Description
What is sustainable peace and what does it look like? This paper investigates the question in the Iraqi context following the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2017, where successive governments have not addressed many of the root causes that led to the group’s emergence but rather consolidated a victor’s peace. Key grievances such as corruption, unemployment, the weak rule of law, militia impunity, and insecurity remain, hallmarks of what Smith et al (2020) refer to as illiberal peace and others refer to as state ‘weakness’. Despite this, Iraq appears relatively stable. Statebuilding and peacebuilding, long considered mutually dependent in liberal thought, remain co-constitutive but operate differently in the Iraqi context. Since 2017, both processes have largely been bottom-up rather than top-down and negotiated rather than implemented according to a pre-conceived normative design. The Iraqi reality challenges conventional notions of boundaries between formal and informal actors, with multiple centres and networks of power from militia to tribes that variously compete with, cooperate with, and represent the state. Rather than a neo-Weberian model, Iraq seems more akin to what Dodge (2018) and Zubaida (1989), drawing on Bourdieu’s work, have described as a political field. This paper substantiates arguments around the need for locally focused grassroots peacebuilding which embraces alternative conceptions of political order to the traditional state, in line with Clement’s (2008) notion of grounded legitimacy and Menkhaus’s (2007) mediated state. It argues for the need to understand key units of international relations such as the state differently, offers original empirical analysis, and considers implications for future peacebuilding practice. The analysis draws on a book manuscript currently in progress, based on over 50 original interviews with Iraqi and international stakeholders.
