Iraq in the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Research

Abstract

This article argues that the study of Iraq has been critically hampered by the opacity of the regime and the country's inaccessibility for field research, a staple technique for effective social science research. In lieu of these methods, scholars of Iraq have adopted many practices akin to those used in Cold War Sovietology, relying on a number of instrumental variables that are observable remotely. These include taking the discursive turn in examining the regime's public rhetoric and the historical turn in examining the state's colonial antecedents. Despite its inherent policy importance and possible contributions to theories about state formation, ethnicity, and natural resource dependence, the study of Iraq has long been relegated to the margins of social scientific inquiry. Since the removal of the Ba'ath regime in 2003, however, a plethora of new studies have appeared, making fuller use of the methodological toolkit. Still, Iraq's changing political relationship with the United States and the continuation of political instability may spell an end to the brief burgeoning of Iraq studies.