substantial) private business.

Some 2016 voters will cast ballots based on particular issues. But for others, particularly those who believe this country is on the wrong track, a candidate running on his or her business background in an effort to stand out from the pack is not likely to have the qualifications most important to being a successful president.

In many policy-related situations, the states can be useful laboratories to determine the most appropriate federal actions. Variations across states in health care programs, earned income credit rules, minimum wages, and other policies have helped inform debates about federal interventions.

In this paper, we reverse that approach. Many state and local governments currently face difficulties financing future pension obligations for their workers. The federal government, however, faced similar circumstances in the 1980s and successfully implemented a substantial reform. We examine the situation the federal government faced and how it responded to the funding challenge. We present key aspects of the situation facing state governments currently and draw comparisons between them and the federal situation in the 1980s. Our overarching conclusion is that states experiencing distress today about the cost and funding of its pension plans could benefit from following an approach similar to the federal government’s resolution of its pension problems in the 1980s.

The federal government retained the existing Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) for existing employees and created a new Federal Employees’ Retirement System (FERS) for new employees. FERS combined a less generous defined benefit plan than CSRS, mandatory enrollment in Social Security, and a new defined contribution plan with extensive employer matching. Although we do not wish to imply that a “one size fits all” solution applies to the very diverse situations that different states face, we nonetheless conclude that the elements of durable, effective, and just reforms for state pension plans will likely include the major elements of the federal reform listed above.

Section II discusses the federal experience with pension reform. Section III discusses the status and recent developments regarding state and local pensions. Section IV discusses the similarities in the two situations and how policy changes structured along the lines of the federal reform could help state and local governments and their employees.

Download "Public Pensions in Flux: Can the Federal Government’s Experiences Inform State Responses?" »

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As part of his economic revitalization plan, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been touting “womenomics,” a plan to increase the number of women in the labor force. One way for women to enter the workforce but bypass the conventional corporate structure is through entrepreneurship.

Four questions for three female entrepreneurs

At a recent Center for East Asia Policy Studies event on womenomics and female entrepreneurship in Japan, we brought together three successful female entrepreneurs to discuss their experiences both in the United States and Japan. Prior to their panel discussion, we asked each of the speakers four questions about their careers.

1. What was the trigger that made you decide to start your own business?
2. What was the biggest hurdle in starting and/or running your business?
3. How or when was being a woman an asset to you as an entrepreneur and/or running your business?
4. How has the climate for female entrepreneurs changed compared to when you started your business?

Despite the differing environments for entrepreneurs and working women in the two countries, the speakers raised many of the same issues and offered similar advice. Access to funding or financing was an issue in both countries, as was the necessity to overcome fears about running a business or being in male-dominated fields. All of the speakers noted the positive changes in the business environment for female entrepreneurs since they had started their own businesses, as well as the impact this has had in creating more opportunities for women.

Donna Fujimoto Cole

Donna Fujimoto Cole is the president and CEO of Cole Chemical and Distributing Inc. in Houston, Texas. She started her company in 1980 at the urging of her clients. Today Cole Chemical is ranked 131 among chemical distributors globally by ICIS (Independent Chemical Information Service) and its customers include Bayer Material Scientific, BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble, Shell, Spectra Energy, and Toyota. Cole is also an active member of her community and serves on the boards of a variety of national and regional organizations.

Fujiyo Ishiguro

A founding member for the Netyear Group, Fujiyo Ishiguro is now the president and CEO of the Netyear Group Corporation based in Tokyo, Japan. The firm, which was established in 1999, devises comprehensive digital marketing solutions for corporate clients. The Netyear Group was listed on the Mothers section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2008. Recently, Ishiguro has served on a number of Japanese government committees including the Cabinet Office’s “The Future to Choose” Committee and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s “Internet of Things” Committee. 

Sachiko Kuno

Sachiko Kuno is the co-founder, president, and CEO of the S&R Foundation in Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization that supports talented individuals in the fields of science, art, and social entrepreneurship. A biochemist by training, Kuno and her research partner and husband Ryuji Ueno have established a number pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic foundations including R-Tech Ueno in Japan and Sucampo Pharmaceuticals in Bethesda, Maryland. Together, Kuno and Ueno hold over 900 patents. Kuno is active in the greater Washington community and serves on the boards of numerous regional organizations.

Full video of the event featuring these speakers can be found here.

Video

• The importance of mentors for female entrepreneurs
• Female entrepreneurs: Different options and different styles
• Female leadership creates opportunities

Over 200 delegates from 50 countries gather this week in Washington for the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship. The summit hosts entrepreneurs to teach and learn innovative ways to strengthen professional and social relationships between the U.S. and the Islamic world. During his first major address to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo last June, President Obama pledged to increase engagement through entrepreneurship, exchange programs and multilateral service initiatives.

Volunteer-led development initiatives have begun to act on Obama’s call for citizen diplomacy and private-sector engagement. The Initiative on International Volunteering and Service at Brookings and the Building Bridges Coalition have fueled an emerging legislative initiative that calls for increasing the role of international volunteers in the U.S. diplomatic agenda and development programs. This Service World Initiative has drawn from Brookings research outlining options to advance the president’s call for multilateral service.

As seen last year, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lived in urban areas. And this trend is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. By 2050, urban dwellers are expected to make up about 70 percent of Earth’s total population. These informed 21st century urban citizens demand 24-7 connectivity, smart electric grids, efficient transportation networks, safe food and water, and transparent social services. All these demands place a huge strain on existing city infrastructures and the global environment. Most affected by this rapid urban boom, are the emerging markets. So how do we tackle this development dilemma?

One way is for highly-skilled experts, from a range of countries, to volunteer their time in emerging markets to help improve economic development, government services and stimulate job growth. This type of pro-bono program has many benefits. It benefits the urban areas in these emerging markets by leveraging intelligence, connecting systems and providing near-term impact on critical issues such as transportation, water, food safety, education and healthcare. It benefits the expert volunteers by fostering their teamwork skills, providing a cultural learning experience, and broadening their expertise in emerging markets.

IBM, which chairs the Building Bridges Coalition’s corporate sector, hosts a range of volunteer-led global entrepreneurship programs that improve economic stability for small- and medium-sized businesses, increase technology in emerging markets and open doors for the next generation of business and social leaders. This program connects high-talent employees with growing urban centers around the world and fosters the type of leadership to help IBM in the 21st century.

Recently, IBM sent a group of experts to Ho Chi Minh City as part of its Corporate Service Corps, a business version of the Peace Corps. This was the first Corporate Service Corps mission to be made up of executives, and the first to help a city in an emerging market analyze its challenges holistically and produce a plan to manage them. As a result, the city has now adopted a 10-year redevelopment plan that includes seven pilot programs in areas ranging from transportation to food safety. IBM will also help the city set up academic programs to prepare young Vietnamese to launch careers in technology services. IBM will continue this program throughout the next couple years to evolve the next set of global business and cultural hubs utilizing the volunteer hours of some of its most seasoned experts.

The Presidential Summit this week will further Obama’s call to “turn dialogue into interfaith service, so bridges between peoples lead to action.” The policy initiative of the Building Bridges Coalition, coupled with entrepreneurial innovations such as IBMs, can foster greater prosperity and service between the U.S. and our global partners.

Abstract

Most pollsters base their election projections off questions of voter intentions, which ask “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” By contrast, we probe the value of questions probing voters’ expectations, which typically ask: “Regardless of who you plan to vote for, who do you think will win the upcoming election?” We demonstrate that polls of voter expectations consistently yield more accurate forecasts than polls of voter intentions. A small-scale structural model reveals that this is because we are polling from a broader information set, and voters respond as if they had polled twenty of their friends. This model also provides a rational interpretation for why respondents’ forecasts are correlated with their expectations. We also show that we can use expectations polls to extract accurate election forecasts even from extremely skewed samples.

I. Introduction

Since the advent of scientific polling in the 1930s, political pollsters have asked people whom they intend to vote for; occasionally, they have also asked who they think will win. Our task in this paper is long overdue: we ask which of these questions yields more accurate forecasts. That is, we evaluate the predictive power of the questions probing voters’ intentions with questions probing their expectations. Judging by the attention paid by pollsters, the press, and campaigns, the conventional wisdom appears to be that polls of voters’ intentions are more accurate than polls of their expectations.

Yet there are good reasons to believe that asking about expectations yields more greater insight. Survey respondents may possess much more information about the upcoming political race than that probed by the voting intention question. At a minimum, they know their own current voting intention, so the information set feeding into their expectations will be at least as rich as that captured by the voting intention question. Beyond this, they may also have information about the current voting intentions—both the preferred candidate and probability of voting—of their friends and family. So too, they have some sense of the likelihood that today’s expressed intention will be changed before it ultimately becomes an election-day vote. Our research is motivated by idea that the richer information embedded in these expectations data may yield more accurate forecasts.

We find robust evidence that polls probing voters’ expectations yield more accurate predictions of election outcomes than the usual questions asking about who they intend to vote for. By comparing the performance of these two questions only when they are asked of the exact same people in exactly the same survey, we effectively difference out the influence of all other factors. Our primary dataset consists of all the state-level electoral presidential college races from 1952 to 2008, where both the intention and expectation question are asked. In the 77 cases in which the intention and expectation question predict different candidates, the expectation question picks the winner 60 times, while the intention question only picked the winner 17 times. That is, 78% of the time that these two approaches disagree, the expectation data was correct. We can also assess the relative accuracy of the two methods by assessing the extent to which each can be informative in forecasting the final vote share; we find that relying on voters’ expectations rather than their intentions yield substantial and statistically significant increases in forecasting accuracy. An optimally-weighted average puts over 90% weight on the expectations-based forecasts. Once one knows the results of a poll of voters expectations, there is very little additional information left in the usual polls of voting intentions. Our findings remain robust to correcting for an array of known biases in voter intentions data.

The better performance of forecasts based on asking voters about their expectations rather than their intentions, varies somewhat, depending on the specific context. The expectations question performs particularly well when: voters are embedded in heterogeneous (and thus, informative) social networks; when they don’t rely too much on common information; when small samples are involved (when the extra information elicited by asking about intentions counters the large sampling error in polls of intentions); and at a point in the electoral cycle when voters are sufficiently engaged as to know what their friends and family are thinking.

Our findings also speak to several existing strands of research within election forecasting. A literature has emerged documenting that prediction markets tend to yield more accurate forecasts than polls (Wolfers and Zitzewitz, 2004; Berg, Nelson and Rietz, 2008). More recently, Rothschild (2009) has updated these findings in light of the 2008 Presidential and Senate races, showing that forecasts based on prediction markets yielded systematically more accurate forecasts of the likelihood of Obama winning each state than did the forecasts based on aggregated intention polls compiled by Nate Silver for the website FiveThirtyEight.com. One hypothesis for this superior performance is that because prediction markets ask traders to bet on outcomes, they effectively ask a different question, eliciting the expectations rather than intentions of participants. If correct, this suggests that much of the accuracy of prediction markets could be obtained simply by polling voters on their expectations, rather than intentions.

These results also speak to the possibility of producing useful forecasts from non-representative samples (Robinson, 1937), an issue of renewed significance in the era of expensive-to-reach cellphones and cheap online survey panels. Surveys of voting intentions depend critically on being able to poll representative cross-sections of the electorate. By contrast, we find that surveys of voter expectations can still be quite accurate, even when drawn from non-representative samples. The logic of this claim comes from the difference between asking about expectations, which may not systematically differ across demographic groups, and asking about intentions, which clearly do. Again, the connection to prediction markets is useful, as Berg and Rietz (2006) show that prediction markets have yielded accurate forecasts, despite drawing from an unrepresentative pool of overwhelmingly white, male, highly educated, high income, self-selected traders.

While questions probing voters’ expectations have been virtually ignored by political forecasters, they have received some interest from psychologists. In particular, Granberg and Brent (1983) document wishful thinking, in which people’s expectation about the likely outcome is positively correlated with what they want to happen. Thus, people who intend to vote Republican are also more likely to predict a Republican victory. This same correlation is also consistent with voters preferring the candidate they think will win, as in bandwagon effects, or gaining utility from being optimistic. We re-interpret this correlation through a rational lens, in which the respondents know their own voting intention with certainty and have knowledge about the voting intentions of their friends and family.

Our alternative approach to political forecasting also provides a new narrative of the ebb and flow of campaigns, which should inform ongoing political science research about which events really matter. For instance, through the 2004 campaign, polls of voter intentions suggested a volatile electorate as George W. Bush and John Kerry swapped the lead several times. By contrast, polls of voters’ expectations consistently showed the Bush was expected to win re-election. Likewise in 2008, despite volatility in the polls of voters’ intentions, Obama was expected to win in all of the last 17 expectations polls taken over the final months of the campaign. And in the 2012 Republican primary, polls of voters intentions at different points showed Mitt Romney trailing Donald Trump, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich and then Rick Santorum, while polls of expectations showed him consistently as the likely winner.

We believe that our findings provide tantalizing hints that similar methods could be useful in other forecasting domains. Market researchers ask variants of the voter intention question in an array of contexts, asking questions that elicit your preference for one product, over another. Likewise, indices of consumer confidence are partly based on the stated purchasing intentions of consumers, rather than their expectations about the purchase conditions for their community. The same insight that motivated our study—that people also have information on the plans of others—is also likely relevant in these other contexts. Thus, it seems plausible that survey research in many other domains may also benefit from paying greater attention to people’s expectations than to their intentions.

The rest of this paper proceeds as follows, In Section II, we describe our first cut of the data, illustrating the relative success of the two approaches to predicting the winner of elections. In Sections III and IV, we focus on evaluating their respective forecasts of the two-party vote share. Initially, in Section III we provide what we call naïve forecasts, which follow current practice by major pollsters; in Section IV we product statistically efficient forecasts, taking account of the insights of sophisticated modern political scientists. Section V provides out-of-sample forecasts based on the 2008 election. Section VI extends the assessment to a secondary data source which required substantial archival research to compile. In Section VII, we provide a small structural model which helps explain the higher degree of accuracy obtained from surveys of voter expectations. Section VIII characterizes the type of information that is reflected in voters’ expectation, arguing that it is largely idiosyncratic, rather than the sort of common information that might come from the mass media. Section IX assesses why it is that people’s expectations are correlated with their intentions. Section VI uses this model to show how we can obtain surprisingly accurate expectation-based forecasts with non-representative samples. We then conclude. To be clear about the structure of the argument: In the first part of the paper (through section IV) we simply present two alternative forecasting technologies and evaluate them, showing that expectations-based forecasts outperform those based on traditional intentions-based polls. We present these data without taking a strong position on why. But then in later sections we turn to trying to assess what explains this better performance. Because this assessment is model-based, our explanations are necessarily based on auxiliary assumptions (which we spell out).

Right now, we begin with our simplest and most transparent comparison of the forecasting ability of our two competing approaches.

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• Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations

Editor's Note: A new academic study by David Rothschild and Justin Wolfers concludes that poll questions about expectations—which ask people whom they think will win—have historically been better guides to the outcome of presidential elections than traditional questions about people’s preferences. David Leonhardt of The New York Times conducted an interview with Wolfers by e-mail, focusing on the implications of the study for current presidential polls.

David Leonhardt:In the article, I discussed only briefly the expectations polls about the 2012 race, and some of the Twitter feedback was eager for more. By my count, there have been five recent major polls asking people whom they expect to win — by ABC/Washington Post, Gallup, Politico/George Washington University, New York Times/CBS News, and the University of Connecticut. There is also sixth from Rand asking people the percentage chances they place on each candidate winning. How consistent are the polls?

Justin Wolfers: There’s a striking consistency in how people are responding to these polls. The most recent data are from the Gallup poll conducted Oct. 27-28, and they found 54 percent of adults expect Obama to win, versus 34 percent for Romney. Around the same time (Oct. 25-28), there was a comparable New York Times/CBS poll in which 51 percent of likely voters expect Obama to win, versus 34 percent for Romney.

But these results aren’t just stable across pollsters, they’ve also been quite stable over the past few weeks, even as the race appeared to tighten for a while. Politico and George Washington University ran a poll of likely voters on Oct. 22-25, finding 54 percent expect Obama to win, versus 36 percent for Romney. The University of Connecticut/Hartford Courant poll of likely voters got a somewhat higher share not venturing an answer, with 47 percent expecting Obama to win versus 33 percent for Romney. Finally, the ABC/Washington Post poll of registered voters run Oct. 10-13 found 56 percent expect Obama to win, compared to 35 percent for Romney.

I’m rather surprised by the similarities here – across time, across pollsters, across how they word the question, and across different survey populations (likely voters, registered voters, or adults) – but I suspect that is part of the nature of the question. You just don’t see the noise here that you see in the barrage of polls of voter intentions, which are extremely sensitive to all of these factors.

I always throw out the folks who don’t have an opinion, and count the proportions as a share of only those who have an opinion. By this measure, the proportion who expect Obama to win is: 61 percent (Gallup), 60 percent (The New York Times), 60 percent (Politico), 59 percent (Hartford Courant), 62 percent (ABC). The corresponding proportions who expect Romney to win are: 39 percent, 40 percent, 40 percent, 41 percent and 38 percent. Taking an average across all these polls: 60.3 percent expect Obama to win. Or if you prefer that I focus only on the freshest two polls, 60.7 percent expect him to win.

DL: The results do seem have tightened somewhat since the first debate, which Romney was widely seen to have won, right? Do the patterns — or lack of patterns — in the numbers help solve the issue of what most people are thinking of when they answer the expectation question: Private information (their friends’ voting plans, yard signs in their neighborhood, etc.) or public information (media coverage, speeches, etc.)?

JW: The results of the polls of voter intentions seem to have tightened a bit since the first debate. There’s an interesting school of thought in political science that basically says: voters are pretty predictable. But they don’t think too hard about how they’re going to vote until right before the election. So what happens is that public opinion through time just converges to where it “should” be. And viewed through this lens, the first debate was just an opportunity for people who really should always have been in Romney’s camp to figure out that they’re in Romney’s camp.

So why did the expectations polls move less sharply than intentions polls? One possibility is that your expectations are explicitly forward-looking, and perhaps people saw the race tightening as they saw that some of the support for Obama was a bit soft. Let me put this another way: There are two problems with how we usually ask folks how they plan to vote. First, the question captures the state of public opinion today, while the expectations question effectively asks you where you think public opinion is going. And second, polls typically demand a yes or no answer, when the reality may be that we know that our support is pretty weak, and it may change, or we aren’t even sure whether we’ll turn up to the polls. The virtue of asking about expectations is that you can think about each of your friends, and think not just about who they’re supporting today, but also whether they may change their minds in the future.

I worry that it sounds a bit like I haven’t answered your question, but that’s because I don’t have a super-sharp answer. If I had to summarize, it would be: expectations questions allow you to think about how the dynamics of the race may change, and so they are less sensitive to that change when it happens.

DL: Based on your research and the current polls, what does the expectations question suggest is the most likely outcome on Tuesday?

JW: If a majority expects Obama to win, then right there, it says that I’m forecasting an Obama victory.

But by how much? Here’s where it gets tricky. The fact that 60 percent of people think that Obama is going to win doesn’t mean that he’s going to win 60 percent of the votes. And it doesn’t mean that he’s a 60 percent chance to win. Rather, it simply says that given the information they have, 60 percent of people believe that Obama is going to win. Can we use this to say anything about his likely winning margin?

Yes. I’ll spare you the details of the calculation, but it says that if 60.3 percent of people expect Obama to beat Romney, then we can forecast that he’ll win about 52.5 percent of the two-party vote. That would be a solid win, though not as impressive as his seven-point win in 2008.

The proportion who expect Obama to win right now looks awfully similar to the proportion who expected George W. Bush to win in a Gallup Poll at a similar point in 2004. Ultimately Bush won 51.2 percent of the two-party vote.

Right now, Nate Silver is predicting that Obama will win 50.5 percent of the popular vote, and Romney 48.6 percent. As a share of the two-party vote, this says he’s forecasting Obama to win 51 percent of the vote. Now Silver’s approach aggregates responses from hundreds of thousands of survey respondents, while I have far fewer, so his estimate still deserves a lot of respect. I don’t want to overstate the confidence with which I’m stating my forecast. So let me put it this way: My approach says that it’s likely that Obama will outperform the forecasts of poll-based analysts like Silver.

DL: We’ll find out soon enough. Thanks.

Event Information

On March 26, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings hosted an expert consultation on the development of the World Bank Group's new Education Strategy. The consultative meeting brought together a small group of experts from diverse fields. The purpose of the discussion was to gather input and suggestions aimed at strengthening the World Bank Group's work in the education sector.

Elizabeth King, Director of Education in the Human Development Network at the World Bank, opened the event by providing an overview of the Bank’s current approach to education, and how it has evolved over the last several decades. She described the Bank’s priorities as reconnecting education to the broader development agenda, supporting more equitable access, ensuring better learning, and strengthening education systems. The Bank’s main operating principals are taking a whole-sector approach, building the evidence base in education, and measuring the results and impact. Beginning with this extensive consultation process, the Bank is demonstrating its willingness to work with others in the development community to build a larger and more robust evidence base from which to draw lessons to improve the quality of limited staff to maximize the impact of Bank activities, to underscore its commitment to partnerships with other organizations and civil society groups, and to move toward improving the measurement of results so as to be able to further improve the Bank’s education programs around the world.

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How has the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—signed between the P5+1 and Iran one year ago—played out in practice? Several Brookings scholars, many of whom participated prominently in debates last year surrounding official congressional review, offered their views.

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at a joint meeting of Congress. His address sparked an intense debate among U.S. and Israeli lawmakers over the protocol issues raised by the invitation to speak, which came from the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives without consultation with the Obama White House, as well as the substance of the address — a broadside against Obama’s Iran policy — and its timing during the final days of a closely contested Israeli election.

Brookings scholars weighed in on the debate, through blog posts, op-eds and the media. These include:

Fellow Natan Sachs explained why Netanyahu’s speech was so controversial.  "Israelis, by and large, don't like it when their prime minister quarrels with the United States," Sachs told Vox. "For most voters, especially in the core base on the right and I think center right, here's Bibi doing something that opposition leaders cannot do: speak the way he does with his English and this reception from Americans.” Also read Sachs' blog post on the electoral implications of the speech as well as his Haaretz op-ed with recommendations for Israeli and American strategy toward the Iran nuclear talks.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy (CMEP) at Brookings, appeared on Charlie Rose following the speech, and said, “I think the speech was very effective, as a speech, particularly at the end when Netanyahu was really playing to his domestic audience and political base more than anyone…I think that’s probably the video clip the Likud will be playing in  ads as the campaign winds down.”

Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami looked at poll results examined U.S. public opinion related to Netanyahu’s speech. "Among Democrats, those holding favorable views of the Israeli prime minister declined from 25 percent in November to 16 percent in February, and among Independents from 21 percent to 14 percent. Correspondingly, unfavorable views increased from 22 to 26 percent among Democrats, and from 14 to 21 percent among Independents," he wrote in Foreign Policy.

A New York Times editorial examining Netanyahu's speech discussed American public opinion on the Iran nuclear deal, and cited Telhami’s poll results “show[ing] that a clear majority of Americans — including 61 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats — favor an agreement.” Telhami also organized and moderated the annual Sadat Forum earlier this week, featuring a discussion on the Iranian nuclear issue and the Netanyahu speech with Brookings Distinguished Fellow Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Matthews, and CMEP Senior Fellow Suzanne Maloney.

According to Ambassador Martin Indyk, who has served as director of the Foreign Policy program and was just named Brookings Executive Vice President, Netanyahu remained against any agreement. “He was pretty clear about his opposition to the deal,” Indyk told Foreign Policy. “I believe he wants to sink it, not modify it.”

Prior to the speech, Robert Einhorn, senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Intelligence and Security and the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Initiative, wrote an op-ed published in the International New York Times discussing Netanyahu’s angle on the Iran talks. After Netanyahu’s speech, Einhorn appeared on Christiane Amanpour and argued that the deal was “not an ideal deal, but it’s a good deal, and one that’s better than any realistic alternative.” Einhorn, who formerly participated in the negotiations with Iran as a senior State Department official, was quoted in coverage of the speech published in the Washington Post and Politico, among others.

In an op-ed on U.S. News and World Report, Maloney argued that when it comes to a deal with Iran, “The ever-present illusion of a more perfect deal is not worth risking an imperfect, but minimally sufficient, bargain.”

With the prospect of a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 looking increasingly likely and with the caveat that, “as always, Iran’s future behavior is hard to predict because its motives going into the nuclear negotiations are unclear and its decision-making is always opaque,” Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack examined the possible scenarios and offered his thoughts on whether a nuclear deal would likely make Iran more or less aggressive — or neither. 

Bruce Riedel, senior fellow and director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, wrote about Netanyahu’s address in contrast to Saudi Arabia’s diplomacy. “As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plays center stage at the Congress this week to slam the Iran deal-in-the-making, the Saudis are playing a more subtle game,” Riedel wrote. “Iran is priority number one. It's more than just the nuclear issue.” The pot was also quoted in a Bloomberg News analysis of Gulf reaction to the state of play on Iran.

Last week, William Galston, who holds Brookings' Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, wrote about the implications of Netanyahu’s speech, warning that “[t]he last thing he should want is a negative reception in the United States that fuels Israeli swing voters’ doubts about his capacity to manage Israel’s most important relationship.” And in his Washington Post column last week, Senior Fellow Robert Kagan argued that “there is no doubt that the precedent being set is a bad one” and regretted that “bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a U.S. president’s policies…will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.”

And finally, for anyone wanting to see what our scholars were tweeting during Netanyahu’s speech, and reaction afterward, here’s a round-up.

Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in Economic Studies, explains new research on the growing longevity gap between high-income and low-income Americans, especially among the aged.

“Life expectancy difference of low income workers, middle income workers, and high income workers has been increasing over time,” Burtless says. “For people born in 1920 their life expectancy was not as long typically as the life expectancy of people who were born in 1940. But those gains between those two birth years were very unequally distributed if we compare people with low mid-career earnings and people with high mid-career earnings.” Burtless also discusses retirement trends among the educated and non-educated, income inequality among different age groups, and how these trends affect early or late retirement rates.

Also stay tuned for our regular economic update with David Wessel, who also looks at the new research and offers his thoughts on what it means for Social Security.

Show Notes

Later retirement, inequality and old age, and the growing gap in longevity between rich and poor

Disparity in Life Spans of the Rich and the Poor Is Growing

Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen on Stitcher, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.

Researchers have long known that the rich live longer than the poor. Evidence now suggests that the life expectancy gap is increasing, at least here the United States, which raises troubling questions about the fairness of current efforts to protect Social Security.

There's nothing particularly mysterious about the life expectancy gap. People in ill health, who are at risk of dying relatively young, face limits on the kind and amount of work they can do. By contrast, the rich can afford to live in better and safer neighborhoods, can eat more nutritious diets and can obtain access to first-rate healthcare. People who have higher incomes, moreover, tend to have more schooling, which means they may also have better information about the benefits of exercise and good diet.

Although none of the above should come as a surprise, it's still disturbing that, just as income inequality is growing, so is life-span inequality. Over the last three decades, Americans with a high perch in the income distribution have enjoyed outsized gains.

Using two large-scale surveys, my Brookings colleagues and I calculated the average mid-career earnings of each interviewed family; then we estimated the statistical relationship between respondents' age at death and their incomes when they were in their 40s. We found a startling spreading out of mortality differences between older people at the top and bottom of the income distribution.

For example, we estimated that a woman who turned 50 in 1970 and whose mid-career income placed her in the bottom one-tenth of earners had a life expectancy of about 80.4. A woman born in the same year but with income in the top tenth of earners had a life expectancy of 84.1. The gap in life expectancy was about 3½ years. For women who reached age 50 two decades later, in 1990, we found no improvement at all in the life expectancy of low earners. Among women in the top tenth of earners, however, life expectancy rose 6.4 years, from 84.1 to 90.5. In those two decades, the gap in life expectancy between women in the bottom tenth and the top tenth of earners increased from a little over 3½ years to more than 10 years.

Our findings for men were similar. The gap in life expectancy between men in the bottom tenth and top tenth of the income distribution increased from 5 years to 12 years over the same two decades.

Rising longevity inequality has important implications for reforming Social Security. Currently, the program takes in too little money to pay for all benefits promised after 2030. A common proposal to eliminate the funding shortfall is to increase the full retirement age, currently 66. Increasing the age for full benefits by one year has the effect of lowering workers' monthly checks by 6% to 7.5%, depending on the age when a worker first claims a pension.

For affluent workers, any benefit cut will be partially offset by gains in life expectancy. Additional years of life after age 65 increase the number years these workers collect pensions. Workers at the bottom of the wage distribution, however, are not living much longer, so the percentage cut in their lifetime pensions will be about the same as the percentage reduction in their monthly benefit check.

Our results and other researchers' findings suggest that low-income workers have not shared in the improvements in life expectancy that have contributed to Social Security's funding problem.

It therefore seems unfair to preserve Social Security by cutting future benefits across the board. Any reform in the program to keep it affordable should make special provision to protect the benefits of low-wage workers.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times. 

Will McCants: As we wind down another year in the so-called Long War and begin another, it’s a good time to reflect on where we are in the fight against al-Qaida and its bête noire, the Islamic State. Both organizations have benefited from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings but they have taken different paths. Will those paths converge again or will the two organizations continue to remain at odds? Who has the best strategy at the moment? And what political changes might happen in the coming year that will reconfigure their rivalry for leadership of the global jihad?

To answer these questions, I’ve asked some of the leading experts on the two organizations to weigh in over. The first is Barak Mendelsohn, an associate professor of political science at Haverford College and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He is author of the brand new The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences.

Barak Mendelsohn: Al-Qaida attacked the U.S. homeland on 9/11, unprepared for what would follow. There was a strong disconnect between al-Qaida’s meager capabilities and its strategic objectives of crippling the United States and of bringing about change in the Middle East. To bridge that gap, Osama bin Laden conveniently and unrealistically assumed that the attack on the United States would lead the Muslim masses and all other armed Islamist forces to join his cause. The collapse of the Taliban regime and the decimation of al-Qaida’s ranks quickly proved him wrong.

Yet over fourteen years later al-Qaida is still around. Despite its unrealistic political vision and considerable setbacks—above all the rise of the Islamic State that upstaged al-Qaida and threatened its survival—it has branches in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa.

Down, but not out

Two factors explain al-Qaida’s resilience: changes in the environment due to the Arab revolutions and the group’s ability to take advantage of new opportunities by learning from past mistakes. The Arab awakening initially undercut al-Qaida’s original claims that change in Muslim countries cannot come peacefully or without first weakening the United States. Yet, the violence of regimes against their people in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere created new opportunities for al-Qaida to demonstrate its relevance. Furthermore, involved citizens determined to shape their own future presented al-Qaida with a new opportunity to recruit. 

But favorable conditions would be insufficient to explain al-Qaida’s resilience without changes in the way al-Qaida operates. Learning from its bitter experience in Iraq, al-Qaida opted to act with some moderation. It embedded itself among rebel movements in Syria and Yemen, thus showing it could be a constructive actor, attentive to the needs of the people and willing to cooperate with a wide array of groups. As part of a broader movement, al-Qaida’s affiliates in these countries also gained a measure of protection from external enemies reluctant to alienate the group’s new allies. 

[E]ven after showing some moderation, al-Qaida’s project is still too extreme for the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

At present, the greatest threat to al-Qaida is not the United States or the Arab regimes; it’s the group’s former affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State. ISIS is pressuring al-Qaida’s affiliates to defect—while it has failed so far to shift their allegiance, it has deepened cracks within the branches and persuaded small groups of al-Qaida members to change sides. Even if al-Qaida manages to survive the Islamic State’s challenge, in the long term it still faces a fundamental problem that is unlikely to change: even after showing some moderation, al-Qaida’s project is still too extreme for the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

Up, but not forever

With the United States seeking retrenchment and Middle Eastern regimes weakening, the Islamic State came to prominence under more convenient conditions and pursued a different strategy. Instead of wasting its energy on fighting the United States first, ISIS opted to establish a caliphate on the ruins of disintegrating Middle Eastern states. It has thrived on the chaos of the Arab rebellions. But in contrast to al-Qaida, it went beyond offering protection to oppressed Sunni Muslims by promoting a positive message of hope and pride. It does not merely empower Muslims to fend off attacks on their lives, property, and honor; the Islamic State offers its enthusiastic followers an historic chance to build a utopian order and restore the early Islamic empire or caliphate.

ISIS opted to establish a caliphate on the ruins of disintegrating Middle Eastern states. It has thrived on the chaos of the Arab rebellions.

The Islamic State’s leaders gambled that their impressive warfighting skills, the weakness of their opponents, and the reluctance of the United States to fight another war in the Middle East would allow the group to conquer and then govern territory. The gamble paid off. Not only did ISIS succeed in controlling vast territory, including the cities of Raqqa and Mosul; the slow response to its rise allowed the Islamic State’s propaganda machine to construct a narrative of invincibility and inevitability, which has, in turn, increased its appeal to new recruits and facilitated further expansion.

And yet, the Islamic State’s prospects of success are low. Its miscalculations are threatening to undo much of its success. It prematurely and unnecessarily provoked an American intervention that, through a combination of bombings from the air and skilled Kurdish proxies on the ground, is limiting the Islamic State’s ability to expand and even reversing some of the group’s gains. 

ISIS could settle for consolidating its caliphate in the territories it currently controls, but its hubris and messianic zeal do not allow for such limited goals. It is committed to pursuing military expansion alongside its state-building project. This rigid commitment to two incompatible objectives is perhaps the Islamic State’s biggest weakness. 

[T]he slow response to its rise allowed the Islamic State’s propaganda machine to construct a narrative of invincibility and inevitability.

Rather than pursue an economic plan that would guarantee the caliphate’s survival, the Islamic State has linked its economic viability to its military expansion. At present, ISIS relies on taxing its population and oil sales to support its flailing economy. But these financial resources cannot sustain a state, particularly one bent on simultaneously fighting multiple enemies on numerous fronts. Ironically, rather than taming its aspirations, the Islamic State sees conquest as the way to promote its state-building goals. Its plan for growing the economy is based on the extraction of resources through military expansion. While this plan worked well at first—when the Islamic State faced weak enemies—it is not a viable solution any longer, as the self-declared caliphate can no longer expand fast enough to meet its needs. Consequently, this strategy is undermining ISIS rather than strengthening it. 

Unfortunately, even if the Islamic State is bound to fail over the long run, it has had enough time to wreak havoc on other states in the neighborhood. And while its ability to govern is likely to continue diminishing, the terror attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Sinai suggest that the Islamic State will remain capable of causing much pain for a long time.

Will McCants: As we begin another year in the so-called Long War, it’s a good time to reflect on where we are in the fight against al-Qaida and its bête noire, the Islamic State. Both organizations have benefited from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings but they have taken different paths. Will those paths converge again or will the two organizations continue to remain at odds? Who has the best strategy at the moment? And what political changes might happen in the coming year that will reconfigure their rivalry for leadership of the global jihad?

To answer these questions, I’ve asked some of the leading experts on the two organizations to weigh in. First was Barak Mendelsohn, who contrasts al-Qaida’s resilience and emphasis on Sunni oppression with the Islamic State’s focus on building a utopian order and restoring the caliphate.

Next is Clint Watts, a Fox fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He offers ways to avoid the flawed assumptions that have led to mistaken counterterrorism forecasts in recent years. 

Clint Watts: Two years ago today, counterterrorism forecasts focused on a “resurgent” al-Qaida. Debates over whether al-Qaida was again winning the war on terror ensued just a week before the Islamic State invaded Mosul. While Washington’s al-Qaida debates steamed away in 2013, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s al-Qaida suffered unprecedented internal setbacks from a disobedient, rogue affiliate formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI). With terror predictions two years ago so far off the mark, should we even attempt to anticipate what the next two years of al-Qaida and ISIS will bring?

Rather than prognosticate about how more than a dozen extremist groups operating on four continents might commit violence in the future, analysts might instead examine flawed assumptions that resulted in the strategic surprise known as the Islamic State. Here are insights from last decade’s jihadi shifts we should consider when making forecasts on al-Qaida and the Islamic State’s future in the coming decade. 

Loyalty is fleeting, self-interest is forever. Analysts that missed the Islamic State’s rise assumed that those who pledged allegiance to al-Qaida would remain loyal indefinitely. But loyalties change despite the oaths that bind them. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State’s leaders used technicalities to slip their commitments to al-Qaida. Boko Haram has rapidly gone from al-Qaida wannabe to Islamic State devotee. 

In short, jihadi pledges of loyalty should not be seen as binding or enduring, but instead temporary. When a group’s fortunes wane or leaders change, allegiance will rapidly shift to whatever strain of jihad proves most advantageous to the group or its leader. Prestige, money, manpower—these drive pledges of allegiance, not ideology. 

Al-Qaida and the Islamic State do not think solely about destroying the United States and its Western allies. Although global jihadi groups always call for attacks on the West, they don’t always deliver. Either they can’t or they have other priorities, like attacking closer to home. So jihadi propaganda alone does not tell us much about how the group is going to behave in the future. 

Zawahiri, for example, has publicly called on al-Qaida’s affiliates to carry out attacks on the West. But privately, he has instructed his affiliate in Syria to hold off. And for most of its history, the Islamic State focused on attacking the near enemy in the Middle East rather than the far enemy overseas, despite repeatedly vowing to hit the United States. Both groups will take advantage of any easy opportunity to strike the United States. However, continuing to frame future forecasts through an America-centric lens will yield analysis that’s off the mark and of questionable utility.

[J]ihadi propaganda alone does not tell us much about how the group is going to behave in the future.

Al-Qaida and the Islamic State don’t control all of the actions of their affiliates. News headlines lead casual readers to believe al-Qaida and the Islamic State command and control vast networks operating under a unified strategic plan. But a year ago, the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris caught al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) completely by surprise—despite one of the attackers attributing the assault to the group. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb's (AQIM) recent spate of attacks in Mali and Burkina Faso were likely conducted independently of al-Qaida’s central leadership. While the Islamic State has clearly mobilized its network and inspired others to execute a broad range of international attacks, the group’s central leadership in Iraq and Syria closely manages only a small subset of these plots. 

At no time since the birth of al-Qaida have jihadi affiliates and networks operated with such independence. Since Osama bin Laden’s death, al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen, the Sahel, Somalia, and Syria all aggressively sought to form states—a strategy bin Laden advised against. Target selections and the rapid pace of plots by militants in both networks suggest local dynamics rather than a cohesive, global grand strategy drive today’s jihad. Accurately anticipating the competition and cooperation of such a wide array of terrorist affiliates with overlapping allegiances to both groups will require examination by teams of analysts with a range of expertise rather than single pundits. 

At no time since the birth of al-Qaida have jihadi affiliates and networks operated with such independence.

Both groups and their affiliates will be increasingly enticed to align with state sponsors and other non-jihadi, non-state actors. The more money al-Qaida and the Islamic State have, the more leverage they have over their affiliates. But when the money dries up—as it did in al-Qaida’s case and will in the Islamic State’s—the affiliates will look elsewhere to sustain themselves. Distant affiliates will seek new suitors or create new enterprises. 

Inevitably, some of the affiliates will look to states that are willing to fund them in proxy wars against their mutual adversaries. Iran, despite fighting the Islamic State in Syria, might be enticed to support Islamic State terrorism inside Saudi Arabia’s borders. Saudi Arabia could easily use AQAP as an ally against the Iranian backed Houthi in Yemen. African nations may find it easier to pay off jihadi groups threatening their countries than face persistent destabilizing attacks in their cities. When money becomes scarce, the affiliates of al-Qaida and the Islamic State will have fewer qualms about taking money from their ideological enemies if they share common short-term interests. 

If you want to predict the future direction of the Islamic State and al-Qaida, avoid the flawed assumptions noted above. Instead, I offer these three notes: 

1. First, look to regional terrorism forecasts illuminating local nuances routinely overlooked in big global assessments of al-Qaida and the Islamic State. Depending on the region, either the Islamic State or al-Qaida may reign supreme and their ascendance will be driven more by local than global forces. 
2. Second, watch the migration of surviving foreign fighters from the Islamic State’s decline in Iraq and Syria. Their refuge will be our future trouble spot. 
3. Third, don’t try to anticipate too far into the future. Since bin Laden’s death, the terrorist landscape has become more diffuse, a half dozen affiliates have risen and fallen, and the Arab Spring went from great hope for democracies to protracted quagmires across the Middle East. 

Today’s terrorism picture remains complex, volatile, and muddled. There’s no reason to believe tomorrow’s will be anything different.

Will McCants: ISIS-claimed attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Egypt indicate the organization wants to take the fight to its enemies abroad. One reason might be that all is not well in ISIS-land. The nascent state in Syria and Iraq has lost around 25 percent of its territory and tens of thousands of fighters in the year since America and its allies began to their campaign to defeat it. While the state still endures for now, it's under tremendous pressure because of the costs of ceaseless war.

To explain the troubles ISIS faces at home, we have invited a group of scholars to comment on its governance over the past years and speculate on what they might face in the year ahead. First was Mara Revkin, who examined how opinions towards ISIS have changed since it captured Mosul more than a year ago.

Next up is Aymenn al-Tamimi, a Jihad-Intel research fellow at the Middle East Forum, who argues that internal documents show increasing challenges for the Islamic State. 

Aymenn al-Tamimi: There are a variety of ways to assess Islamic State (or ISIS) governance over its territories. One angle involves trying to talk to residents living within ISIS-controlled lands, and indeed this is the primary line of evidence Mara Revkin relies on in her piece assessing ISIS administration.

While oral testimony may produce some interesting observations on ISIS governance, it is also beset with difficulties in reliability and corroboration. The ISIS system of rule is a totalitarian dictatorship, on the lookout for anyone who could be deemed to be collaborating with the outside world. As such, residents may be reluctant to criticize, out of fear that they could be accused of leaking information harmful to ISIS. That can get a person disappeared or publicly executed. 

Last year, when I was speaking with a friend living in the western Anbar town of Rawa, he initially said that most residents preferred life under ISIS: 

“We are not content like before but I and most of the people here prefer living under the shade of the Islamic State, as no soldier comes upon our lands, and now I assure you that all the people of Rawa will fight in one rank against the [Iraqi] army if it tries to advance an inch because the army won’t have mercy on anyone…and this is the truth…and I give you knowledge of the sentiment among most of the people who were persecuted by the army but had committed no crime or fault, but we only lack [national grid] electricity.” 

At first glance, his sentiments seem quite understandable. Harassment, mass arrests, and disappearances in prisons of Iraqi Sunnis by the Baghdad government’s security forces were common grievances—maybe they have more weight than loss of access to public services like the national electricity grid, from which most areas under IS control have now been cut off. 

Yet in a subsequent conversation, in which I inquired about any publications ISIS had distributed in his area, the fear of ISIS became very apparent: 

“Brother, you know why I am cautious in giving you information: because the Internet is being monitored. And I want to know what you will do with it and whether this thing will harm the Dawla [ISIS], because after God Almighty and Exalted is He, we don’t have anything besides the Islamic State, and I fear having a [negative] effect on them.” 

Another resident of Rawa refused to discuss anything about life in the town, with the same concern about Internet communication being monitored by ISIS. 

These examples offer a glimpse into the challenges of understanding ISIS administration through local testimony. How can we be sure the testimony is not compromised on account of fear? It is of course possible to find people critical of ISIS living within its territories: for instance, a relative in Mosul told me a year ago that 90 percent of the city’s inhabitants prefer life before ISIS, but said fear prevents them from expressing their true feelings. But how does one even verify that claim? 

Cracks in the system

With clear shortcomings in oral testimony, I prefer to focus instead on internal ISIS documents to understand the evolution in governance—as well as problems facing ISIS that we don’t see in the endless streams of propaganda. To be sure, this method also has limitations: though I have managed to compile hundreds of documents so far, they likely constitute only a small fraction of the whole cache. Only if the ISIS project collapses with loss of major strongholds like Raqqa and Mosul—and hopefully the capture of tens of thousands of documents—will we get a fuller picture. 

Even so, the documents unearthed so far yield a number of important insights. The ISIS bureaucracy is ostensibly comprehensive and impressive, but it is clear that as time progresses, the state project is facing challenges due to pressure from its enemies. 

Only if the ISIS project collapses with loss of major strongholds like Raqqa and Mosul—and hopefully the capture of tens of thousands of documents—will we get a fuller picture.

For example, in mid-2015, the agricultural department issued a general notification urging people to conserve grain stocks on account of the “economic war” being waged by the coalition against ISIS, indicating that agricultural output in ISIS territories was in trouble. In addition, while ISIS makes no secret of its appeals for medical personnel to come to the caliphate, internal documents show that brain-drain is also a problem: multiple ultimatums have been issued, calling for medical professionals to return to ISIS lands or risk having their property confiscated. 

While ISIS would like to cultivate a new generation of professionals, the only real existing institution is Mosul University, which practically remains open only to Iraqi students. ISIS closed some departments on the grounds of contravening its ideology, and even those that remain open cannot function, likely owing to the wider issue of brain drain.

Documents also show great concern about the anti-ISIS coalition’s ability to launch airstrikes on high-profile targets. Worried about data security, the ISIS leadership increasingly attempts to restrict all broadcasting of information to its own channels. It has warned fighters and commanders not to open social media accounts or use mobiles, and recently banned satellite television.

Cash rules everything

Finally, for all the criticisms of the anti-ISIS coalition’s strategies, it is clear that they have significantly dented the group’s financial revenues. The Iraqi government no longer pays salaries of workers living under ISIS rule, airstrikes have hit ISIS-owned assets in the oil industry, Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) have taken the key Syria-Turkey border point of Tel Abyad, and Turkey has tightened security on remaining border areas under ISIS control. 

As a result, ISIS has reduced expenditures and increased taxation on its populations. In Mosul, for instance, ISIS imposed all costs for printing textbooks on school students. From Raqqa province, a memo dating to November/December 2015 established a 50 percent pay cut for all fighters, regardless of rank. The latter pointed to “the exceptional circumstances” ISIS is facing (referring, no doubt, to financial troubles). This is particularly significant as a financial budget I obtained from Deir az-Zor province shows that military upkeep—primarily in the form of fighters’ salaries—can be reasonably estimated to account for two-thirds of ISIS expenditures. These pay cuts may exacerbate problems of military cohesion in ISIS’s ranks—evidenced by a month-long general amnesty issued in October 2015 for deserters, and the failures of mobilization efforts to stop the Assad regime and Iran from breaking the ISIS siege of Kweiris airbase in Aleppo province.

Bring the fight home

For all of these insights into internal challenges for the ISIS project, I deem the prospect of collapse from an internal revolt unlikely. It is evident that internal opponents of ISIS face a stifling environment, and no one to date has offered them an alternative model of governance. Any internal uprisings that do occur—such as the Sha’itat revolt in Deir az-Zor province back in 2014—have been put down with ruthless efficiency. From the economic side, the group’s financial difficulties are unlikely to translate into total collapse, as it’s impossible to completely seal off cash flow between ISIS and the outside world. 

All of this shows that it will be up to outside forces to take the fight against ISIS to its heartlands.

Will McCants: ISIS-claimed attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Egypt indicate the organization wants to take the fight to its enemies abroad. One reason might be that all is not well in ISIS-land. The nascent state in Syria and Iraq has lost around 25 percent of its territory and tens of thousands of fighters in the year since America and its allies began to their campaign to defeat it. While the state still endures for now, it's under tremendous pressure because of the costs of ceaseless war.

To explain the troubles ISIS faces at home, we have invited a group of scholars to comment on its governance over the past years and speculate on what they might face in the year ahead. First was Mara Revkin, who examined how opinions towards ISIS have changed since it captured Mosul more than a year ago.

Next up was Aymenn al-Tamimi, a Jihad-Intel research fellow at the Middle East Forum, who argued that internal documents show increasing challenges for the Islamic State. 

This time, we’ve asked Aaron Zelin, the Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, to weigh in with a historical perspective.

Aaron Zelin: Attempts by salafi-jihadis to create states or govern territory are not a new phenomenon. Even for the Islamic State (IS), this is its second attempt at establishing a state and governing territories it controls. What sets it apart this time is the level of planning, sophistication, and capabilities compared to ten years ago.

Unlike the prior pieces in this series, I hope to present a historical perspective on IS governance, since I do not think one can be separate from the other.

The first state

In October 2006—when the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) was declared—the leader of al-Qaida in the Land of Two Rivers (better known as AQI), Abu Ayyub al-Masri (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir) pledged allegiance to the new self-declared leader of the faithful, Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi. In a January 2007 book, ISI’s Shaykh ‘Uthman ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Tamimi explains the rationale for declaring the state. In it, he also outlines the state’s responsibilities for areas it controls: prosecuting criminals and sinners, implementation of the hudud (fixed punishments in the Qur’an and Hadith), mediating and resolving conflicts, providing security, distributing food and relief, and selling oil and gas. 

Although it called itself a state, the Islamic State of Iraq controlled only small amounts of territory, for limited periods of time—in no small part because of the American military occupation, but also due to insurgent and tribal competition for power. It attempted to show a veneer of legitimacy by establishing a cabinet of ministries in April 2007 and September 2009. Because of ISI’s limitations, it was nearly impossible to resolve conflicts, provide security, distribute food and relief, or sell oil and gas. Instead, it fell back on mostly only instituting hisba (moral policing) activities and targeting enemies as murtadin (apostates) and therefore legitimate to target and kill. Ten years ago, therefore, ISI did not live up to its own standards of governance excellence.

Ten years ago, therefore, ISI did not live up to its own standards of governance excellence.

ISI killed and kidnapped leaders from prior allies—such as the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah, and other insurgent factions—because they were unwilling to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi. It required female residents to wear the niqab, burned down beauty salons and stores selling music, flogged individuals for drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, and banned barbers’ use of electric razors. ISI also banned positioning certain fruits next to one another at markets out of concerns over sexual innuendo, as well as banned the local bread (samun) and the use of ice. In town after town, this precipitated what eventually became known as the tribal sahwa, or awakening. That, along with the U.S. military surge in Iraq, tactically defeated ISI by 2009.

Towards a second state

Since ISI was only tactically and not strategically defeated, it used the American drawdown of troops that ended in December 2011, Sunni grievances with the Nouri al-Maliki regime in Baghdad, and most importantly the battlefield next door in Syria to rebuild its infrastructure and capabilities. As I noted in March 2013, a month before it changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS): “Through sectarian rhetoric, [ISI] will use the Syrian fight to try and gain more recruits in Iraq and redeem itself for its lost opportunity last decade.” Indeed it did. This time proved much different than a decade earlier. It also had a provisional position paper that outlined how it sought to take over territory and govern.

Prior to the infighting that began in January 2014 between ISIS and revolutionary, Islamist, and other jihadi factions in Syria, there was an understanding among the different insurgent forces against the Assad regime. As a consequence, ISIS was able to embed itself within the broader anti-Assad coalition even if other factions were wary of it—unlike now, when IS has pariah status. From April 2013 to January 2014, ISIS’s main focus was to present itself in a positive light to the Syrian population through da’wa (missionary) forums and by providing services. It also conducted softer moral policing, such as burning cigarettes or confiscating alcohol. But similar to a decade ago, it also killed other leaders from Syrian insurgent factions, prompting backlash. ISIS was pushed out of Latakia, Idlib, and parts of Aleppo governorates between January and March 2014. 

This led to ISIS’s independent consolidation of territory farther to the east in the Raqqa governorate and parts of Dair al-Zour governorate. It is also when more harsh punishments began to appear, such as cutting off hands for robbery or crucifying alleged apostates. In this period, ISIS also sought to appear as a state-like entity, showing off its various administrative departments including its da’wa offices, shariah courts, religious schools, police stations, and local municipalities, among others. It was an uneven process across its proto-wilayat (provinces) until its June 2014 declaration of the Caliphate, when ISIS changed its name again—to IS.

The second state

Since then, based on my review of thousands of IS media releases, a pattern emerged in IS attempts to expand, take over new territory, and consolidate its control. IS’s systematizing, bureaucratizing, and formalizing its governance structures allow it to operate consistently and in parallel across its various wilayat. This governance model can equally be applied in its core territory of Iraq and Syria as well as various other provinces. It is far more advanced than its prior incarnations, let alone al-Qaida branches (the closest instance being al-Shabab in Somalia).

IS’s systematizing, bureaucratizing, and formalizing its governance structures allow it to operate consistently and in parallel across its various wilayat.

My research demonstrates that IS state-building exhibits two stages: pre- or partial territorial control and full territorial control. Within these two categories are five phases of establishing control: intelligence, military, da’wa, hisba (consumer protection and moral policing), and governance. Although hisba would generally be considered part of IS’s governance apparatus, I separated the two—this helps distinguish the level of advancement and sophistication associated with meting out justice, versus that associated with actual services, administration, and economic activity, since the former is easier to implement than the latter. More details with specifics and case studies can be found here.

When compared with its first state as ISI and its building toward a second state as ISIS, the post-June 2014 IS structures, plans, and implementation are far superior.

When compared with its first state as ISI and its building toward a second state as ISIS, the post-June 2014 IS structures, plans, and implementation are far superior. Further, depending on the date and the particular province, IS did live up to its own standards of governance. That’s not to legitimize it, but rather to understand it on its own terms. This increased efficacy illustrates the organization’s ability to learn from past experiences. It also suggests that IS may apply lessons learned as more of its governance plays out in areas outside of Iraq and Syria—especially in Libya, but possibly even in Yemen or Afghanistan in the future. New knowledge will sharpen IS’s thinking and continue its growth and evolution as well as shorten its learning curve.

Therefore, aspects of the IS model could shift in the future. Moreover, since the American-led airstrikes began, its capabilities have been slowly diminished. As a result, it is currently difficult to determine whether IS is living up to its standards anymore.

Moreover, since the American-led airstrikes began, its capabilities have been slowly diminished. As a result, it is currently difficult to determine whether IS is living up to its standards anymore.

Watch and learn

Similar to IS, al-Qaida is in the process of learning lessons from the governance experience of the ISI in the mid-2000s. It is also looking back on its first attempted cases of governance activities by its own branches in the past several years in Somalia, Yemen, Mali, and Syria. Unlike IS, al-Qaida is attempting to root itself into local insurgencies in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Mali, and not play a monopolizing role (at least for now). The second governance attempt by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is still in its infancy, but its performance will provide more answers about the evolution in al-Qaida’s thinking on governance and how it differs from IS’s second governance attempt. 

The establishment of jihadi governance projects are a new normal. For now, it’s clear that IS has set a higher standard when compared to its earlier attempt a decade ago and to al-Qaida’s present governance. But the question going forward is whether either IS’s or al-Qaida’s models (or both) will be able to self-sustain in the long-term as they continue to incorporate lessons learned.

Will McCants: ISIS-claimed attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Egypt indicate the organization wants to take the fight to its enemies abroad. One reason might be that all is not well in ISIS-land. The nascent state in Syria and Iraq has lost around 25 percent of its territory and tens of thousands of fighters in the year since America and its allies began to their campaign to defeat it. While the state still endures for now, it's under tremendous pressure because of the costs of ceaseless war.

To explain the troubles ISIS faces at home, we have invited a group of scholars to comment on its governance over the past years and speculate on what they might face in the year ahead. First was Mara Revkin, who examined how opinions towards ISIS have changed since it captured Mosul more than a year ago. Then Aymenn al-Tamimi argued that internal documents show increasing challenges for the Islamic State. Next, Aaron Zelin weighed in with a historical perspective, analyzing the extent to which ISIS has lived up to its own standards of governance.

Now, we have Kamran Bokhari, a fellow with George Washington University's Program on Extremism, to argue that security—namely defending territory—is the foremost governance objective of ISIS in the short term.

Kamran Bokhari: Ascertaining the extent to which ISIS excels at governing requires, among other things, an understanding of its imperatives and capabilities. The most fundamental act of governance for any state is protecting its territory. With many of the world’s most powerful militaries now dedicating significant resources towards the Islamic State’s destruction, the group has its work cut out for it in this regard. Defending its current territorial holdings in Syria and Iraq (and expanding if and where possible) is the single most critical imperative for ISIS.

This is not to say that other aspects of governance, including those detailed by Mara Revkin, Aymenn al-Tamimi, and Aaron Zelin, are not priorities for ISIS. The polity erected by the transnational jihadist movement cannot hope to survive—much less expand—without the provision of essential services such as sanitation, utilities, healthcare, and education to its citizenry. However, ISIS can only focus so much on these functions when the areas it controls are under attack on multiple fronts. In the last few months, it has lost ground in certain areas—largely in Iraq—but its core turf in Syria remains intact. 

This resilience should sharpen the focus of U.S. and Western military and intelligence institutions. At present, analysts and policymakers focus too much on ISIS’s ideology and too little on its war-making tradecraft. Radicalization is necessary but not sufficient to produce violence—definitely not on the scale that ISIS has demonstrated. The geopolitical real estate directly under ISIS control in Syria and Iraq is about the size of the state of New York; if we include the swathes of land where it enjoys relative freedom of operation, it’s approximately as big as Great Britain. 

Defending such a wide expanse against ground assaults, airstrikes, special operations forces missions, as well as human and signals intelligence probes requires elaborate institutionalization. Aaron Zelin details how ISIS systematized bureaucratic structures between the fall of its first attempt at statehood (2006 to 2009) and its second incarnation (2011 to the present). During these periods, it crucially developed a multi-divisional conventional military and counter-intelligence. In addition to its primary need to defend its nascent state, the jihadist movement has spent most of its existence developing military and intelligence capabilities, which played a key role in its emergence as the most potent rebel force in post-Arab spring Syria. 

Where did ISIS leaders pick up their self-defense strategies? One answer is al-Qaida, though many analysts over-emphasize that linkage. ISIS leadership has also likely studied the rise and fall of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Run by the Afghan Taliban, the Emirate was the first and only contemporary jihadist movement to have established a state of any significance before ISIS. There are differences, of course. The Taliban emirate was based within the confines of the Afghan nation-state, and enjoyed active backing from Pakistan and other Gulf Arab states. Furthermore, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has denounced the movement founded by Mullah Mohammed Omar as a “deviant” entity. However, the experiences of the Afghan Taliban from 1996 to 2001 offer very valuable lessons for ISIS—all the more since the latter’s caliphate rejects national boundaries and lacks state sponsorship. 

Security first

ISIS leaders fear losing their nascent state in the face of growing economic and military pressures. They seek to avoid, in particular, the circumstances that allowed for the collapse of the Taliban regime following the September 11 attacks. Many have asked why ISIS would engage in transcontinental attacks in the West if its primary aim is the preservation of its polity. As Shadi Hamid has discussed, ISIS likely does not view its terrorist attacks like the one in Paris as undermining its state. I would actually argue that ISIS sees a U.S. ground intervention as only helping its cause. What it fears is a more complex approach from the Americans involving Syrian boots on the ground. 

Thus in many ways, ISIS’s caliphate today faces circumstances similar to the ones that the Taliban emirate did in late 2001. The U.S.-led coalition against the Taliban launched airstrikes, while intelligence and special operations forces supported an anti-Taliban militia coalition, the proverbial “boots on the ground.” Fast-forward 15 years, and the battlespace that ISIS finds itself in—though much more complex—has the same basic configuration. The ISIS leadership is now vigorously searching for ways to endure airstrikes, block intelligence efforts, and thwart special operations missions designed to take out critical leadership and infrastructure. 

Perhaps most pressing is the need to prevent the emergence of a critical mass of Kurdish and/or rival jihadist militias to whom ISIS could potentially lose significant tracts of land. In Afghanistan, anti-Taliban militiamen with U.S. support were able to stage a comeback from their bases in northern Afghanistan near the Tajikistan border, sweeping through Kabul and even seizing the Taliban’s home turf of Kandahar. ISIS does not want to experience something similar to that, with Syrian rebel forces turning toward its territory in eastern Syria, especially now that they have run into serious problems in western parts of the county. There, regime forces backed by Russian aircraft are gaining the upper hand in critical places in Aleppo and Idlib provinces. U.S. strategy, for its part, seems to be focused not on the collapse of the Assad regime but rather in equipping rebel forces to take on ISIS. Some rebels may do so in the hope of garnering greater Western support. 

For these reasons, ISIS needs to ensure that both those in its own ranks as well as the people over whom it rules have little incentive to desert or rebel. Coercion helps, but only to a certain extent. The Afghan Taliban learned this lesson the hard way, when the very same population that had initially welcomed it as protectors against anarchy turned against the movement and were instrumental in the implosion of its state. This is why the ISIS regime will try to balance coercion and the provision of quality services (which Mara Revkin highlights). But as Aymenn al-Tamimi notes, financial constraints seriously limit the organization’s ability to sustain public support by providing essential services without having to resort to tax increases. 

Civilian administration is a relatively new activity for ISIS, and it therefore will take time to improve its performance. In the short term, ISIS will focus more heavily on the security aspects of governance. It is better equipped and experienced in this sphere, given its own prior experience as non-state jihadist force. ISIS is likely to continue to focus on what it knows best, as doing so offers it a better chance of holding hard-fought ground against its opponents.

Will McCants: As we continue onwards in the so-called Long War, it’s a good time to reflect on where we are in the fight against al-Qaida and its bête noire, the Islamic State. Both organizations have benefited from the chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings but they have taken different paths. Will those paths converge again or will the two organizations continue to remain at odds? Who has the best strategy at the moment? And what political changes might happen in the coming year that will reconfigure their rivalry for leadership of the global jihad?

To answer these questions, I’ve asked some of the leading experts on the two organizations to weigh in. First was Barak Mendelsohn, who analyzed the factors that explain the resilience and weaknesses of both groups. Then Clint Watts offered ways to avoid the flawed assumptions that have led to mistaken counterterrorism forecasts in recent years. 

Next up is Charles Lister, a resident fellow at the Middle East Institute, to examine the respective courses each group has charted to date and whether that's likely to change. 

Charles Lister: The world of international jihad has had a turbulent few years, and only now is the dust beginning to settle. The emergence of the Islamic State as an independent transnational jihadi rival to al-Qaida sparked a competitive dynamic. That has heightened the threat of attacks in the West and intensified the need for both movements to demonstrate their value on local battlefields. Having spent trillions of dollars pushing back al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan and al-Qaida in Iraq, the jihadi threat we face today far eclipses that seen in 2000 and 2001.

As has been the case for some time, al-Qaida is no longer a grand transnational movement, but rather a loose network of semi-independent armed groups dispersed around the world. Although al-Qaida’s central leadership appears to be increasingly cut off from the world, frequently taking many weeks to respond publicly to significant events, its word remains strong within its affiliates. For example, a secret letter from al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to his Syrian affiliate the Nusra Front in early 2015 promptly caused the group to cease plotting attacks abroad.

Seeking rapid and visible results, ISIS worries little about taking the time to win popular acceptance and instead controls territory through force.

While the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2010 challenged al-Qaida’s insistence that only violent jihad can secure political change, the subsequent repression and resulting instability provided an opportunity. What followed was a period of extraordinary strategic review. Beginning with Ansar al-Sharia in Yemen (in 2010 and 2011) and then with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar al-Din, and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) in Mali (2012), al-Qaida began developing a new strategy focused on slowly nurturing unstable and vulnerable societies into hosts for an al-Qaida Islamic state. Although a premature imposition of harsh Shariah norms caused projects in Yemen and Mali to fail, al-Qaida’s activities in Syria and Yemen today look to have perfected the new “long game” approach.

In Syria and Yemen, al-Qaida has taken advantage of weak states suffering from acute socio-political instability in order to embed itself within popular revolutionary movements. Through a consciously managed process of “controlled pragmatism,” al-Qaida has successfully integrated its fighters into broader dynamics that, with additional manipulation, look all but intractable. Through a temporary renunciation of Islamic hudud (fixed punishments in the Quran and Hadith) and an overt insistence on multilateral populist action, al-Qaida has begun socializing entire communities into accepting its role within their revolutionary societies. With durable roots in these operational zones—“safe bases,” as Zawahiri calls them—al-Qaida hopes one day to proclaim durable Islamic emirates as individual components of an eventual caliphate.

Breadth versus depth

The Islamic State (or ISIS), on the other hand, has emerged as al-Qaida’s obstreperous and brutally rebellious younger sibling. Seeking rapid and visible results, ISIS worries little about taking the time to win popular acceptance and instead controls territory through force and psychological intimidation. As a militarily capable and administratively accomplished organization, ISIS has acquired a strong stranglehold over parts of Iraq and Syria—like Raqqa, Deir el-Zour, and Mosul—but its roots are shallow at best elsewhere in both countries. With effective and representative local partners, the U.S.-led coalition can and will eventually take back much of ISIS’s territory, but evidence thus far suggests progress will be slow.

Meanwhile, ISIS has developed invaluable strategic depth elsewhere in the world, through its acquisition of affiliates—or additional “states” for its Caliphate—in Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Russia. Although it will struggle to expand much beyond its current geographical reach, the growing importance of ISIS in Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan-Pakistan in particular will allow the movement to survive pressures it faces in Syria and Iraq. 

As that pressure heightens, ISIS will seek to delegate some level of power to its international affiliates, while actively encouraging retaliatory attacks—both centrally directed and more broadly inspired—against high-profile Western targets. Instability breeds opportunity for groups like ISIS, so we should also expect it to exploit the fact that refugee flows from Syria towards Europe in 2016 look set to dramatically eclipse those seen in 2015.

Instability breeds opportunity for groups like ISIS.

Charting a new course?

That the world now faces threats from two major transnational jihadist movements employing discernibly different strategies makes today’s counterterrorism challenge much more difficult. The dramatic expansion of ISIS and its captivation of the world’s media attention has encouraged a U.S.-led obsession with an organization that has minimal roots into conflict-ridden societies. Meanwhile the West has become distracted from its long-time enemy al-Qaida, which has now grown deep roots in places like Syria and Yemen. Al-Qaida has not disappeared, and neither has it been defeated. We continue this policy imbalance at our peril.

In recent discussions with Islamist sources in Syria, I’ve heard that al-Qaida may be further adapting its long-game strategy. The Nusra Front has been engaged in six weeks of on/off secret talks with at least eight moderate Islamist rebel groups, after proposing a grand merger with any interested party in early January. Although talks briefly came to a close in mid-January over the troublesome issue of the Nusra Front’s allegiance to al-Qaida, the group’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani now placed those ties as an issue on the table for negotiation. 

Al-Qaida has not disappeared, and neither has it been defeated.

The fact that this sensitive subject is now reportedly open for discussion is a significant indicator of how far the Nusra Front is willing to stretch its jihadist mores for the sake of integration in Syrian revolutionary dynamics. However, the al-Nusra Front's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is a long-time Al-Qaeda loyalist and doesn't fit the profile of someone willing to break a religious oath purely for the sake of an opportunistic power play. It is therefore interesting that this secret debate inside Syria comes amid whispers within Salafi-jihadi and pro-al-Qaida circles that Zawahiri is considering “releasing” his affiliates from their loyalty pledges in order to transform al-Qaida into an organic network of locally-inspired movements—led by and loosely tied together by an overarching strategic idea.

Whether al-Qaida and its affiliates ultimately evolve along this path or not, the threat they pose to local, regional, and international security is clear. When compounded by ISIS’s determination to continue expanding and to conduct more frequent and more deadly attacks abroad, jihadist militancy looks well-placed to pose an ever present danger for many years to come. 

Will McCants: ISIS-claimed attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Egypt indicate the organization wants to take the fight to its enemies abroad. One reason might be that all is not well in ISIS-land. The nascent state in Syria and Iraq has lost around 25 percent of its territory and tens of thousands of fighters in the year since America and its allies began to their campaign to defeat it. While the state still endures for now, it's under tremendous pressure because of the costs of ceaseless war.

To explain the troubles ISIS faces at home, we have invited a group of scholars to comment on its governance over the past years and speculate on what they might face in the year ahead. First was Mara Revkin, who examined how opinions towards ISIS have changed since it captured Mosul more than a year ago. Then Aymenn al-Tamimi argued that internal documents show increasing challenges for the Islamic State. Next, Aaron Zelin weighed in with a historical perspective, analyzing the extent to which ISIS has lived up to its own standards of governance. And Kamran Bokhari argued that security—namely defending territory—is the foremost governance objective of ISIS in the short term.

Below is an analysis from Quinn Mecham, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. He focuses on the need to provide alternative, positive models of governance for the populations living under ISIS control.

Quinn Mecham: The Islamic State group (ISIS), despite clear pretentions to statehood in the form of the “caliphate” it declared in June 2014, does not preside over a particularly successful “state.” It faces numerous challenges from both within and without, challenges that accelerated in 2015 with increasingly systematic airstrikes on ISIS fighters and facilities by numerous external actors. 

However, the governing institutions over which the Islamic State presides currently represent the best approximation of institutionalized governance for the millions of people in Iraq and Syria under its rule. Though international actors unanimously refuse to acknowledge the Islamic State as a legitimate state in the international system, it nevertheless provides many of the functions of a state for those living within its territory. The fulfillment of these state functions is critical to the lives and livelihoods of those governed in territory controlled by the Islamic State. An effective policy to challenge the Islamic State must take the group’s governance agenda into account by constructing appealing alternatives to Islamic State governance rather than simply seeking to undermine it. 

The Islamic State’s ambitious state-building efforts present a challenging policy problem for the array of states now fighting the Islamic State group. France, Britain, Russia, and the United States, among others, regularly articulate the urgent need to destroy the group and they have increasingly acted to do so. Airstrikes that accelerated in the later half of 2015 have put substantial pressure on the Islamic State’s institutions, killing off thousands of Islamic State fighters and destroying a substantial amount of military and economic infrastructure, most notably the capacity to refine and distribute oil resources. Ground operations, such as the one that retook the Iraqi city of Ramadi in December, have also ratcheted up the pressure. 

[I]n addition to degrading the organization, the attacks on ISIS are also degrading the only current form of effective governance for civilians.

While these efforts help fulfill the primary goal of degrading or destroying ISIS by targeting the group’s military and operational infrastructure, they also harm the coalition’s ultimate goal of creating regional stability. This is because, in addition to degrading the organization, the attacks on ISIS are also degrading the only current form of effective governance for civilians, leading to very negative consequences for the populations living under Islamic State rule. As governing capacity is degraded without providing an effective substitute for ISIS governance, many of the coalition’s objectives in the region will become more elusive in the medium term. Additionally, certain aspects of the Islamic State’s state-building goals, which outside groups would like to prevent, may actually be enhanced as a result of the conflict. 

War, what is it good for?

As military pressure mounts on the Islamic State, significant parts of its project are in danger, including its financing, military success, and leadership capacity. However, it is not certain that all aspects of its state capacity will decline. Scholarship on state-building makes it clear that although war can destroy states, it can also help to build them. Although the Islamic State is often viewed externally simply as a rebel group, its domestic state-building agenda follows the historical path of many developing states in that it has benefitted from some of the effects of being at war.

[A]lthough war can destroy states, it can also help to build them.

War helps to build states in a number of ways. First, it creates an environment where the state can much more efficiently extract resources from the population in the form of taxation, military conscription, or extortion. When security is at stake, people are more willing to give up other goods for protection; a state at war also has a high degree of readiness for violence, which can be applied to extract resources from its own people. 

Second, state survival during war requires a high degree of institutional efficiency, including the creation of new bureaucratic structures such as taxation systems, governance mechanisms, information networks, and other institutions designed to control and manage conquered territory. Finally, the pressures of constant warfare for those under threat and on the front lines can also solidify group commitments and strengthen aspects of the military culture, bureaucracy, and ideology that have contributed to the group’s success.

Scaling back

Certainly warfare also can degrade state capacity, and it has done so across Islamic State territory over the past year. Much of that degraded capacity is military in nature, but the process has also reduced state capacity on which civilians directly depend. There is substantial evidence now to suggest that military pressure on the Islamic State group has negatively impacted a variety of core state functions for civilians. While most coalition airstrikes to date have sought to avoid dominantly civilian targets, economic infrastructure has been actively targeted, leading to a significant decline in the resources devoted to civilian concerns.

Compared with only a year ago, the group is now a less effective distributor of resources and has also become more dependent on resource extraction from the populations that it controls. For example, as the group’s revenues from oil and the initial spoils from captured territory have declined, both its social service provision and its ability to pay salaries have severely deteriorated. This is harmful not just because of concerns over civilian protection, but also because it reduces social stability and plays into the group’s narrative that its enemies are making people’s lives much worse. While it is difficult to measure the extent to which civilians blame the group for these new difficulties, a current media crackdown in ISIS territory means that the dominant ISIS narrative of blaming external aggressors is the only one disseminated and likely has significant impact on public opinion.

After airstrikes accelerated in the autumn, an internal Islamic State memo revealed that due to a loss of revenue, the salaries of Islamic State fighters were being cut by a dramatic 50 percent from the original promised payments. These cuts have also affected non-military employees of the Islamic State, spreading to all civil servants. At the same time, the prices for basic goods have been dramatically increasing. Financial infrastructure has also been targeted, making basic economic transactions much harder, while declining soldier salaries make it more likely that those with guns will look to civilian resources to supplement their incomes. Popular policies such as subsidies for bread have been difficult to finance and in some areas under external pressure, essentials such as wheat have become very scarce. This pressure on the food supply impacts civilians in unpredictable ways because the Islamic State has tightly regulated agricultural markets and has failed to allow free market mechanisms to efficiently distribute food resources. 

In the realm of health and education, student registration fees have gone up dramatically while subsidies have declined, scaling back access to a key service designed to systematically socialize students into the ideology of the Islamic State. Professionals are also fleeing Islamic State territory, as exemplified by physicians who have been leaving the Islamic State in large numbers. Despite apparently having significant physical resources for basic medical care, such as vaccinations, the new labor shortage of physicians has made it impossible to keep up regular vaccination schedules within the civilian population. More recently, pressure on obtaining key medical supplies has also increased. 

Two sides of the coin

Attacks on the Islamic State have therefore both strengthened and degraded different components of state capacity. Some aspects of state capacity have actually increased under conditions of war, such as taxation, extortion, conscription, and coercive institutions that control civilians. Military attacks have degraded other aspects of the state, however, such as the resources of ISIS fighters and civil servants, resource distribution capacity, and institutions that support economic development. 

It is not yet clear what these changes in military and state capacity will have on the overall trajectory of Islamic State survival and the stated goal to destroy the Islamic State. While the Islamic State could ultimately be destroyed by a coalition military campaign that proactively takes and governs territory, under the present strategy it is much more likely that the Islamic State will persist and continue to preside over a fragile and increasingly marginal system of governance that is neither good for the group, for the people that live within its territory, or for long-term stability in the Middle East. 

Costs and benefits of a military campaign

This creates a set of difficult policy choices because there are also many good reasons for the military campaign against the Islamic State. The group has demonstrated its capacity and will continue to launch violent attacks on a range of international targets, providing external actors with clear justification to destroy the group’s military capacity in an effort to maintain global security. Likewise, the group’s military success and territorial control are central to its attractiveness to foreign fighters. The ideology that drives the Islamic State depends in part on its continued ability to challenge the current international system. Delivering sustained military defeats is therefore critical to puncturing the group’s apocalyptic narrative of ever greater success and expansion. 

Much of the Islamic State’s domestic control is also maintained through fear, and military defeats confirm in the public imagination that the group can be beaten, from without and potentially from within. Although significant local challenges have not yet materialized, as the Islamic State’s coercive capacity becomes weaker, defections to other groups may occur, and domestic opponents may begin to recalculate their odds of a successful challenge. 

[U]nder the present strategy it is much more likely that the Islamic State will persist and continue to preside over a fragile and increasingly marginal system of governance.

The clear need for military action must, however, be weighed against the serious costs to both civilian populations and to the long-term war effort of harming existing state capacity on which civilians depend. The largely aerial campaign against the Islamic State group has had painful effects on the populations it controls. The reduction of fuel availability, the collapse in salaries, the removal of food and educational subsidies, and the deep insecurity that comes from a constant fear of bombardment has likely done very little to endear civilian populations to the cause of the coalition’s military activity, which is often seen as supporting the Syrian regime. 

Degrading state capacity through military action also feeds into the group’s narrative that both the West and Arab leaders have no concern for Muslim civilians, and that the group is the only possible one that can act as a protector against external enemies. Dozens of recent Islamic State videos paint the anti-ISIS coalition as a Russian, Syrian, Jewish, or U.S. conspiracy designed to harm civilians. While it is difficult to determine the extent of civilian casualties as a result of the campaign to date, the heightened deprivation resulting from the coalition military campaign, coupled with a glaring lack of alternative models of good governance, is unlikely to break the dependence of civilians on the Islamic State. 

Wanted: Alternatives

When one takes the Islamic State’s substantive role in governance into account in formulating a strategy to destroy the group, it becomes increasingly clear that an effective military strategy must be coupled with a much more robust agenda to build alternative governance mechanisms if it is to be successful at permanently displacing the group from its territory. 

Challenging civilian dependence on the Islamic State requires alternative forms of governance that are more appealing to the populations currently governed by the group. Even if the quality of Islamic State governance declines in relative terms, a substantively more appealing option must be available if those currently under the Islamic State’s control will be willing to support it. The great current challenge is to formulate a policy that can meet or exceed the Islamic State’s ability to build governing institutions, not just tear them down. At this point in the tragic narrative, those craving good governance are likely to be much less interested in regime type than in institutions that can provide consistent levels of security, economic growth, and the rule of law.

The great current challenge is to formulate a policy that can meet or exceed the Islamic State’s ability to build governing institutions, not just tear them down.

While the Islamic State adeptly uses theatrical violence and fear to exercise control within its territory, a large portion of its success in maintaining control should also be attributed to the poor alternative options for the populations that reside within it. For many Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, the imaginable alternative models of governance are currently deeply unappealing. These include:

• re-absorption into the repressive cruelties of the Syrian state, 
• control by violent and corrupt Syrian rebel groups without a track record of effective governance, 
• governance by a deeply sectarian, Shiite-dominated Iraqi government that is dependent on ideological sectarian militias to maintain security, or 
• rule by ethnic Kurdish militias that have a poor reputation for their treatment of Arab communities. 

When compared with these options, the Islamic State group often comes across as more authentic, less corrupt, more committed to the rule of law, and a better provider of state services. Its current basic governance failures, while many, are also increasingly attributable to the effects of the military campaign waged by its enemies. 

Let's build

Despite its deep, persistent flaws, an alternative, better system of governance is more likely to come from the Iraqi state (in the case of large population centers such as Mosul), or from existing informal tribal governance (in Syria and more rural areas) than it is to come from other sources. The key actions that currently need to be taken are thus two-fold:

1. First, in territory already reclaimed from the group—such as in the devastated city of Ramadi—the anti-ISIS coalition should extend every effort to distribute needed resources, infuse the economy with ready employment options, reaffirm property rights and judicial institutions, and severely punish those pursuing violent retribution. Unfortunately, little in this direction has been accomplished in the months since the capture of Ramadi, as the rebuilding of civilian infrastructure has been treated as secondary to lingering security concerns. A clear investment of institutional and economic resources that helps to demonstrate the ability to maintain security and equal treatment under the rule of law will send a more powerful signal of the Islamic State’s weakness than the results of an aerial bombing campaign. 
2. Second, a greater external commitment to support the best in existing institutions within the Iraqi state as well as in areas with the potential for effective non-state tribal governance is a critical investment in the long-term stability of Islamic State territory. In other words, external resources should increasingly focus not just on training and equipping local military allies, but also in supporting high quality civilian institutions of local and regional governance. 

Unfortunately, it takes much longer to build effective state institutions than to destroy them.

Aggressively pursuing a governance strategy will be much more difficult than pursuing an air war against a proto-state without anti-air defenses, but it is a necessary one if the persistent appeal of the group’s state-building project is to be overcome. Because the Islamic State has powerfully distinguished itself from other jihadist competitors through its governance agenda, its support cannot be eliminated through a strategy solely dependent on destroying the governance upon which local populations depend. 

Unfortunately, it takes much longer to build effective state institutions than to destroy them. The faster that a serious, resource-intensive commitment to building alternative governing institutions in areas bordering Islamic State territory begins, the more likely we are to see the group that calls itself the Islamic State lose control of its narrative, its territory, and the civilian support upon which it relies.

Will McCants: ISIS-claimed attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Egypt indicate the organization wants to take the fight to its enemies abroad. One reason might be that all is not well in ISIS-land. The nascent state in Syria and Iraq has lost around 25 percent of its territory and tens of thousands of fighters in the year since America and its allies began to their campaign to defeat it. While the state still endures for now, it's under tremendous pressure because of the costs of ceaseless war.

To explain the troubles ISIS faces at home, we have invited a group of scholars to comment on its governance over the past years and speculate on what they might face in the year ahead. First was Mara Revkin, who examined how opinions towards ISIS have changed since it captured Mosul more than a year ago. Then Aymenn al-Tamimi argued that internal documents show increasing challenges for the Islamic State. Next, Aaron Zelin weighed in with a historical perspective, analyzing the extent to which ISIS has lived up to its own standards of governance. Kamran Bokhari argued that security—namely defending territory—is the foremost governance objective of ISIS in the short term, while Quinn Mecham focused on the need to provide alternative, positive models of governance for the populations living under ISIS control.

Next up, Nelson Kasfir, Professor of Government Emeritus at Dartmouth College, and Zachariah Mampilly, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Africana Studies at Vassar College, compare ISIS’s governance choices with how other armed groups have governed civilian populations. 

Nelson Kasfir and Zachariah Mampilly: Now that the Islamic State (ISIS) claims to be a state, any useful analysis of how it rules should rest on a systematic conception of governance by insurgents who hold populated territory, a surprisingly common phenomenon. If we are to understand what ISIS is doing, how long it is likely to stick around and indeed why some civilians in its domain prefer its government to what they had experienced from either Baghdad or Damascus, it would be a good idea to compare its choices of governance with other armed groups that have captured territory and governed civilian populations. All of them must administer territory without the advantages conferred by sovereignty—an important resource available to even the weakest internationally recognized states.

In our new book, Rebel Governance in Civil War, we offer a framework to explain how rebels govern. We bring together leading scholars to explore specific issues and cases from all over the globe. While single-factor hypotheses don't help much, there are broad patterns describing how and why armed groups govern that fit ISIS.

By rebel governance, we mean decision-making, the provision of services and the regulatory framework that armed groups establish to produce a social order within a specific territory they control. Rebel governance activities can be separated into those that concern how decisions are made, what social services are provided and how the production or taxation of economic rents is organized. Symbolic practices and ideologies, including religious creeds, have significant effects in supporting any system of rebel rule.

Armed groups differ widely in their approach to governance.

Armed groups differ widely in their approach to governance, as the case studies in our book demonstrate. Few armed groups that control territory can ignore civilian governance, short of expelling civilian populations altogether. The vast majority of insurgent organizations range from governing minimally, by assuming few regulatory functions, to maximally by ruling everything, including the provision of public goods.

For example, although the leaders of the National Patriotic Front (NPFL) in Liberia were primarily interested in personal profit, they still created the veneer of government to seek international recognition and to ensure the proceeds of commercial enterprises went into their pockets. Both types of insurgents were active during the Greek civil war, the conservatives limiting their governance activities, while the communists tried to regulate all aspects of social life.

Despite the many Western press accounts that dwell on ISIS’ penchant for flamboyant displays of callous cruelty, it would be a mistake to think that ISIS does not engage in civilian governance. As Charles Lister notes: "By perceiving and presenting itself as a state, IS [ISIS] has sought to control and govern territory and maintain a cabinet of ministers responsible for a broad range of 'ministries,' incorporating military, civil, political, and financial duties." As a caliphate, ISIS has opted primarily for a hierarchical top-down administration. It demands strict obedience, but it is also intent on building infrastructure and running it effectively. By basing governance on its revival of the "Caliphate according to the prophetic method," that is, re-establishing institutions on the basis of what it understands the Prophet Mohammed to have insisted, ISIS leaders appear to have demanded control over most facets of social and personal life.

As a caliphate, ISIS has opted primarily for a hierarchical top-down administration.

As early as 2007, ISIS published a booklet outlining its plans for governance. In 2013, it issued pamphlets that laid out the exact governance activities the organization would undertake once in control of specific territories. Immediately after capturing various towns in Syria and Iraq, ISIS set about taking control over key industries and services including the distribution of electricity, water, and fuel as well as the production and distribution of food. ISIS monopolized service provision and proved sophisticated in using it to balance its brutality. As a result, "Sunni civilians have been more likely to accept the imposition of harsh norms," as Lister has written.

Symbolic processes are powerful tools of governance that legitimate rebel groups or signal their coercive capability. These processes are often influenced by specific ideological concerns. Like nation-states, rebels create distinctive symbolic repertoires by producing their own flags, currencies, mausoleums and staging parades and rallies. The leaders of ISIS are well aware of the importance of symbols. "The Islamic State was signaling that its flag was not only the symbol of its government and the herald of a future caliphate; it was the harbinger of the final battle at the End of Days," writes Will McCants in The ISIS Apocalypse.

The leaders of ISIS are well aware of the importance of symbols.

Explaining varying approaches

What factors shape these different traits of rebel governance? In our book, we identify four clusters: causes arising before the rebellion; causes arising during the rebellion; those emanating from attributes or behavior of the rebels; and finally those developing from responses of civilians.

First, pre-conflict factors involving the relations between state and society shape subsequent patterns of rebel governance. History matters because insurgents mostly acquire their cultural values, education, and ideas about governance, while growing up in the society they later defy. These experiences shape them even as they rebel. How they resolve these contradictions will vary from case to case. Thus, the Forces Nouvelles that occupied northern Côte d'Ivoire after 2002 "adopted—or rather adapted—procedures from the former state administration." Since they did not hold unchallenged authority, they chose to share the maintenance of security with neo-traditional hunters' associations who were deeply trusted by local residents. In a different case, General Padiri's Mai-Mai militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo adopted the administrative pattern of offices of the Congolese government while adding "Bureau Six" to incorporate commonly held autochthonous magico-religious beliefs that greatly deepened the legitimacy of the militia's leaders.

Because ISIS takes an uncompromisingly radical stance, it is difficult to identify its continuities with prior governance. Still, a closer examination of ISIS’ involvement in food distribution provides an illustrative example of its links with the practices of past regimes. As one recent academic study (by José Ciro Martínez and Brent Eng, in a still-unpublished manuscript) points out, food production has long been understood as a key element of the weak social contract binding pre-conflict regimes in Syria and Iraq to their people. In pre-conflict Syria, the Baath Party had long understood direct control over the bread market as an integral task of the social welfare pact it struck with the population. Recognizing the importance of bread distribution to the Syrian population, ISIS undertook numerous efforts to control and ensure the production of bread within its territories. In a 2013 pamphlet published in Aleppo that outlines ISIS’ governance strategy, a promise to ensure bread distribution stands out alongside more conventional governance activities. Importantly, considering the propagandistic nature of many ISIS communications, the group went far beyond rhetorical positions in their commitment to policies concerning bread. Instead of merely mandating the manner in which bread would be produced and distributed in ISIS-controlled areas of Aleppo and Raqqa, the group also “subsidized the cost of flour, accelerated the opening of bakeries and distributed bread itself when necessary,” as Martínez and Eng write.

[W]artime contextual factors...affect rebel governance.

Second, wartime contextual factors—those circumstances that emerge during rebellion— also affect rebel governance. As rebels fight and as they engage with civilians, they often change their practices of governance. The military threat of the incumbent and other military rivals as well as the broader wartime political economy often significantly impact insurgents’ approaches toward civilians. With regard to military capacity, Stathis Kalyvas shows that as the communist insurgents lost territory towards the end of the Greek civil war, they became more coercive. In Latin America as well, there have been many cases in which rebel governance decayed when insurgent groups failed to protect their civilian populations from either internal or external violence, or in response to expansion of electoral opportunities by the incumbent state.

Similarly, a comparison of ISIS’ governance in Raqqa and Mosul, the two largest cities under its control, suggests that external military pressure has made the government more intimidating and sometimes less willing to abide by its own rules. After ISIS took control of each city, it quickly imposed its authority and provided more efficient administration than its predecessors had. In Raqqa the regime acted on the basis of its posted rules until American-led air strikes caused its leaders to become somewhat “more paranoid and prone to kidnapping people randomly.” In Mosul, residents, who originally regarded ISIS as “liberators,” became more dissatisfied as their taxes greatly increased and their nonpayment was met with physical punishments and fines. The failure of ISIS to protect its citizens from collateral damage from air strikes is certain to have increased their discontent.

After ISIS took control of each city, it quickly imposed its authority and provided more efficient administration than its predecessors had.

Material rewards also affect rebel governance. Rebels often change their pattern of governance when they begin to accumulate significant rents through the exploitation of natural resources. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) changed after it began to export diamonds and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) stopped following some of its Marxist principles after it began to export cocaine.

Usually, rebels cannot defend oil wells from attacks by incumbent states. ISIS has been an exception, making a daily income of $3 million in September 2014. After the recent steep fall in crude oil prices and air strikes, internal taxation (or extortion) may have become a more significant source of revenue. ISIS has also profited from kidnapping and bank robberies. Its reliance on oil production has proven both a boon and curse as the value of ISIS-produced oil shifts dramatically due to both the challenge of ensuring production and fluctuations in oil prices globally. The income permitted ISIS to pay generous salaries to civilians to keep sanitation and utility services functioning.

Third, rebel attributes and behavior—organizational structure and ideological orientation—affect rebel governance. Ideologies often provide rebels with political identities, coherent frameworks for political and social action and a sense of disciplined commitment to an overriding purpose. The Greek communists learned their Marxism before they rebelled. Ethnic secessionists, such as the Naga in India, knew whom they were going to exclude from their imagined polity in advance of taking up arms.

Establishing a legal code is a social service that often demonstrates the influence of ideology on rebel governance.

Establishing a legal code is a social service that often demonstrates the influence of ideology on rebel governance. Rules that rebels create and civilians obey can help provide legitimate authority, whether out of trust (as in the case of the Shining Path in Peru) or out of fear (as inspired by the Taliban in Afghanistan).

ISIS bases not only its fundamental character, but also its plan of governance, almost entirely on its peculiar interpretation of Islamic doctrine. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, received both a masters and a doctorate in Islamic rhetoric from the University of Islamic Sciences in Baghdad. As the caliph, some of the Islamic rationales that have been supplied to justify specific ISIS regulations can be traced to his earlier education.

The influence of Islam on ISIS’ ideology is most evident in its attempts to establish a legal system. The rebellion "sees itself as creating a distinctive and authentic legal order for the here and now, one that is based not only on a literal (if selective) reading of early Islamic materials but also on a long-standing [Islamic] theory of statecraft and legal authority." Andrew March and Mara Revkin identify laws governing land, trade, taxation and treatment of prisoners and slaves, all derived from ISIS’ interpretation of scripture. In addition, they assert "the theory of the caliphate implies a law-based social contract with reciprocal obligations and rights between the caliph and the people." The extent to which this legal order actually results in enforceable rights that protect civilians is unclear. However, there is evidence that ISIS officials engaged in dispute resolution among civilians, even punishing its fighters when they took bribes or harmed civilians.

[C]ivilian responses to the insurgent group affect rebel governance.

Finally, civilian responses to the insurgent group affect rebel governance. We examine both individual reactions to armed groups as well as how varying social groups—such as traders, religious orders, ethnic groups, and civil society organizations—engage with or challenge an armed group’s governance efforts. ISIS is challenging to study since it is perceived as denying civilians’ agency completely. But even under the most autocratic governance arrangements, civilians have found ways to influence and even challenge armed groups. For example, during the war in Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had numerous methods for incorporating civilian feedback despite its deserved reputation as an autocratic and brutal organization. The education system in Tiger-ruled areas emerged as a result of civilian pressure and meaningfully incorporated civilians into its daily operations.

Indeed, a surprising number of rebel groups have shared decision-making with civilians. The African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) created democratic village councils, as did the National Resistance Army during its war in Uganda. On the other hand, summary justice and brutal punishments can increase legitimacy among civilians when meted out to thieves and rapists. Residents gave strong support to rebels who took over neighborhoods in Medellín, Colombia and provided instant justice to those the community regarded as criminals.

It appears that ISIS does not share decision-making with civilians, similar to other rebels that take Islam as the doctrinal basis for their revolt such as the Taliban in Afghanistan or Boko Haram in Nigeria. But discerning whether civilian responses affect ISIS governance would require difficult (though not impossible) field visits to ISIS-controlled territory. The fact that the group frequently needs to rely on civilians in order to provide services suggests that there may be greater scope for civilian involvement than is commonly recognized.

[W]hile ISIS may appear unique, it is not an exception from the pressures that shape rebel governance patterns generally.

Taken together, the above discussion shows that while ISIS may appear unique, it is not an exception from the pressures that shape rebel governance patterns generally. Armed groups do not determine the outcome of their governance efforts in a vacuum. Rather, civilian governance outcomes are established by the behavior of a variety of actors each interacting in a shifting and complex environment. While ISIS may be distinctive in its commitment to implementing a form of civilian governance based on its understanding of Islamic modes of governance, it is still subject to these dynamics. Analyzing it through the four clusters of factors discussed above show how its governance of civilians compares with other rebel groups.

The sustainability question

What does this tell us about the future of civilian governance under ISIS? Because ISIS has established a caliphate, it is committed to governing the people in the territories it conquers. As discussed above, ISIS leaders have adopted an approach to law that creates room for some protections for civilians and an approach to social welfare that provides space for a limited social pact. Yet, these rulers have fashioned an uncompromising notion that civilians must be governed within their strict interpretation of Islamic doctrine. In addition, they depend on foreign military recruits to buttress their rule.

These factors create contradictions that may cause regime instability that might either increase regime brutality, if leaders remain constant to their principles, or result in regime decay, if they lose their sense of purpose. ISIS may eventually be “hamstrung by its radicalism.” During the short time that ISIS has ruled civilians, it has insisted that its decisions cannot be questioned. The relevant lesson from studying other rebellions is that groups better able to accommodate different political actors through a process of political negotiation are more likely to endure. If ISIS leaders remain obstinate, refusing to compromise in favor of a principled ideological stand, civilians will continue to suffer and either fight or flee if they can. Alternately, if the group’s leaders are tempted by the wealth the regime has accumulated, they may give in to corruption and fashion a more predatory regime.

ISIS has also become a magnet for foreign fighters. No one really knows how many there are, but an early (2014) estimate is 15,000 from 90 countries. Although the flow has decreased recently, cultural interactions and political disputes among these foreigners and civilians are certain to remain problematic. As the external military threats faced by ISIS grow, its leaders are likely to rely on the loyalty and morale of their foreign fighters at the expense of the civilian population. Civilian governance will probably decay, resulting in greater instability and perhaps sowing the seeds of ISIS' own demise.