In the years following the Arab Spring, a number of Islamist insurgent groups conquered swaths of territory across the Middle East and North Africa and began governing civilian populations. These groups have been faced with the complexities of administering justice, collecting taxes, and providing public services such as health care and education. How do Salafi-jihadist armed groups approach administration? This book is a groundbreaking comparative exploration of Salafi-jihadist governance, drawing on in-depth case studies of the Islamic State in western Iraq and eastern Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in northwestern Syria, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in southern Yemen. Marta Furlan examines rebels’ experiments in ruling and assesses whether there is a single model of Salafi-jihadist governance, the degree to which ideology and doctrine inform the behavior of rebel rulers, and the similarities and differences between Salafi-jihadists and other armed nonstate groups. Offering a window into the inner workings of government and civilian life under Islamist power, Inside Salafi-Jihadist Governance sheds new light on rule by nonstate groups more broadly.
Marta Furlan is the Senior Programme Manager for Research at Free the Slaves, an international human rights NGO. She is also a Research Fellow at the Center on Armed Groups, a Climate change and Conflict Research Fellow at XCEPT, and a Senior research Fellow at the Orion Policy Institute. Marta holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of St Andrews (UK), where her research focused on rebel governance and armed groups-civilians relationa. Her research interests also include the human rights impact of climate change, with a special focus on Indigenous communities. She is passionate about community-based participatory action research that involves people in the formulation of solutions. She is the author of the book Inside Salafi-Jihadist Governance: The Strategies and Characteristics of Islamist Insurgent Rule (Columbia University Press, 2025) and has published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Small Wars & Insurgencies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the Journal of Human Rights Practice and Civil Wars.