Lithuanian Annual Strategic Review

Routinely, people, who have, over the past five years, travelled to Western Asia to settle, are being referred to, in the Western popular discourse, as ‘foreign fighters’. Though, admittedly, many among them did join various armed groups, a rather significant part of them did not or even could not have become members of armed groups. This is first of all true of children who travelled with their parents but also young females, in the Western popular parlance pejoratively called ‘jihadi brides’. However, even these categories aside, those (young) men who did join armed groups in Syria and Iraq, though they may be identified as ‘fighters’, may also not be regarded (and certainly many among them do not see themselves) as ‘foreign’. As the overwhelming number of people who travelled to West Asia joined the Islamic Khilafa State (IKS), their status in the entity is more of ‘naturalized citizens’, whose naturalization process is epitomized in the joining of the armed forces of the Islamic Khilafa State. Those, who did not (or could not) join the IKS armed forces, became citizens through pledging allegiance to the khalifa (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and by performing what they themselves regard as compulsory hijra – relocation from the lands of unbelief to the land of Islam under the declared khilafa. The khilafa project initiated by the Islamic State is a unique phenomenon, not only from the point of view of the theories of international relations but also in respect to the classical notions of state formation and nation building, and puts the conceptualization of citizenship in a new light. As such, it poses new challenges not only from the perspective of narrow military security but also from a much broader one, particularly, to the countries, among them European, the citizens of which forsake their original social contracts for a new one.