Return to Ruin: A Conversation with Anthropologist Zainab Saleh

Aamer Ibraheem, PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, met with Assistant Professor Zainab Saleh from Haverford College’s Department of Anthropology to discuss her new book, Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia.

Aamer Ibraheem (AI): First, allow me to thank you for the opportunity to interview you here today. And second, I want also to congratulate you on publishing this exceptional and timely ethnography, Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia, which came out in September of 2020. I am saying timely precisely because this book speaks about the temporality of the aftermaths of political catastrophe, crisis, and tragedy, through which you tell us a human story of Iraqis abroad hoping to return one day to a better Iraq. But with the United States’ invasion of Iraq, these hopes become uncertain exiles. Let me start by asking what propelled you to writing this book in the first place, what idea of ethnography did you have at the time you started, and what did you think this ethnography would enable?

Zainab Saleh (ZS): In the summer of 2002, I started my doctoral degree at Columbia University in New York City. The atmosphere was charged with war talk. Everyone was discussing the Bush administration’s preparations to invade Iraq. The antiwar camp was strong on Columbia’s campus. Students and professors demonstrated against the war, organizing sit-ins and lectures to warn of its consequences and expose the hypocrisy of the U.S. government. The pro-war camp, especially outside academia, was more powerful. It agitated about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s oppression of Iraqis, and the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The camps shouted at each other, and among themselves, about freedom and democracy versus colonialism, sovereignty versus imperialism, and human rights versus oil. Iraqis, who have borne the brunt of Western governments’ support of Saddam Hussein (and their falling out with his regime), and who were going to bear the brunt of another war, were marginal and faceless in these struggles and debates. As the invasion of Iraq proceeded in 2003, the Orientalist discourse about Iraq, which perceived the country as riddled with primordial sentiments, further silenced the voices of Iraqis. The erasure of Iraqi individuals from discussions and news about the U.S. occupation prompted me to focus my research on them. As a privileged Iraqi who now lives abroad, I owe it to Iraqis to offer a more nuanced version of their stories, their hopes, their disappointments, and their losses. Since it was almost impossible to do research in Iraq given the deteriorating situation there, I chose London, home to the largest Iraqi diasporic community in Europe at the time.

The idea that ethnography is embedded in storytelling and that its challenge is how to render these stories has been crucial to my use of life stories to offer a more nuanced picture of Iraqis’ aspirations and losses. I share the life stories of five Iraqis to provide uninterrupted narratives of their evolving perceptions of their lives as well as their positions at political moments that shaped their trajectories. To me, ethnography works to evoke certain responses in the readers, and convey knowledge by making them witnesses to the events narrated in the book. To me, ethnography has much in common with storytelling and testimonies, which have emerged as a technique of empowerment and bearing witness for Black and Chicana feminists concerned about the mainstream representation of women like themselves whose histories and realities were erased and misrepresented. Employing the binary of oppressor/oppressed, bell hooks argues that as “subjects, people have the right to define their own reality, establish their own identities, name their history. As objects, one’s reality is defined by others, one’s identity created by others, one’s history named only in ways that define one’s relationship to those who are subject.” As such, for oppressed people to become subjects and engage in liberatory projects, resistance to mainstream myths about them entails “identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story.” As such, ethnography emerged as a venue to write in a nuanced way about the lives of my interlocutors, and provide them with the space to narrate their own stories, which aimed to undermined simplistic and reductionist narratives about their lives.

AI: Throughout reading Return to Ruin, it becomes clear to the reader how the interventions of Britain and the United States in Iraq have not only deeply shaped Iraqis’ life trajectories, but also their experiences of exile. While British colonial rule in Iraq has received wild scholarly attention, you argue that the role the United States has played in the country did not start with 2003 or even the 1980s, but as far back as the early 1960s. Therefore, by tracing critical historical moments from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba‘th coup and support of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion and occupation, this book writes Iraqis back into the U.S. imperial history in particular. In this process, you focus on two particularly interesting yet related concepts, which I would like to ask you to unpack for us. First, you employ the concept of imperial encounter to “shed light on how the United States and Iraq, countries usually seen to occupy different worlds, are entangled” (page 7). Second, by drawing on the term disassemblage, as introduced by Ann Stoler to “identify how things get cut off from one another in our conceptualization” (p.8), you show the ways neutral terms have been used to camouflage and disconnect imperialist ambitions. Can you please tell us more about the work of these two concepts, and the way in which they frame the entry points to the ethnographic accounts in the book?

ZS: As I listened to Iraqis, I realized that their narratives of displacement, as well as their general life trajectories, were deeply enmeshed in imperial interventions in Iraq that have taken place since the early twentieth century and continue to the present. Iraqis in London, like those in Iraq, are “imperial subjects,” whose lives are inseparable from the histories of Britain and the United States in the region, particularly the latter’s efforts to safeguard U.S. oil companies’ access to Iraqi oil, to deter Iraq from embracing communism during the Cold War, and to support regimes that would guarantee what the United States perceived as regional stability. These imperial trajectories also became dynamic terrains in which political, gendered, religious, and class differences were inscribed, invoked, and reconfigured in diaspora.

I employ the term of imperial encounter to write Iraqis back into the imperial history of particularly the United States. The histories of Iraq and the United States are deeply intertwined. On the one hand, the United States has had a direct impact on political developments in Iraq and the lives of Iraqis through its policies supporting regime changes and the perpetuation of war. On the other hand, Iraq has been essential to U.S. economic interests. Iraqi arms purchases bolstered the military-industrial complex in the United States, and stable access to Middle East oil secured U.S. dominance in the global economy. The concept of imperial encounter demonstrates that Iraq and the United States are no longer separate entities, but are entangled in an unequal power relation that has reconfigured the lives of Iraqis. Scholars have advised against approaching the United States as an entity confined to its territorial boundaries; rather, we must examine the relationship between U.S. imperialism and other countries and U.S. efforts to produce subjects beyond its national boundaries through neoliberal policies. Rather than merely neoliberal policies, however, Iraqis have experienced the U.S. empire through political and military interventions as well.

I found Ann Stoler’s  concept of disassemblage very helpful in thinking about U.S. empire, and the connections between different imperial formations. In terms of U.S. imperial interventions in the world, Iraq is not an exceptional case. Scholars have begun to historicize the debate on U.S. imperialism and to situate the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan within the imperial legacy of the Unites States. Thus, the War on Terror after 9/11 can be seen as part and parcel of a long history of U.S. expansion and global domination. Wars and military occupation were foundational to the United States in that genocidal violence was central to the establishment of the United States as a settler-colonial state, as well as to its political and economic hegemony. A permanent state of war, as far as the United States is concerned, thus represents a historical continuum of conquest, cleansing of new frontiers, and control of territories abroad. In this narrative, U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, as well as its establishment of military bases around the world and imposition of neoliberal reforms, are part of this foundational imperial violence. This approach to empire emphasizes connections between settler colonialism, racism, economic hegemony, and political interventions. Thus, the decades-long intervention of the United States in Iraq can be seen as part of a continuum of different imperial formations throughout the world. U.S. empire can no longer be seen as a singular event or a relic of the past. Rather, it has persisted throughout the centuries, brought various peoples into its orbit, and left individual lives in ruins.

AI: Let me follow up on my earlier question, and particularly on the idea that employing the concept of the encounter decenters the nation-state, as you argue in the book, while emphasizing global connection. Global events such as the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran that inspired local Shi‘i groups in Iraq who challenged Saddam Hussein’s regime, or the American “War on Terror” and its long history of shaping the daily politics and lives of Iraqis, are but only a few examples in the rich ethnographic accounts you provide, through which you urge us to move beyond territorial boundaries. However, the question of the state, or state-related encounters, is still central to Iraqis’ subject formation in the narratives you tell. I am thinking here of the Ba‘th party, for instance, the coup of 1963, local state institutions such as schools and the Mukhabarat (the Iraqi intelligence), the Iraq-Iran War, and even individual and collective practices like the mourning and loss (of an Iraqi state), and others. My question is the following: given the centrality of the question of the state in anthropological literature, among others, how do we locate Iraqi discourse(s) in this book in relation to state formation?

ZS: In the discourses of my interlocutors, the state was embedded in the question of sovereignty, and the state’s ability to use overwhelming violence to determine life and death of individuals and populations. Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat invite scholars to shift the ground of understanding sovereignty towards “issues of internal constitution of sovereign power within states through the exercise of violence over bodies and populations” (p. 2, emphasis in the original). As such, sovereignty is not something the state possesses but unfolds in its practices dispersed throughout societies through the exercise of violence, and through the efforts to discipline and subordinate other forms of authority. These performances of power can be spectacular and public, secret and menacing, and also can appear as scientific/technical rationalities of management and punishment of bodies. In this framework, the techniques of power and discipline work on and through bodies. While sovereignty is institutionalized, reenacted, and reproduced through practices by the state with the aim of producing docile subjects, it remains contingent, unstable, and in need of reiteration continuously. While under the monarchy, the state resorted to violence to a certain extent (through censorship, imprisonment, and deportation), it also attempted to establish institutions to be better govern and discipline the population, in particular schools.

British officials in Iraq were against the expansion of the public-school system, fearing that over-education would produce subjects engaged in political agitation and unwilling to do manual labor. Iraqi nationalists, by contrast, saw the school and the family as arenas of social reform and economic development, which aimed to produce new Iraqi subjects worthy of sovereignty.[i] They particularly saw that educating young women would produce modern mothers who were capable of raising healthy citizens. However, the family and the school did not become sites to produce docile and governable subjects. Rather, they emerged as hubs for revolutionary action and imagination. Older Iraqis spoke of progressive and nationalist parents and brothers who from a young age made them aware of social inequality in the Iraqi society and of anticolonial struggle worldwide. Once they went to secondary schools, they were further exposed to communist and nationalist trends that advocated for political freedom, women’s liberation, and social justice, all of which fueled their political and social activism. As such, the anti-colonial struggle entailed a disavowal of the colonial state, which was invested in the regulation of the individual body and techniques of social control, with the aim of control natural resources and maintenance of the power of elites. By organizing in the underground Iraqi Communist Party and participating in protests against treaties that the British officials imposed on Iraq and against social inequality, young Iraqis at the time saw themselves as revolutionaries who were engaged in a struggle to bring about radical transformations at the state level.

Under Saddam Hussein’s reign, the state and its use of spectacular violence—through wars, torture, forced collaborations, threats, and executions—became daily occurrences that Iraqis had to endure.

AI: What is strikingly important and illuminating in your work, is its intimate apprehension of the generational experience of time and history. You follow five Iraqi protagonists exiled in London, Hanan, Khalil, Ali, Hadjar, and Rasha, whose different biographies together represent three different generations of discourses. Successive and overlapping generations, as these biographies show us, acquire frameworks of subject formation, as well as modes of connecting memories of the past to expectations for the future by virtue of their location in relation to eventful intimate and collective experiences such as wars, revolutions, as well as class and gender sensibilities. These five narratives unravel the idea that generational memory becomes, for some exiled Iraqis in London, a site of anti-colonial contestation, while for others, these memories serve as a site for religious formation of pious selves, whereby the memory of Iraq becomes sacred. Here, I am interested in the contrast between a generation that lives the (political, personal) loss as its own immediate experience and memory and a generation that lives it at a generational remove, in an existentially mediated way (and here I am reminded of anthropologist David Scott, whose work you build on). In particular, I am interested in what you invite us to read as a connection between Iraqi remembrance and political act (page 43)? Tell us more about that.

ZS: U.S. officials and pundits read the authoritarian rule of Saddam Hussein and the sectarian violence that erupted in 2003 in Iraq as internal Iraqi affairs—manifestations of Oriental despotism and primordial hatred—rather than as events that have been entangled in national and imperial power dynamics. The U.S. imperial script, which disaggregates places and camouflages events, is based on a politics of concealment and culturalist interpretations. Erasing the history of the role of the United States in Iraq is part of the process of imperial formations, which are predicated upon simplified dominant discourses of events. But accounting for violence as a cultural phenomenon that has persisted throughout history erases the imperial and national entanglements that shaped political events and exacerbated ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq. Rather than seeing sectarian and ethnic identities as contemporary phenomena that are produced, reinforced, or otherwise transformed and weakened in historical contexts, the mainstream discourse on Iraq in the United States puts forward a timeless and culturalist interpretation of violence.

These representations of Iraq raised heated debates among Iraqis in London over the nature of the Iraqi society and the turn of events after 2003. Through their reflections on their lives in Iraq and relationships in diaspora, Iraqis I met in London contested these essentialist depictions and provided alternative accounts of their country. Their narratives speak to the vibrant political and social landscapes that existed until the rise of Saddam Hussein to power in 1979 and the shifts in political projects and aspirations throughout the twentieth century. Through their chronicling of life in Iraq and diaspora, aiming to carve out Iraqi subjectivities informed by national and imperial events, Iraqis in London sought to write themselves back into an imperial history and challenge the politics of erasure—whether through literal violence or simplistic narratives—that they have endured for decades. My Iraqi interlocutors in London eloquently told stories about their lives and experiences in Iraq and about their efforts to define home and selfhood. In doing so, they were trying to make sense of the present and reflect on the past. Remembrance, to them, became a way to reconnect to their homeland, to guard against the erasure of their past, and to carve out an Iraqi subjectivity against fragmentation and wars.

AI: I am slightly diverging from my earlier question in order to focus on your understanding of the notion of Belonging. Through tracing Iraqis’ narratives of enduring in the face of uncertainty, you show how new forms of belonging were marked by classed, gendered, generational, and particularly suffering experiences. You also show how some narratives and experiences of belonging cultivate a religious subjectivity anchored in sacred Iraqi localities (e.g. page 160), while others form a sense of a secular sentiment revolves around an anti-colonial language (e.g. page 70). First, how do you approach these formations (sacred and secular), and the relations among them? Second, I am curious to learn if the historical and material context in which these stories of belonging were narrated and documented (i.e. London) helped shaping and drawing the lines between what is perceived by exiled Iraqis as secular, versus what is perceived as religious? In other words, do you think these lines would have been shaped differently among your interlocutors had they were located elsewhere than London, say Amman?

ZS: I can only speak to the experiences of Iraqi exiles in London as I haven’t been to Amman since I left Iraq in 1997, and I’m also unfamiliar with Iraqi communities in the United States. In Britain, there were two distinct discourses, namely the secular discourses which was embedded in the notion of secularism and modernity, and the religious discourse, which perceived Iraq as holy place. This dominant discourse in London in 2006 focused on a narrative of anti-colonial struggle and revolution. It was mainly endorsed by Iraqis who came of age in the 1940s, and were involved in anticolonial struggle against the British and the monarchy at the time, and in the cultural renaissance Iraq was going through. This discourse valorized the experiences of middle-class Iraqis from Baghdad, perceived progressive Iraqi women as a marker of modernity, and disavowed the experiences of religious people and the downtrodden. This prevailing narrative of selfhood was marked by shifts in the understanding of Iraqiness among the younger generation. While the efforts of the younger generation to carve out an Iraqi subjectivity were informed by attempts to define notions of home and belonging around a place they barely remembered, they also reflected changes in the Iraqi political landscape, which had come to be defined by rising piety and aversion to political activism. Iraqi subjectivity became associated with a religious discourse that perceived Iraq as a place of holy religious sites and religious experiences that dated back to the seventh century. Instead of visions of bringing about radical transformation in their homeland, the younger generation in London was suspicious of political activism and looked for religious practice and normal daily life to create a sense of identity.

However, the religious discourse endorsed by young Iraqis not only marked a departure from the communists’ secular project, it also aimed to break away from what they perceived to be the traditional Islam of their parents. While young Iraqis felt the need to constantly affirm a religious identity through regular religious practices and travels to Iraq, they fashioned a religious self that was nevertheless embedded in a modernist reading of Islam. Basing their religious practices and beliefs on reading and understanding the religious texts, rather than blindly following religious scholars, young Iraqis delineated a concept of traditional Islam versus modern Islam. The debate among them about traditional and modern Islam was embedded in the turn of events in Iraq after 2003. As it became apparent that the religious politicians who assumed power after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and who resorted to a sectarian discourse to mobilize people had failed to build a functioning state and to provide basic services to the citizens, young religious Iraqis in London began to be disenchanted with the religious establishments. In 2006, a few of them began to voice scathing critiques of politicians’ use of religion for political ends and of the role of the religious establishment in public affairs; moreover, they advocated for the separation of religion from state and felt that religion had become a tool to exacerbate sectarian tensions, rather than a means to shape a pious self, dedicated to the cultivation of networks of care and tolerance. By 2019, these rare voices became more dominant as young people thought religion should strictly revolve around the relationship between the individual and God without interfering in politics. While this critique broke with the vision that Islam held fundamental precepts for state governance, it did not renounce religion itself. Young Iraqis faulted the religious establishment and politicians for mischaracterizing Islam and believed that Islam itself offered lessons in acceptance of others, leading a life of integrity, and constructing spaces of solidarity.

AI: This book invites us not only to think spatially about the concept and experience of exile, but also to take seriously the temporality of exile. Unlike established diasporas that maintain material connections to their homelands, Iraq was largely closed off to its diaspora in London during Saddam Hussein’s reign. In that sense, you argue that the Iraqi community in London was in exile even prior to the fall of the regime (p.25). Additionally, after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, Iraqi exiles in London had to live with the realization that they were no longer exiles waiting to return home (p.27). While some recent literature on Iraq, such as that of Sarah Pursley’s Familiar Futures, have attended to the work of time within the national boundaries, your arguments take us elsewhere outside that place to make of the notion of exile itself a temporal space with no particular beginning or end. Would you unpack this temporality of the exile further?

ZS: I perceive the temporality of the nation state and the temporality of exile as intertwined together. The generation of Iraqi revolutionaries who came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s endorsed a modernizing discourse that centered on political independence, economic prosperity, social equality, democracy, and women’s rights. They also believed that the change of the status quo could take place through radical change. David Scott describes such anti-colonial revolutionaries as harboring “modernist narratives of revolutionary overcoming” (p.5), whereby the present is “a state of expectation and waiting for the fulfillment of the promise of social and political improvement,” and change is “imagined not only as successive and progressive, but also as revolutionary” (p.72, emphasis in the original). In Iraq, the older generation of communists embraced such modernist sensibilities, and believed that popular mobilization would entail progressive, and hence revolutionary, change. Iraqi revolutionaries aspired after a radical rupture with the past and the immediate present, and envisioned a utopian future of political freedom and social justice. To them, time would unfold in a linear way, whereby the past would give in to the present, which in turn would give in to a promising future. However, the post-colonial present in Iraq—like in other Third World countries—resulted in disappointment, and Walter Benjamin’s angel of history was looking at a pile of ruins. The post-colonial present came to be defined by conflicts, corruption, and authoritarianism for the last five decades. The state of exception—namely wars, defeats, and ruins – became the rule.

Rather than a promising future, Iraqi found themselves inhabiting a temporality defined by exile. This status quo entailed spatial and temporal ruptures. Before, the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Iraqis in London perceived that their exile as a liminal phase and a state of exception, which would come to an end after regime change, and that the progressive procession of time was suspended amid ruins. They also sustained the hope this limbo would be short-lived, and the promising future would resume after the liminal stage. However, the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the spiraling sectarian violence put an end to this vision. David Scott describes the generation that experienced the Grenada Revolution and lived to see its failure as a generation that is “stranded in the present.” To this generation, the post-revolutionary present has nowhere to go. The failure of the revolution marked the end of the possibility to imagine alternative futures. To this disenchanted generation, the past became omnipresent in that it became a source of enchantment and provided a refuge from the bleak present. This generation became “locked in a melancholia in which the past only returns as nostalgia” (p.126). To Iraqi exiles in London, the present became an impasse and out of joint after 2006. The present came to be haunted by ruins and catastrophes, and the future ceased to be a source of inspiration and anticipation. Hence, the past emerged as an enchanted time, and exilic temporality came to be defined a deep sense of nostalgia, whereby the past held the prospect of a promising future, where justice, democracy, security, and prosperity might prevail.

AI: One of the most striking aspects of this book is the way you tie together humans, places, memories, and violence through intimate narratives. You embrace the notion according to which narrative is both the theory and the practice, and each of the biographies you follow illustrates that in its own unique way. You did not only listen to stories, but yourself became a storyteller to your interlocution in London, “as they were curious about your story as you were about theirs” (page 32). Through narration you unpack intimate practices such as trust and distrust between you and the exiled Iraqi community as well as among Iraqis themselves, and trace personal experiences such as that of personal loss, religious and political sensibilities, melancholy, and trauma. This was also translated in the book’s structure as you wrote parts of your own life and inserted them between each chapter, thus emphasizing that “you, like the Iraqi Londoners, are also carving out an Iraqi political subjectivity informed by war and violence” and a notion of home that is defined by fear and dissonance with past stories (p.33). How difficult and challenging this approach is during the process of writing, and what does it tell us about the Iraqi experience in particular?

ZS: Writing about Iraq, whether I was writing about myself or my interlocutors, has been a difficult process because Iraq, as one of my interlocutors told me, was “an open wound.” The image of the open wound signals the inability to find closure and the constant pain she felt from the destruction of her homeland and the loss of relatives and friends. As I mentioned earlier, the daily news about sectarian violence in Iraq and simplistic media representations, bothered me to a great extent. Whether telling my own story or the tales of my interlocutors, I aimed to provide alternative accounts of our history and experiences through narratives and life stories. For me, the efforts to carve out an Iraqi subjectivity rooted in historical events and structures of power were meant to resist the politics of erasure that rendered Iraqis as faceless statistics and the mainstream portrayal of them as sectarian subjects. Reclaiming our voices through storytelling enabled us to claim authorship of their narratives and to shed light on their daily struggles and interpretations of events. For me personally, by writing about my life and my family in Iraq, I wanted to show the readers what U.S. empire looked like on the ground, and the ways that United States produced conditions of slow death and debilitation for Iraqis.

In addition, in order to gain Iraqi exiles’ trust, I had to talk about my background and experiences in Iraq—in particular, the death of my parents and sister due to Hussein’s persecution. Iraqis in London decided to share their stories with me because they identified with me on some level. To the communists, I was the daughter of comrades, since both of my parents were communists. Religious people warmed up to me, though they disapproved of my lack of religiosity, because my father hailed from Najaf, a holy Shi‘i city in southern Iraq. For others, it was my story about losing my family that they connected with, because “I understood what suffering meant.” The young generation who grew up under Hussein’s regime shared with me how their parents instilled caution and fear in them from a young age in the 1980s and how the sanctions in the 1990s exposed them to financial hardships. Given that the intersections of my life story with the various narratives of my interlocutors were such an integral part of my fieldwork, I have included parts of my story between each chapter of this book. Through these narrations, I, like the Iraqi Londoners, am also carving out an Iraqi political subjectivity informed by war and violence and a notion of home that is defined by fear and dissonance with the stories I heard from my parents about the “good old days.”

AI: As a way of concluding this interview, I would like to ask: Where do you go from here? And what are your current preoccupations, or perhaps next project? Will we see another book on Iraq?

ZS: Currently, I’m working on a book, titled Uprooted Memories: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Deportation in Iraq. This book project examines the citizenship laws and legal practices enacted by different Iraqi governments that led to the denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews, Iraqi communists, and the so-called Iraqis of Iranian origin throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the mechanisms that Iraqis devised to challenge state definitions of citizenship and to assert belonging to their homeland—both from inside Iraq and in diaspora. Since its establishment in 1921, the Iraqi state—whether under monarchical, republican, or military regimes—has been responsible for the displacement and expulsion of different segments of the Iraqi population. These forced migrations from Iraq have been closely tied to projects of state-making and efforts to assert sovereignty, govern a diverse country, control and discipline groups that are seen as a threat, and silence oppositional political movements. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, this project shows how this long history of persecution and migration led to the emergence of Iraqi communities in diaspora and to heated debates about belonging that continue today—and provide insight into forms of citizenship that emerge outside of state recognition, with different groups restoring to political mobilization and the creation of networks in order to assert belonging to Iraq.

This project is based on anthropological debates on citizenship and law. I argue that citizenship in twentieth and twenty-first centuries Iraq became a process of denial and affirmation that extended across decades. It constantly oscillated between legal exclusion and performative resistance to legal violence. In this framework, while the definition of citizenship in legal terms engendered exclusion, was embedded in a politics of othering, and produced conditions of precarity and dispossession, citizenship was not only the purview of the state. Subjects could affirm a sense of citizenship and belonging through political activism and the construction of networks of solidarity with fellow citizens. Citizenship has been articulated, rearticulated, and disarticulated in these nexuses of power, mobility, political activism, debates over schools and education, and family networks.