International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017

Post-invasion Baghdad has undergone an excessive militarization of its urban spaces which have assumed sectarian expressions. Abu Nuwas Street is one of the few remaining open public spaces along the Tigris with a symbolic significance for Baghdadis. The street includes facilities with significant political visibility and, thus, potential targets for terrorist attacks. The walled and heavily secured state quarters, known as the Green Zone, are just across the river. The street, therefore, has witnessed excessive deployment of security measures since its reopening and renovation in 2007 as a result of the ‘surge’ military strategy under the then commanding general of the occupation forces David Petraeus. This article is an attempt to understand how the effects of militarization in the open public spaces of Abu Nuwas Street have affected socio-spatial practices. It documents an important public space in a city rarely explored in contemporary urban studies. My findings reveal that although security measures drastically decreased socio-spatial practices along Abu-Nuwas street, seeds of a vibrant and diverse public space can be found in the adjacent parks.

This article explores the experiences of various female characters in the period immediately before and during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), the Kurdish popular Uprising in Iraq, their subsequent mass-exodus to the Turkish and Iranian borders, and the creation of a quasi-independent Kurdish state in the north of Iraq. Studying Qasham Balata’s Runaway to Nowhere in 2010 and Sindis Niheli’s Hizar d Werçerxana da, Bergé Éké (Hizar and the Vicissitudes of Life, Part One) in 2013, the article deals with the lives and experiences of two female characters, focusing on their transformation from voiceless victims to well-informed social and political activists. By incorporating feminist themes of social inequality, domestic abuse, violence against women and women’s social and political activism into broader questions of nationalism and national struggle for liberation, the novels selected here affirm the significant and problematic interplay between feminism and nationalism in the Kurdish context.

The dramatic period of change surrounding the late 1960s saw the emergence and development of Marxist-informed revolutionary challenges to Arab political thought as well as the region’s relationship with the global Cold War. Into such debates stepped a renewed Iraqi exile community then living in Western Europe. Initially identifying themselves as the Iraqi Revolutionary Grouping (IRG) they would challenge past Iraqi Marxist and Communist commitments, the emerging authoritarian state and global imperialism through a renewed commitment to Marxist-informed social action, support for the Palestinian cause and direct opposition to increasing U.S. intervention into Iraq and the wider Arab world. Their position shifted the Iraq communist movement discourse from its long-standing subservience to Soviet designs, broadened connections and solidarity with progressive regional actors in an effort to reach beyond the state system and privileged the Palestinian cause.

Any attempt to resolve political violence in religious or ethnic terms is bound to fail at the outset, for it settles for addressing a representation of the symptoms and manifestations of violence rather than disclosing its constitutive moments and the political terrain of its lived relevance. My argument runs counter to such a phenomenological presentation of violence, asserting that the contemporary violent conflicts within Iraq are not a war of sect against sect, but rather one among powerful political contenders and their regional and/or international backers. To generalize and present war in the first sense is to apologetically cover up what essentially is a class conflict, above all among fractions of the ruling class and their political representatives, an explanatory that creates an image of senseless violence. This class scenario cries for a security state, order and the monopolization of violence, i.e., the making of a hierarchical class-based state. The constitution, coherence and homogeneity of any ruling class is not pre-given, rather it necessitates a project of political hegemony within the power block in which it is established, reproduced and guaranteed by the state. The absence of such a hegemony witnesses conflicts among fractions of the ruling class that permeate all societal levels to the extent that the state apparatus itself becomes an instrument, mean and object of the conflicts rather than its purveyors and means of pacification. The intersection of imperialist occupation, violent claims for hegemony among regional contenders and domestic struggle over political power assumes inevitably fractured and particularist forms: religion, confession and ethnicity. In this way, religion, confession and ethnicity are not the cause of violence; rather the contest for hegemony violently manufacture and set them in motion. The destructive occupation regime and the lack of political will to make a unified national field empower sects and ethnicities to be recast as ideological centrifuges. In this article I will reconstruct the developments up to the emergence of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in December 2013/January 2014, in order to decipher the present and to warn that such catastrophes are to be expected in the future unless radical changes and reforms are made to the whole state edifice imposed on Iraqis from 2003.

The economy of Kurdistan has been semi-independent for years, while the Baghdad government had decided to devote 17 per cent of the Iraqi budget towards it. Due to this oil revenue, the budget of Iraq as a whole increased rapidly, and this was reflected in the Iraqi Kurdistan budget. However, in April 2015, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) started to make its economy independent from Baghdad through exporting their oil directly. This study examines the implications of an economic boom on the perceptions of government performance in relation to the provision of public services, the development of democracy and government performance in general. The research adopts a survey method (n=224) with responses from adults aged 18 and over. The research findings suggest that the economic boom reflected negatively on the perceptions of the majority of citizens regarding the government’s performance. The responses indicate that this was because of the lack of public services rather than the development of democracy by the government. The small number of respondents who held a positive perception regarding the government was due to the belief that the government provided sound security rather than sound economic policy and public services with the development of democracy. The research examined the role of demographic and political background as a control variable, and the results showing that, in particular, age, gender, educational background and political affiliation were significant.

The Ba’thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism, Aaron M. Faust (2015) Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 296 pp., ISBN: 9781477305577, h/bk, $55.00

A History of the Iraq Crisis: France, the United States, and Iraq, 1991–2003, Frederic Bozo (2016) Washington, DC and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Columbia University Press, Epilogue, Afterword, Notes, Bibliography, and Index, 381 pp., ISBN: 9780231704441, h/bk, $55.00