How revolutionary are Jihadist insurgencies? The case of ISIL

This paper examines the rise of ISIL in the context of wider debates in the first half twentieth century on the nature and political direction of the early Bolshevik state model of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. It argues that there are some parallels between the Trotskyite internationalist tendency in Soviet Russia and of ISIL given the latter’s calls for revolutionary jihad against both ‘apostate’ states in the Islamic world and, in the longer...