Post-invasion Iraq Research Articles

Understanding Accountability and Governance in Post-invasion Iraq

Using the accountability framework developed by Romzek, Dubnick, and colleagues, this article considers the creation and operation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The CPA’s short duration and the difficult circumstances of Iraq combined to pose fundamental challenges to the normal expectations for accountable behavior of a federal agency. With minimal plans in place for governing Post-invasion Iraq, the CPA had little structure and few institutional expectations to influence its behavior. This lack of guidance, combined with the CPA’s de facto reporting relationships and noncareer staff, led to the maximization of political accountability, whereas professional accountability was secondary.

Set up to fail: consociational political structures in post-war Iraq, 2003–2010

Since Arend Lijphart's development of the theory of consociationalism in 1969, dominant schools of thought have accepted that ‘power sharing’ and ‘group autonomy’ are the basic preconditions of democratic governance in divided societies. The constitution and electoral framework adopted by post-invasion Iraq instituted many of Lijphart's recommendations, including proportional representation, federalism and a parliamentary system with a weak presidency. But this democratic framework has failed Iraq. Eight months on from its 2010 parliamentary election and still struggling to establish an effective government, Iraq is facing constitutional crisis. This article uses the case study of Iraq to uncover fundamental flaws in orthodox arguments about democracy in divided societies and it goes on to recommend changes that would better enable stable and effective governance.

Leaked Documents Provide Bonanza for Researchers

The Pentagon is fuming after last week's release of a huge cache of classified Iraq War data by the organization WikiLeaks. But researchers struggling to build an accurate picture of the death toll in post-invasion Iraq are thrilled.

The Iraq War: origins and consequences

* 1. Culture and History of Iraq: Ancient Mesopotamia to the British Mandate * 2. From the British Mandate to the 1958 Revolution * 3. The Iraq Revolution, Post-Monarchy Political Conflict and the Establishment of the Baathist Regime * 4. Saddam Hussein, the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War * 5. The Invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Persian Gulf War * 6. The Iraq War: Causes, Invasion, and Post-Invasion Policies * 7. Iraq in the Context of Previous US Interventions and the Vietnam War * 8. Post-Invasion Iraq: Occupation and Reaction Government and Economy Insurgency * 9. Counterinsurgency and U.S.Corporate Presence * 10. Impacts of the Iraq War

The Transformation of Violence in Iraq

This article explores the connections between various forms of organized political violence and ostensibly private, non-political violence in post-invasion Iraq, focusing on gender-based violence and the links between militias and organized crime. We argue that, as in other civil wars, much of the violence is dual-purpose', simultaneously serving private and political goals, and that despite a decline in violence since 2007, the situation created by the overthrow of the previous dictatorship remains extremely dangerous.

‘Explosions and examinations’: growing up female in post-Saddam Iraq

In the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi civilians have witnessed their country descend into profound and often deadly chaos. HNK and Aunt Najma are two young voices from post-Saddam, post-invasion Iraq who write www-based diaries (blogs) on life in post-invasion Iraq. Through their voices, and via the voices of many other Iraqi bloggers, different fragments of the reality of post-invasion Iraq enter the globalised, unruly, digital spaces of cyberspace and create not only accounts of these realities, but what we will call digital selves. We will identify and discuss the selves that HNK and Aunt Najmapractise via the use of Michel Foucault's later work on the care of the self and governmentality; and we suggest that HNK and Aunt Najma's digital diaries (blogs) provide a real-time, unfolding, reflexive, and often interactive window into particular life-worlds in post-invasion Iraq, life-worlds that provide glimpses into what it means to grow up female in post-Saddam Iraq.

Is Islamist Terrorism More Dangerous?: An Empirical Study of Group Ideology, Organization, and Goal Structure

Scholars have traditionally argued that Islamist terrorist groups tend to commit higher casualty attacks. Noting that casualty rates of attacks vary widely across Islamist terrorist groups, this study advances an alternative hypothesis that group organizational features and goal structures better explain differing casualty rates than does the overarching ideological type. Using both cross-national analysis and a case study of post-invasion Iraq, I demonstrate that there are two basic types of Islamist terrorist groups whose organizational and goal-structure features explain divergent casualty rates: “strategic groups” that function similarly to secular national-liberation and regime-change movements and “abstract/universal groups” that are affiliated with the global al-Qaeda network.

Iran's Foreign Policy in Post‐Invasion Iraq

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The History of Imposed Democracy and the Future of Iraq and Afghanistan

What does history tells us about the prospects for democracy in post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan? American policy makers frequently referenced the post-World War II success stories of Germany and Japan as plausible futures for the imposed democratic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. To evaluate the historical validity of this comparison, we examine the durability of 43 imposed democratic regimes during the period 1800–1994, given several political, economic, and social dimensions, as well as the long-term impact of these foreign cultivated regimes on subsequent polity performance. Our analysis suggests that the survival of imposed democracy is by no means assured. Instead, the survival of democracy is strongly conditioned by the process by which the regime is imposed and the social and economic conditions present in the state hosting the imposed polity. We discuss the prospects for the survival of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan in light of these findings.

Commercial Security: Conditions of Growth

Today, in what has been described as a re-emergence of privately organized extraterritorial force, the private military and security industry supplies the major military powers with a range of core services. This article asks how such a development came about, and why it has become politically uncomplicated to outsource such intimate state functions as the executive branches of foreign policy programmes. How did certain states arrive at a situation where it is unclear whether core military and security affairs are run by public or private agencies? The article answers these questions by presenting and commenting on general explanations as to why the private military industry has grown so much in post-invasion Iraq. It adds new perspectives to existing scholarly work by suggesting that the reappearance of private extraterritorial force could not have occurred on such a scale without a restructuring of neutrality in international relations. It is suggested that this change in neutrality might constitute the sine qua non of the re-emergence of private extraterritorial force.

Estimating Excess Mortality in Post-Invasion Iraq

In a military invasion and ongoing war, the likelihood of obtaining good demographic data plummets. Catherine Brownstein and John Brownstein discuss the accuracy of the data from the Iraq Family Health Survey. Dr. Mohamed Ali discusses violence-related mortality among Iraqi civilians and the methods used to assess health and mortality in a war zone. Dr. Ali is a statistician in the Department of Measurement and Health Information Systems at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Ethics of Secession and Postinvasion Iraq

This article outlines the two central theories in the ethics of secession and examines whether or under what conditions these normative theories would be satisfied in a post-invasion Iraq. I argue that the two dominant normative theories of secession focus on the secessionist group, which national self-determination theories conceive as a nation holding a right to self-determination, and just-cause theories conceive as having a remedial right to secession as a victim of injustice. The Iraq case suggests that this is a flawed way of thinking about the issue. I argue that secession is more legitimate when fair multinational arrangements are not on offer; and that the fairness requirement involves examining constitutional arrangements from the point of view of all groups.