Women and Gender in Iraq is an obligatory read for understanding Iraq’s current wave of civil unrest. Yet, if one is to argue that Zahra Ali roots her book on women and gender studies, its readership certainly trespasses feminist traditional audiences. Her research informs political scientists, economists, humanitarian and development practitioners, and local and international activists of the centrality of gender in women’s lives but also, fundamentally, Iraqi politics and nation-building processes. Ali’s unique contribution is to fill the gap in and take issue against research and disciplines that have long relegated the women or gender question to a lesser analytic category or that have simplified and undertheorized its importance. At the theoretical level she situates herself in a growing trend of “contextualising notions of women’s rights and feminism, secular and religious, and conservative and progressive” (289) within the historical and political events that first prompted them, thus enriching a growing body of literature that has previously focused on Egypt (Al-Ali 2000) or Morocco (Salime 2011), to name a few regions. Yet this comes short to describe her contribution into the field of women’s social movements, since her research also digs into the importance of gender in state-building processes, which refers to the women question as a unique standpoint from which to unpack the complexities of nationalism and ethnosectarian fragmentation in postinvasion Iraq. A substantive argument underpinning this idea is that feminist perspectives in this book have helped Ali brilliantly combine political analysis with historical events, domestic matters, and lived experiences of the many activists she interviewed. Thus this research, while rooted in sociology with clear anthropological methods, also draws on political science and history.While the book unfolds chronologically, one is tempted to reverse the order of the chapters, as this would illuminate the root causes of the civil protests in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and many other squares around Iraq since 2011, unrest that picked up in 2018. The mosaic—and often patchy and chaotic—mapping of women’s organizations in different localities and during different chronological periods is thus the lens through which Ali examines Iraq’s civil society struggle to build a nation that wishes to leave behind its colonial past, Baʾth’s party dictatorship and Saddam Hussein’s legacy, and the US-led invasion and posterior occupation. While doing so, Ali brings forward the lived experiences of the eighty women she interviewed while doing fieldwork in 2010 across Arab Iraq and Iraq Kurdistan, whose voices bear the mark of the particular gendered experience of Iraq’s conflict. In this regard, her research has uncovered important evidence of the consequences of a protracted crisis with an unbearable, violent footprint. Ali offers a historical understanding of the sea of violence that foreign troops and ethnosectarian violence has inflicted on Iraqi ordinary citizens since the British Administration. In a much-appreciated effort and in accessible language, Ali delicately interweaves the many forces that regulate women’s lives during different periods and thus teases out the many nuances that tie together concepts and principles that for long had been explained by and to Western audiences as opposed to each other: secularism and religion, progressivism and conservatism, or Islam and feminism, to name a few. Ali untangles this political, cultural, and economic hodgepodge without losing the perspective of those whose suffer, and without concealing her own bereavement and positionality as an exiled daughter of a father who was assassinated by a terrorist sectarian group. The balance she shows in her writing is simply commendable.The first chapter introduces the reader to the genesis of “the women question” at the time of the British Administration, which continues in the second chapter toward the Baʾth period from 1969 until the fall of Saddam Hussein, during the US-led invasion in 2003. These chapters are essential to properly identify the layers on which 2003 prompted the most violent period of Iraq’s modern history and to understand how political actions and armed conflict descend upon a population as a “critical event”—borrowing Veena Das’s (1995) expression—changing forever the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Chapter 3 is dedicated to unpacking the complexity and diversity of lived experiences of women activists and the many positions toward the invasion, thus forming a preliminary section that explains the differences she treats in chapter 4—on the emergence of women’s groups and networks—and the differences with Iraq Kurdistan explained in chapter 5. These chapters also contribute to ongoing debates on the influence of humanitarian aid and donor funding on the women’s movement, which swings between critics to the careerization and professionalization of the women’s movement, on the one hand, and organizations with firm political stands toward donors, particularly USAID, on the other. Ali also clarifies how women’s movements mainly use funding available in a practical way to advance their agendas, while she acknowledges that the fall of Saddam Hussein paved the road to a “sense of freedom and effervesces” (167) supported by an enabling international environment that focused on women’s rights. Nonetheless, hopes in this period rapidly deteriorated as the US administration found its way into the country. Chapters 6 and 7 dig into vernacular issues historically related to women’s rights and the multiple and diverse feminist social movements. As such, these chapters contribute to regional and global discussion on matters such as the provision of the law, the politics of representation and respectability, citizenship, or secularism, to name a few, and ends with a categorization of women’s activists and feminisms.Ali’s research has brought up reflections on three interconnected topics that I hope she will continue to explore. Intergenerational continuity and fragmentation, the emergence of sexual violence activism or the lack of it in such a context, and the experiences of the diaspora are recurrent themes that draw my attention. The tensions that underlie the entire book deserve an in-depth analysis. Ali shows how Iraq has been the chessboard of foreign powers, with the consent and alliance of different constituencies at different times, a dynamic that has played a significant role in the fragmentation of the nation and the emergence of ethnosectarian conflict. Connections to the diaspora are portrayed as a positive influence, which I assume is with a grade of complexity whose analysis will push forward a more engaged understanding of class. Similarly, recent youth movements and their connections and ruptures with past generations will push the analysis to explore the fragmentation and continuation of certain agendas and the forces that have prompted the emergence or concealment of highly pervasive matters such as sexual violence.Ali’s book contributes to the growing body of knowledge on social movements in the Middle East that erases the binary that has put Middle Eastern countries on the line between civilization and barbarism, giving visibility to the multiple forces and power dynamics of Iraq’s recent history.