The Old is Dying But The New Cannot be Born: ISIS in Iraq

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh:

On March 19, 2003, the United States used shock and awe strategies to invade in Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein’s interventionist Ba'athist state, and occupy the country. In the subsequent months, a transitional government, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), was established to reconstruct the Iraqi state and use shock therapy to shift the state from a central-planning dependent economy to a market economy. The principal aim included integrating the country into the global capitalist economy by superimposing a neoliberal economic agenda that effectively transnationalized the state and facilitated the development of new transnational accumulation circuits. CPA, and later the post-invasion governments, accomplished these goals by implementing a series of reforms that aimed at deregulating capital, privatizing key state-owned enterprises, liberalizing trade, implementing austerity measures, and more, without popular or democratic consent.

This included a rollback of social provisioning to reduce public expenditure, including health and education, and a rollout of increased surveillance, state-sanctioned violence, and repression aimed at creating a favourable environment for foreign direct investment. These changes exacerbated existing political, religious, and cultural tensions as impoverishment and precarity intensified. The state, in response, further cemented disciplinary security policies, creating vicious cycles of violence. Employing international political economy, this lecture examines the transnationalization of state and class and the implementation of neoliberalism in Iraq from 2003-2016, arguing that the very foundation of the new state contained contradictions that led to its eventual demise. This ultimately emboldened nascent insurgencies that would later morph into ISIS, which, from 2016 onwards, would attempt to create a competing, transnational state structure predicated on Islam.

Shehnoor Khurram is a senior PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at York University (Toronto, Canada). She is currently a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Her research interests are in international and comparative political economy, state theory, and critical security studies. Her fields of interest are united in her dissertation project, which traces the making and unmaking of statehood in Iraq, leading up to ISIS. Her cutting edge research has been published in Manchester University Press, Africa World Press, and New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis.