Atrocity denial suffuses the bedrock of the academic field of modern Middle East studies. One of the most frequently cited works about modern Assyrians is a 1974 revisionist account of the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Its author, Khaldun S. Husry, dismisses Assyrian recollections of the violence as “propaganda of the victims.” Examining how Husry’s article came to be published reveals that the editor who published it, Stanford Shaw, promoted its logic as part of his denial of the Armenian genocide. As a result of the influence of this denialism, Assyrians—who continue to face displacement and dispossession over a century after hundreds of thousands of them, alongside Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Empire—are systematically demeaned in academic literature. Scholars routinely treat Assyrians as problematic, questioning their legitimacy through racist lines of inquiry. They then claim, as moral licensing for their contempt, that their aim is to critique ethnic nationalism and colonialism. Analyzing the disparagement of Assyrians in the Middle East studies field offers lessons about what good and bad critiques of ethnic nationalism look like, how to avoid historiographical and citational pitfalls when writing about marginalized people, and why revisionist histories of atrocities are profoundly harmful.

This article reports on outcomes and lessons learned from a four-day mhGAP-IG cascade training programme delivered in 2023 to psychosocial support workers from Red Crescent Societies in Iraq, Egypt and Jordan by primary care physicians who had themselves completed mhGAP-IG training. Participants demonstrated significant gains in knowledge, confidence and competence, supported by assessments and qualitative feedback. The training improved preparedness, clarified clinical language and enhanced comfort in addressing mental, neurological and substance use disorders. This experience highlights the feasibility of cascade training as a sustainable model to strengthen front-line mental healthcare capacity in conflict-affected low- and middle-income countries.

This article reconstructs the religious and political activities of the Lebanese Shi‘i scholar Mohamad Jawad Chirri, who founded the first purpose-built Shi‘i mosque in the United States in 1963. It uses Chirri’s biography to explain the institutional, ideological, and political concerns structuring the global Shi‘i revival of the mid-twentieth century, as well as the strategies adopted by Islamic revivalist figures to achieve their institutional ambitions in a competitive and increasingly globalized religious marketplace. A hypermobile activist who lived and travelled between southern Lebanon, southern Iraq, Michigan, and West Africa, Chirri’s institutional initiatives and public activism took place outside the purview of the centres of Shi‘i religious authority in southern Iraq and Iran. The article argues that Chirri’s work, thought, and legacy complicate diffusionist understandings of Islamic revivalist activity as an ideologically coherent project of politicization or radicalization in the years surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The ‘global’ Shi‘i revival should instead be understood as an entanglement of institutional projects linked by transnational familial, professional, and financial networks emerging in the 1950s.

This article uses the theory of recognition to analyze sectarian conflicts in Iraq. After describing the sectarian and historical background of contemporary Iraqi politics, the article critiques the implementation of consociationalism and policies influenced by liberal multiculturalism in deeply divided societies. It argues that these policies lead to a dangerous reification of identities. The article argues that a progressive implementation of deliberative democracy practices could improve identity-related issues in Iraq and explains how democratic practices are legitimized by the most influential Islamic religious figure in Iraq.

Realists and liberals dispute the post-war record of the transatlantic alliance. Yet, the crisis over Iraq has prompted consensus on the notion that transatlantic relations will ‘never be the same’. This article offers two central arguments. First, the US-European alliance was transformed, long before the Iraq crisis, by the end of the Cold War. Second, convergence on ends for the international order remain obscured by transatlantic disputes over means.

Left-populist narratives of hydrocarbon extraction in the postcolonial world, including the twentieth-century Middle East, often construe it as a process whereby multinational fossil capital encloses and commodifies land held in common. Although such narratives may capture the experience of communities along certain oil and gas frontiers, they do not account for the social terrains and political trajectories of extractive land grabs in areas where private property in land already underpins commercial agriculture. How do energy companies engage with an existing market in land, and reorient a commodity frontier around extractive rather than agrarian capitalism? This article explores that question by examining property struggles in southern Iraq in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the multinational Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) sought to acquire land still devoted to cash crop agriculture. Drawing on business records and material from Iraqi archives entirely new to Anglophone scholarship, I show how land conflicts on the Basra oil frontier came to revolve less around the IPC as such than the Iraqi state. The latter’s expanding remit entailed both the revival of older powers of sovereign landlordism and the deployment of novel capacities, as the state sought to mediate conflicting legal claims on land and its value and manage the social consequences of territorial dispossession. Ultimately, this article historicizes the political-legal status of postcolonial landlord states like Iraq in an era of hydrocarbon extraction, locating the origin of their powers as much in the material assemblage of oil infrastructures as in the monopoly over oil rents.

Welfare regime theory remains a central framework in social policy literature, valued for its theoretical insights and policy relevance. However, as this framework is increasingly applied to countries in the Global South, scholars have questioned whether all contexts fit neatly into the established welfare regime types. Recent contributions suggest adopting a hybrid lens, which recognizes that welfare arrangements often vary within the same country, with different populations experiencing distinct forms of social protection. This study contributes to this evolving debate by exploring the development of Iraq’s welfare system and proposing a hybrid classification within the welfare regime framework. We argue that Iraq functions as a hybrid welfare regime, where access to welfare and social protection is unevenly distributed across different segments of society. In doing so, the study extends welfare regime theory by classifying Iraq as a case of hybrid welfare regime and highlights the importance of hybrid welfare models for understanding welfare systems in the Global South.

Despite lying at a crossroad of Pleistocene hominin dispersals, little is known about human occupation in Iraq during this period. An archaeological survey in the Western Desert is revealing recurrent hominin activity at Shbicha, highlighting the region’s potential in advancing our understanding of hominin behaviour and dispersal across South-west Asia.

The legitimacy of armed forces in the eyes of civilians is increasingly recognized as crucial not only for battlefield effectiveness but also for conflict resolution and peace building. However, the concept of “military legitimacy” remains under-theorized and its determinants poorly understood. We argue that perceptions of military legitimacy are shaped by two key dimensions of warfare: just cause and just conduct. Leveraging naturally occurring variation during one of the deadliest urban battles in recent history—the multinational campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq—we evaluate our theory using a mixed-methods design that combines original survey data, satellite imagery, and interviews. Civilians living in neighborhoods where armed forces were less careful to protect civilians view those forces as less legitimate than civilians elsewhere. Surprisingly, these results persist after conditioning on personal experiences of harm, suggesting that perceptions are influenced not only by victimization—consistent with previous studies—but also by beliefs about the morality of armed forces’ conduct and the cause for which they are fighting.

During the pandemic, specifically in 2021, I established a virtual network that gathers Iraqi women academics who are based in the diaspora and in Iraq. The network is a private WhatsApp group and an X account that promotes the scholarly work of Iraqi women and fosters collaboration. We have attracted the attention of international institutions, enlarged our group to include Iraqi women academics across the continents, and introduced our work to a larger audience. Like any other group, the network has faced several challenges. We are academic women who are overloaded with endless tasks and burdened with family responsibilities, but we have found solidarity in our group. Our steps are small and slow, but we are making progress in enhancing the global visibility of Iraqi women academics and supporting the higher education system in Iraq.