-Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era.
-Trasnistaria. Has population, land, flag, collects taxes. Only recognized by Russia. There's a few Russian backed puppets like this, I won't name them all.
-Taiwan. Already discussed.
-Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese media calls the protestors terrorists. Yet another example of "terrorist" meaning simply "whoever the establishment wants to de-legitimize". If you follow the CCP narrative, the thing they care about isn't Democracy but separatism. "One China" is about not recognizing Taiwan and HK as a matter of ethno-nationalist principal.
-Palestine. Recognized by majority of UN countries. Still not recognized by US, Israel, and associated power block. Why? Because of the stupid belief that recognition will somehow legitimate it.
-ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer.
This is why I subscribe to De Facto nationhood instead. A nation is a nation when it satisfies the following properties:
-A plot of land with well defined borders.
-A permanent population on said land.
-A Monopoly on violence over said land.
-An organization capable of credibly making peace, declaring war, and otherwise accepting agreements with other nations.
The last one is tricky as it only specifies the capability not the actualization. For example, if the organization agrees to peace but the individual factions of the army keep fighting then this condition is not satisfied and what you have is a stateless warlord situation. For another example, the ISIS situation clearly had an organization which was capable of agreeing to a surrender or appointing an ambassador, but they never wanted to or were allowed to. The condition is still satisfied even though they never did it.
Almost no one, including the Order itself, considers the Sovereign Military Order of Malta a country; it's the usual textbook example of a sovereign entity that is not a state/country by those who see it as sovereign (a point on which there is considerable dispute, despite the claim in its name and it's wide diplomatic interactions and grants of extraterritoriality, and, for it's headquarters, concurrent sovereignty with Italy.)
It's basically a NGO with a sui generis diplomatic status and disputed (among scholars) international legal status.
That's playing a bit fast and loose with the facts there. ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people for a labor force. That's textbook asymmetric warfare/terrorism.
To me that just sounds like textbook nationhood. The defining feature of the state is having the monopoly on violence within its borders.
I'd define terrorism as something along the lines of "using guerrilla tactics against civilian targets in order to achieve political ends". I would differentiate that from atrocities committed against a state's own people in order to keep them in line (for example Stalin's purges), human rights violations (e.g. witch trials or killing homosexuals), ethnic/religious cleansing, or guerrilla attacks against targets with legitimate strategic value.
My understanding, although I am definitely not super informed on this, is that ISIS's atrocities were mostly keeping people in line, human rights abuse, and religious cleansing. Therefore I would not consider those acts to be terrorism. However, that doesn't make them any less evil.
That is blatantly a false statement. I can't believe the negative reaction towards pointing that out.
The things ISIS members did to subpopulations people within that territory were almost universally condemned across the world as large-scale serious human abuse, and the territories were obtained through quite recent violence from other nations whose administrative borders had not stopped being recognised internationally.
So I think it was widely regarded that ISIS should not be granted the international respect and autonomy of legal recognition, nor should it keep any power it had of a monopoly on violence within its borders (or any borders).
That's not to say there aren't widely condemned things going on in other countries. But there is a kind of collective, sometimes grudging, but systematised respect for the autonomy of countries as nations, which I think was widely regarded as not something that would be right to grant to ISIS (or take away from the nations that ISIS had taken territory from).
Where did they say this? I don't see anything about ISIS not using terrorism as a tactic, just that if you recognize ISIS as a state, you get called a terrorist sympathizer. Besides, plenty of countries use terrorist tactics when at war, unfortunately.
You are summarising that as "ISIS did not use terrorist tactics"
I think that is a misleading summary. I don't think the poster meant to dispute that ISIS was behind terrorist attacks, both in the Middle East and also in other parts of the world. What they were saying, is that ISIS was engaging in conventional (non-terrorist) military operations against the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other rebel groups, etc. Terrorism and conventional military tactics are not mutually exclusive, one can pursue both strategies at the same time. But the second strategy is a sign that one is dealing with something having de facto statehood, as opposed to a non-state terrorist group.
If you are getting heavily down-voted, a possible explanation is that people perceive you to be engaging in an uncharitable reading of the remarks you are responding to
If they wanted to say that ISIS was using conventional _AND_ terrorist tactics that would be one thing. They specifically said "not". You even quoted.
If my options are either to stay silent or charitably read someone's claim that ISIS' tactics don't meet their definition of the word terrorism, because they're a state, then honestly I don't want an account on this site anymore.
The US has done all of these except crucifixions. Arguably, we've done all of them (except crucifixion) within the last decade. I'm not sure we can claim "not crucifying" as moral high ground when Americans did things like the following (warning: what follows is horrifying):
"He was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. He was then paraded through the street, all while being stabbed and beaten, before being held down and castrated. He was then lynched in front of Waco's city hall."
"Over 10,000 spectators, including city officials and police, gathered to watch the attack. There was a celebratory atmosphere among whites at the spectacle murder, and many children attended during their lunch hour. Members of the mob cut off his fingers, and hung him over a bonfire after saturating him with coal oil. He was repeatedly lowered and raised over the fire for about two hours. After the fire was extinguished, his charred torso was dragged through the town and parts of his body were sold as souvenirs. A professional photographer took pictures as the event unfolded, providing rare imagery of a lynching in progress. The pictures were printed and sold as postcards in Waco."[1]
This happened in 1916--most would consider the US to have been a nation for over a century by this point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington
The UN absolutely has provisions in its charter for approved wars. The Korean war was UN approved. A regime that is violent against civilians and outwardly genocidal towards religious minorities like ISIS is exactly the situation UN approved intervention was made for (designed with the Nazi's in mind).
I reject the premise that calling them a state would entail granting them anything.
1) At points, they were waging a war that did not rely on terrorist/guerrilla tactics. OP did not claim they don't do 'terrorist stuff' at all. Waging conventional war requires control of territory, which is why this is important.
2) Saying ISIS is/controls a state would have you labeled as a terrorist sympathizer in the media or in conversation. This demonstrates that calling something a 'state' has an implicit moral connotation in popular culture. OP is arguing this should not be true.
None of OPs points were a _moral_ judgement of ISIS. I think we can all agree ISIS is bad.
For instance, I strongly believe Palestine should be an independent, free state distinct from Israel. However, the UN _recognizing_ it as a state does not mean it magically becomes one. The UN is just making a political point, but sadly one that has little impact on the reality in Palestine.