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Article contents
State formation as an outcome of the imperial encounter: the case of Iraq
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2019
Abstract
This article employs a postcolonial historical sociological approach to studying state formation in Iraq between 1914–24. In doing so, it synthesises insights from the ‘historical’ and ‘imperial’ turns in International Relations (IR), to understand the state as a processual and relational entity shaped by the imperial relations through which it emerged. Drawing on the case of Iraq, this article demonstrates how British imperial relations (‘international’) interlaced with anti-colonial struggles (‘domestic’) to foster a historically specific pattern of Iraqi state formation. In making these claims, this article contributes to bridging IR's analytical divide between ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ spaces, while undermining IR's universalist assumptions about the ‘spread’ of the state from Europe to the Arab world. Rather, this article demonstrates that the imperial encounter was constitutive of the type of state that emerged, thereby highlighting the agency of anti-colonial struggles in producing historically specific patterns of state domination.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Review of International Studies , Volume 45 , Special Issue 5: Special Issue on Populism , December 2019 , pp. 848 - 869
- Copyright
- Copyright © British International Studies Association 2019
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194 TNA FO 371/18950/E 4371/759/93, Ministry of Defence, Royal Iraqi Air Force, ‘Quarterly Report for the Period Ending June 30th, 1935’; TNA FO 371/20015/1575/E2743, letter no. 236, from Kerr to Eden, 7 May 1936.
195 Batatu, Hanna, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 30, 461Google Scholar.
196 Ibid., p. 451; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, p. 157.
197 McDoughall, ‘Empires in the Arab world’, p. 56.
198 Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, p. 64.
199 Cooper, Colonialism in Question, p. 157; Al-Marashi, Ibrahim and Salama, Sammy, Iraq's Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Oxon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 47, 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
200 TNA FO 371/75128/1016/E74, Baghdad despatch No. 347, Mack to Bevil, 17 December 1948.
201 Cooper, Colonialism in Question, p. 18.