Despite dramatic improvements in the security environment in most parts of Iraq, still unresolved are many core political issues, foremost of which is the conflict over the city and region of Kirkuk. ...With immense oil reserves and a diverse population of Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmens, Kirkuk in recent history has been scarred by interethnic violence and state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. Throughout the twentieth century, successive Arab Iraqi governments engaged in a brutal campaign to increase Kirkuk's Arab population at the expense of Kurds and Turkmens. Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a newly empowered Kurdish leadership has sought to reverse the effects of the Arabization campaign and to hold a referendum on incorporating Kirkuk into the Kurdistan Region. The Kurds' efforts are, however, strongly opposed by Kirkuk's Turkmens, Arabs, and also most states in the region.
InCrisis in Kirkuk, Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield offer a dispassionate analysis of one of Iraq's most pressing and unresolved problems. Drawing on extensive research and fieldwork, the authors investigate the claims to ownership made by each of Kirkuk's competing communities. They consider the constitutional mechanisms put in place to address the issue and the problems that have plagued their implementation. The book concludes with an assessment of the measures needed to resolve the crisis in Kirkuk, stressing that finding a compromise acceptable to all sides is vital to the future stability of Iraq.
The Legacy of Iraq critically reflects on the abject failure of the 2003 intervention to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy, underpinned by free-market capitalism, its citizens free to live in peace ...and prosperity. It argues that mistakes made by the coalition and the Iraqi political elite set a sequence of events in motion that have had devastating consequences for Iraq, the Middle East and for the rest of the world. Today, as the nation faces perhaps its greatest challenge in the wake of the devastating advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and another US-led coalition undertakes renewed military action in Iraq, understanding the complex and difficult legacies of the 2003 war could not be more urgent. Ignoring the legacies of the Iraq war and denying their connection to contemporary events couldmeans that vital lessonsare ignored and the same mistakes made again.
When US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, they occupied a country that had been at war for 23 years. Yet in their attempts to understand Iraqi society and history, few policy makers, analysts and ...journalists took into account the profound impact that Iraq's long engagement with war had on the Iraqis' everyday engagement with politics, the business of managing their daily lives, and their cultural imagination. Drawing on government documents and interviews, Dina Rizk Khoury traces the political, social and cultural processes of the normalization of war in Iraq during the last twenty-three years of Ba'thist rule. Khoury argues that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance and examines the Iraqi government's policies of creating consent, managing resistance and religious diversity, and shaping public culture. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, this book tells a multilayered story of a society in which war has become the norm.
Nimo, Maha, Safah, Shatha, Emma, Danielle, Kim, Charlene. In a book that once again blends her distinctive flair for capturing the texture of everyday life with shrewd political insights, Cynthia ...Enloe looks closely at the lives of eight ordinary women, four Iraqis and four Americans, during the Iraq War. Among others, Enloe profiles a Baghdad beauty parlor owner, a teenage girl who survived a massacre, an elected member of Parliament, the young wife of an Army sergeant, and an African American woman soldier. Each chapter begins with a close-up look at one woman’s experiences and widens into a dazzling examination of the larger canvas of war’s gendered dimensions. Bringing to light hidden and unexpected theaters of operation—prostitution, sexual assault, marriage, ethnic politics, sexist economies—these stories are a brilliant entryway into an eye-opening exploration of the actual causes, costs, and long-range consequences of war. This unique comparison of American and Iraqi women’s diverse and complex experiences sheds a powerful light on the different realities that together we call, perhaps too easily, “the Iraq war.”
Despite ongoing instability and underdevelopment in post-Saddam Iraq, some parts of the country have realized relative security and growth. The Kurdish north, once an isolated outpost for the Iraqi ...army and local militia, has become an internationally recognized autonomous region. In The Kurdish Quasi-State, Natali explains the nature of this transformation and how it has influenced the relationship between the Kurdistan region and Iraq’s central government. This much-needed scholarship focuses on foreign aid as helping to create and sustain the Kurdish quasi-state. It argues that the generous nature of external assistance to the Kurdistan region over time has given it new forms of legitimacy and leverage in the country. Since 2003 the Kurdistan region has gained representation in the central government and developed commercial, investment, and political ties with regional states and foreign governments.
In the run-up to war in Iraq, the Bush administration assured the world that America's interest was in liberation-especially for women. The first book to examine how Iraqi women have fared since the ...invasion,What Kind of Liberation?reports from the heart of the war zone with dire news of scarce resources, growing unemployment, violence, and seclusion. Moreover, the book exposes the gap between rhetoric that placed women center stage and the present reality of their diminishing roles in the "new Iraq." Based on interviews with Iraqi women's rights activists, international policy makers, and NGO workers and illustrated with photographs taken by Iraqi women,What Kind of Liberation?speaks through an astonishing array of voices. Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt correct the widespread view that the country's violence, sectarianism, and systematic erosion of women's rights come from something inherent in Muslim, Middle Eastern, or Iraqi culture. They also demonstrate how in spite of competing political agendas, Iraqi women activists are resolutely pressing to be part of the political transition, reconstruction, and shaping of the new Iraq.
Compulsion in Religion relies on extensive research with Ba’thist archives to investigate the roots of the religious insurgencies that erupted in Iraq following the American-led invasion in 2003. The ...Iraqi archival records demonstrate that by the 1990s, Saddam’s regime had developed institutions to control and monitor Iraq’s religious landscape. The regime’s ability to do so provided it with confidence to launch a national “Faith Campaign” and to inject religion into Iraqi politics in a controlled manner. Islam played a greater role in the regime’s symbols and Saddam Hussein’s statements in the 1990s than it had in earlier decades. This increase in religious rhetoric did not represent a shift from secular-nationalist ideology to Islamism, however. The regime’s official policies toward religious leaders and institutions remained remarkably consistent throughout the Ba’thist period; Saddam spoke derisively about all forms of Islamist politics in Iraq throughout his presidency. He promoted a Ba’thist interpretation of religion that subordinated it to Arab nationalism rather than depicting the religion as an independent or primary political identity. Saddam did so explicitly to undermine Islamists and the revolutionary religious movements that would emerge after 2003. When the American-led invasion of 2003 destroyed the regime’s authoritarian structures, it unhinged the forces that these structures were designed to contain, creating an atmosphere infused with politically instrumentalized religion but lacking the checks provided by the former regime. Sadrists, al-Qaida, and eventually the Islamic State emerged out of this context to unleash the insurgencies that have plagued post-2003 Iraq.
