Evaluating the Pitfalls of External Statebuilding in Post-2003 Iraq (2003–2021)

ABSTRACT

Peacebuilding and transitional justice are viewed as integral components of statebuilding in post-conflict spaces. This Special Issue critically evaluates statebuilding and peacebuilding in Iraq through macro and micro-level analyses of Iraq's political development following foreign-imposed regime change. In line with the articles in the Special Issue, this introduction critically examines Iraq's post-2003 trajectory as an outcome of the failure of securitized statebuilding and the absence of legitimacy in externally-imposed democratization. It concludes by highlighting the impact of expedient and exogenous statebuilding on transitional justice and post-conflict peacebuilding.

KEYWORDS:

• Iraq
• peacebuilding
• statebuilding
• democratization
• foreign-imposed regime change

Introduction

Mass protests in Iraq since October 2019 reflect a growing disillusionment with the highly sectarianized consociational power-sharing political system instituted post-2003. Recent Arab Barometer public attitudes surveys illuminate Iraq's stagnating trajectory: only thirteen percent of Iraqis have trust in parliament; fifty-two percent agreed that democratic regimes are ineffective at maintaining order and stability; and nearly eighty percent rated the economic situation as bad (Arab Barometer 2019). Nearing two decades since the American-led invasion and subsequent occupation attempted to democratize a state known for its authoritarian durability, foreign-imposed regime change ushered an era of domestic instability characterized by high degrees of ethnic and communal fractionalization, failed governance, and laggard socio-economic development. The past decade has been defined by a pervasive cycle of conflict, insecurity, and re-emergent authoritarianism that pose obstacles to domestic, regional, and international security. Although statebuilding through foreign occupation accompanied a systematic overhaul of the country's political, economic, and governing institutions within a neoliberal model of state reformation (Herring 2008; Dodge 2013; Baker 2014), it failed to devise cohesive, legitimate, and durable parallel conciliatory peacebuilding institutions.

Iraq poses several theoretical and empirical challenges to the extant literature on state- and peacebuilding. First, Iraq prior to 2003 was neither war-torn nor bureaucratically weak or institutionally fragmented. Statebuilding and democratization were outcomes of an invasion and occupation following foreign conquest and not due to a peace settlement resulting from preexisting conflict (Paris 2004, 5). Second, and as a result, Iraq falls outside the scope of most scholarship on multilateral/internationalized peace interventions with the aim of rebuilding war-torn societies of the post-Cold War era (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008, 3–4; Autesserre 2014, 7). Consequently, works have yet to situate its trajectory to capture and conceptualize its failures as part of scholarly works on the hazards of externally imposed statebuilding (Pugh, Cooper, and Turner 2008). Given that Iraq occupies an empirically and theoretically ambiguous space within the aforementioned literatures, this introduction illustrates that its failures are simultaneously emblematic of the failure of externally imposed democratization as an outcome of, and imbued in, liberal statebuilding.

The contributions to this Special Issue frame the dilemmas and failures of post-2003 Iraq within an emergent body of scholarship on critical peacebuilding to illustrate the challenges of statebuilding under foreign conquest (Lemay-Hébert 2009, 2013). Situating Iraq within the intersecting literatures on post-conflict state and peacebuilding, the authors outline the conditions that impeded the creation a functioning, democratic, and stable state (Newman 2010). Whereas peacebuilding necessitates the creation of conditions that minimize the recurrence of violence, statebuilding aims to strengthen or construct legitimate governmental institutions in conflict-prone states (Paris and Sisk 2009, 14). By problematizing the multifaceted failures of state and peacebuilding, the authors examine macro and micro-level processes that impeded the formation of a functioning state and a durable and unifying political order capable of curtailing the recurrence of violence.

In what follows, we elucidate and contextualize the dilemmas of externally imposed democratization and statebuilding. Through an examination of context-specific conditions of failed state and peacebuilding, the Special Issue draws on the fourth-generation critical peacebuilding literature to examine Iraq's post-2003 trajectory and underscore two peace and statebuilding failures (Richmond 2008, 108–9; Roberts 2010, 85; Roberts 2013). First, securitized statebuilding impeded bottom-up, localized efforts at maintaining peace following democratization. Expedient and incongruent statebuilding under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), as an occupying administration, produced weak and highly fragile state institutions susceptible to ethnic elite capture and a weak and highly fragmented coercive apparatus incapable of successfully claiming monopoly over the use of force within its territory (Weber 1991, 78). The overemphasis on post-conflict reconstruction, neoliberal economic restructuring, and institutional and political reforms failed to create parallel peacebuilding institutions. Second, as a foreign invasion and occupation absent international diplomatic support dependent largely on a narrow group of exiled Iraqis, American statebuilding suffered from multiple and overlapping crises of legitimacy that set the path for re-emergent authoritarianism and heightened the propensity for perpetual and pervasive cycles of conflict and fractionalization.

The article is structured as follows. The first section problematizes the securitization of peacebuilding through foreign-imposed regime change in the pre- and post-war planning of the Iraq invasion and occupation. We illustrate the ways in which expedient and incongruent statebuilding under occupation delegitimized transitional justice and peacebuilding following regime collapse in post-2003 Iraq. The second section situates Iraq's trajectory within analogous cases of externally imposed state and peacebuilding to contextualize its failure along a continuum of prescriptive failures embedded in adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to transitional justice and peacebuilding. The third section provides an overview and contributions of the six articles of this Special Issue. Collectively, the articles illuminate macro and micro factors and processes that have impeded the development and implementation of tangible peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms in post-2003. The conclusion summarizes the contribution of the special issue to the extant scholarship on peacebuilding and transitional justice within the context of foreign-imposed democratization and statebuilding.

Securitized state- and peacebuilding in post-2003 Iraq

The 2003 invasion of Iraq epitomized American hegemonic projections of ‘foreign democracy at gunpoint’ (Pickering and Peceny 2006) imbued in neoliberal democracy promotion campaigns through peacebuilding and its corollary, statebuilding. Iraq typifies liberal statebuilding projects of the post-Cold War that saw the ‘Westernization and securitization of peace’ as part of Western democracy promotion and military interventionism whereby ‘peace and, by extension war, works to legitimize this expansion’ (Kühn 2012, 397). As noted by Singh (2006), the Bush Doctrine of preemption fused national security with democracy promotion to counter perceived threats to American economic, strategic, and security interests emanating from weak, fragile, or failed states. The 2002 National Security Strategy noted that failing states constituted a serious threat to U.S. national security (U.S. National Security Council 2002). Viewing terrorism, transnational crime, global poverty, and humanitarian crises as fundamental foreign policy challenges, the 2004 Commission for Weak States and U.S. National Security fused statebuilding with domestic and international peace and security to counter potential threats posed by weak and failing states, noting that:

The resulting state weakness-not just failure-matters to our security, our values, and the success of economic globalization. More broadly, international peace and security now depend in no small part on the capacities of governments in the development world. Weak and failed governments generate instability, which harms their citizens, drags down their neighbors, and ultimately threatens US interests in building an effective international system, providing the foundation for continued prosperity, and, not least, in protecting Americans from external threats to our security. (Weinstein 2004, 6–7)

The 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq served as the acme of American strategic visions for reforming ‘weak’ and ‘failed’ states. Although the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act set the path for regime change in Iraq under the Clinton administration, the 9/11 terrorist attack and the resulting U.S.-led ‘global war on terror’ catalyzed foreign-imposed regime change, statebuilding, and democratization as key components of American foreign policy. This was echoed by Paul Wolfowitz – U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush and a leading architect of regime change in Iraq in noting that ‘if it was not for 9/11 there would never have been a second war. It was entirely in the context of dealing with terrorism’.¹

Statebuilding and peacebuilding in Iraq commenced on a tabula rasa through foreign-imposed regime change.² As a post-conquest occupation (Edelstein 2009, 95), statebuilding lacked the planning, coordination, and logistical support of internationally sanctioned interventions and peacebuilding operations as seen in Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, or Sierra Leone. Post-occupation prescriptions advocated top-down statebuilding predicated on overhauling Ba'thist economic, political and security institutions. The 2002 Future of Iraq Project of the Transitional Justice Working Group at the U.S. Department of State outlined American peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts for Iraq. At its core, ‘establishing rule of law and restoring civil society’ required the near total dissolution of Iraqi political, economic, and coercive state structures and institutions (United States Department of State 2002). Building on the 2002 National Strategy of neoliberal marketization of democracy and development, the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq sought to ‘build stable, pluralistic, and effective national institutions that can protect the interests of all Iraqis and facilitate Iraq's full integration into the international community’ (The White House 2005, 8).

President Bush's National Security Presidential Directive 24 of 20 January 2003 tasked the Department of Defense with post-occupation planning and execution, which cemented the militarization of post-conflict peace- and statebuilding (Smith 2009, 7). This was reflected in the final report of the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), an audit of American post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq. Between 2003 and 2012, the United States Institute of Peace was awarded $10 million for peacekeeping efforts, a stark contrast with the $370 million expended on the Sons of Iraq (SOI) counterinsurgency measure in the form of payments to Sunni insurgents and some Shia militias for cooperating with Coalition forces (United States Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction 2013, xi, 148). Overall, between 2003 and 2012, $51.6 billion was spent on Department of Defense administered relief and reconstruction funds for Iraqi security forces, economic support, emergency response, narcotics control and law enforcement in comparison with the $266 million spent on democracy and human rights promotion, $90 million on supporting child survival and health programmes, and $46 million on cultural exchange and education programmes (ibid., 149–150).

Securitized state and peacebuilding obstructed the creation of parallel, bottom-up community level conflict mitigating and conciliatory institutions. Such institutions during the preparative and transitional phase serve to temper ethnic fractionalization and de-escalate intercommunal tensions by minimizing violent conflict and the conditions that propel them in the future (Bermeo 2002, 9). Formal and informal conciliatory institutions work to bolster cooperation between political leaders and induced commitment to conflict containment (Sisk 1996, 48). As discussed below, securitized, top-down statebuilding and the reliance on expatriate exiled elites in the lead up to and following the 2003 invasion produced a crisis of legitimacy.

Legitimacy in externally-imposed democratization

If ‘any theory of statebuilding must begin with a conception of state failure’ (Lake 2016, 22), how can legitimacy be reconceptualized in instances of statebuilding through foreign occupation absent state failure? Can foreign-imposed regime change and democratization produce a legitimate state and political order? The failure of American statebuilding efforts in Iraq to produce a legitimate political order reflects a historical pattern of failed state and nation-building attempts throughout the twentieth century (Pei and Kasper 2003). On a normative level, legitimacy denotes

the normative belief of a political community that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed. States are legitimate when key political elites and the public accept the rules regulating the exercise of power and the distribution of wealth as proper and binding. (Papagianni 2008, 49)

Legitimacy during statebuilding is achieved when a state is able to perform key functions of the state such as public service delivery and maintaining public order; the presence of an inclusive and bottom-up participatory statebuilding process; and domestic legitimacy for state institutions (ibid., 50). As a political process, successful statebuilding during the formative transitional phase requires an inclusive deliberative process attuned to local level/indigenous realities (Papagianni 2007, 254). Reinforcing legitimacy following state collapse and during the transitional phase of state- and peacebuilding defines a state's democratization trajectory. Iraq exemplifies the challenges of an institutional approach to statebuilding that prioritizes reconstruction and institutional reform over fostering an inclusive legitimate political order (Lemay-Hébert 2009, 29–30).

Two interlinked factors contributed to the failure of adopt cohesive transitional justice and peacebuilding policies following regime change – the absence of international support in the preparative phase and immediately following the invasion, and the reliance on expatriate elites lacking broad-based domestic support to devise the emergent political and institutional structures of the state. First, statebuilding through conquest absent an internationally sanctioned, multilateral mandate lacked the technical, political, and logistical assistance from the U.N. and its subsidiary bodies. By launching a war rather than terminating one, the American-led invasion and occupation in 2003 was conducted without approval from the U.N. Security Council, which otherwise could have acted as a more neutral and credible interlocutor for political groups (Rubin 2008, 33). Compounding the Bush administration's spurious claims about Saddam Hussein's links to transnational Islamist terrorist organizations and weapons of mass destruction capabilities, the invasion was viewed by Iraqis ‘not as an international effort but as an occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers, and this evoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist struggles against Iraq's former overlords’ (Diamond 2004, 43). Second, the reliance on a narrow group of Iraqi Shia and Kurdish dissident elites during the pre-and post-war planning fused communal interests with statebuilding. The muhassasa, exclusive ethnic elite pact system, hampered peacebuilding by codifying the strategic interactions of ethno-sectarian elites (Dodge 2021). According to Allawi (2007, 8),

The exile groups, each with their different agendas, could not and did not provide the USA with a clear and reasonable assessment of the circumstances in Iraq. They were either too parochial in their concerns or simply too eager to assume power after America had removed Saddam.

The absence of legitimate bottom-up engagement with Iraqi experts and technocrats in the American statebuilding process produced what Barnett and Zürcher (2009, 24) call compromised statebuilding, whereby ‘local elites and peacebuilders negotiate a peacebuilding programme that reflects the desire of peacebuilders for stability and the legitimacy of peacebuilding and the desire of local elites to ensure that reforms do not threaten their power base’. The final report of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Iraq similarly noted that the United States failed to consult sufficiently with local Iraqis regarding reconstruction, corruption, security, and development during the crucial phases of the occupation and subsequent statebuilding (SIGIR 2013, 10–20). As a result, the U.S. adopted ill-informed strategies that reinforced weak statehood ‘characterized by patrimonial politics and skewed development’ (Barnett and Zürcher 2009, 24). The absence of legitimacy in the pre-war planning phase of the invasion impeded the formation of parallel transitional justice and peacebuilding institutions and mechanisms alongside the statebuilding process.

Statebuilding in the absence of transitional justice: situating Iraq's trajectory

In its 2004 report Iraqi Voices: Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice and Social Reconstruction based on interviews and discussion groups held after the American invasion and occupation, the International Center for Transitional Justice highlighted the critical importance of ‘understanding local attitudes towards transitional justice and social reconstruction’ in order to formulate ‘legitimate strategies that may contribute to the development of a stable, peaceful society’. The report highlighted that ‘this is particularly important where the transition has not been the result of domestic political developments, and where the society is stratified along ethnic, religious, and political lines’ (International Center for Transitional Justice 2004, V). Writing a year later in 2005, Ruti Teitel, a leading scholar of transitional justice, observed that ‘rather than recurring in an international forum’ similar to the trial of Slobodan Miloševic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ‘the trials in Iraq instead illustrate successor justice in the context of an ongoing military occupation’, and that despite the changes that were made due to security concerns resulting from the growing insurgency, ‘the contemporary Iraqi trials give the appearance of continuing to be closely associated with a politics of occupation’ (Teitel 2005, 843).

The question of whether, and how, to seek redress for past harms is hardly a new one, whether for individual and group relations or for the relatively short history of international relations. In the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, the victorious states also sought to impose their terms of redress on their defeated enemy states in different ways – through massive and punitive reparations payments following World War I, and then through individualized criminal accountability and fundamental social-political reforms following World War II. The concept of ‘transitional justice’ as referring to justice in periods of political change gained popular as well as scholarly prominence in the last decade of the century, in the context of – and as direct response to – the dramatic political events taking place in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa with the end of the Cold War, as authoritarian regimes collapsed and gave way to pro-democracy forces (Teitel 2000). Subsequently, faced with new and challenging situations on the ground, the United Nations Secretary-General described transitional justice as referring to ‘the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society's attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation’ (United Nations 2004, 4; and United Nations 2010, 3).

The purpose of transitional justice–at least from the functional perspective of the U.N. – is to contribute to the prevention of new or renewed conflict, and to promote peacebuilding and reconciliation. According to that international organization, it also ‘should further seek to take account of the root causes of conflicts and the related violations of all rights, including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights’. The range of instruments and practices available includes ‘both judicial and non-judicial processes and mechanisms’ such as criminal prosecutions, truth-seeking, reparations, and institutional reforms, in varying combinations depending on the context (United Nations 2010, 3). Arguably, the U.N.'s definition and approach, as it set these out in 2010, reflected at least some of the hard lessons learned from previous experiences and brought together both problem-solving and critical (if not emancipatory) notions of transitional justice theory and practice.

In his 1992 report An Agenda for Peace, United Nations Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali had attempted to lay out systematically to U.N. member states the case for the support of a four-fold set of closely interrelated tasks for the U.N. in the post-Cold War security environment: preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding (United Nations 1992). The Secretary General's report argued that ‘preventive diplomacy seeks to resolve disputes before violence breaks out; peacemaking and peacekeeping are required to halt conflicts and preserve peace once it is attained. If successful, they strengthen the opportunity for post-conflict peace-building’ (ibid.). Introducing the section of his report on peacebuilding, Boutros-Ghali noted that these tasks included:

disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation. (United Nations 1992, 15)

While it encouraged Member States of the international organization to give greater heed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to assist them in settling their disputes peacefully, as a product of the time in which the report was prepared there was no mention of any other new forms or institutions of international justice.

Other than referrals to the IJC for inter-state dispute resolution, the model of international criminal justice for addressing mass atrocity crimes in 1992, as Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali set out his new Agenda, was the examples of the Nuremberg and Tokyo international military tribunals. The events and atrocities of the Bosnian conflict and Rwandan genocide still remained in the future. At the time that they were proceeding, both of the post-world war tribunals had faced criticisms (not least from the legal teams defending those facing judgement) of being instruments of ‘victor's justice’ and as being essentially political rather than legal exercises (Wyzanski 1946; Conot 1983; Schabas 2012). Both also can be argued to have contributed some of the legal and intellectual groundwork for the later U.N. Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and the Geneva Conventions on the Laws and Customs of War in 1949 (Dodd 2007). Half a century later, strikingly similar debates would surround the establishment and the proceedings of the two international criminal tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR). Both of these tribunals were established ‘after the fact’ in May 1993 and November 1994 respectively – although in the case of the ICTY, prior to the massacre of Bosnian Muslim civilians in Srebrenica in July 1995. They also were established by the U.N. Security Council under its Chapter VII authority, rather than through a U.N. General Assembly resolution (Scharf 2002; Peskin 2005; Schabas 2012).

After the all-too-brief post-Cold War optimism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the long list of intrastate conflicts involving mass atrocities deliberately targeting civilian populations soon included Somalia, Rwanda, eastern Zaire (the Democratic Republic of Congo after 1997), Sierra Leone, Liberia, Haiti, Bosnia (and other shorter conflicts in the former Yugoslavia), among others. Facing a complex new array of tasks in situations of ongoing conflict and hostility towards a U.N. or other international presence, U.N. peacekeeping missions established by the Security Council on the assumptions of ‘classic’ or ‘first generation’ peacekeeping (impartiality, neutrality, consent of the conflicting parties, and non-use of force) too often met with failure at best, disaster at worst (Jetts 1999). While a survey of that history is outside the scope of this article, the U.N. Secretariat sought to learn lessons from these failures by producing highly self-critical reports on Rwanda and Srebrenica. Scholarship on transitional justice shifted toward examining ideas, tools, and mechanisms for ending violent conflicts, transitioning from authoritarian rule, and promoting post-conflict peacebuilding and statebuilding within the context of the aforementioned failures.

Neither Robert Cox's foundational portrayal of theory as being, or representing, either ‘problem-solving’ or ‘critical’ positions and agendas (Cox 1981) and Roger Mac Ginty's interesting recent (Mac Ginty 2021) notion of conflict disruption and his division of the conflict management and peace studies literature into similar camps (Mac Ginty 2011), nor Oliver Richmond's delineation of peacebuilding into four ‘generations’ (Richmond 2008), are immune to critiques of their assumptions, exclusions, or their effects, both in the theory and in the practice(s) of peacebuilding (Dixon 2015; Millar 2015). Nonetheless, the critical analytical tools that Cox, Mac Ginty, and Richmond amongst others have provided are valuable in helping to frame and to deepen understandings of the rapidly growing literature on – and various practices of – peacebuilding and statebuilding. As Mac Ginty notes (2011, 110), many trees if not entire forests have been felled, as these studies, policy statements, and reviews of lessons learned (or not learned) have proliferated. Within that literature and practice, the subfield of transitional justice studies has experienced similar growth and a similar trajectory from the early post-Cold War years. Given that Iraq remains an understudied case within this survey of lessons learned from preceding decades and from other contexts, this Special Issue takes stock of Iraq's trajectory and development nearly two decades following foreign-imposed regime change by focusing on the factors and processes that impeded state and peacebuilding.

The ‘third wave’ of democratization in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa, constituted the large-scale political transformations (transitions) that both urgently required consideration of the policies and mechanisms of transitional justice, and inspired new scholarly studies of the topic. From these experiences and this period – what Ruti Teitel (2005) describes as ‘Phase II’ of transitional justice – there emerged the practices of truth commissions in various formats, such as those established in Chile in 1990, El Salvador in 1992, and Guatemala in 1994, and most well-known in South African in 1996. Along with these new mechanisms and processes there were active debates about the relative merits of lustration or the vetting of former officials of authoritarian regimes, and the alternatives of ‘forgiveness’ pursued either actively through general amnesty provisions or more passively through ‘amnesia’ – the implicit or explicit societal and political choice to forget the past and focus on the future – as pathways towards societal and political reconciliation (Krog 1999; Cousens and Kumar 2001; Mani 2002; Graybill 2004; Borer 2006; Tremlett 2006; du Bois and du Bois-Pedain 2009; Quinn 2010; Goes 2013).

The rich variety of models and modes of transitional justice explored and debated in this literature, including retributive, restorative, and reparative understandings of justice; legal, rectifiable, and distributive dimensions; national, international, and hybrid institutions; formal, informal, and traditional models or sources, nevertheless, and quite understandably, shared the common trait of being ‘problem-solving’. They were focused on the most immediate and pressing issues of seeking justice while constructing and implementing new pathways towards democracy, ensuring a successful and peaceful transition from authoritarian regimes and establishing at least a ‘negative peace’ for the populations that had endured years or decades of repression and violent conflict. In Priscilla Hayner's phrase, this was ‘the peacemaker's paradox’ – seeking to address and satisfy the demand for justice without creating new obstacles to achieving peace for those engaged in peace negotiations and seeking justice ‘in the shadow of conflict’ (Hayner 2018). In this context they primarily reflected, and often constituted contributions to, what Richmond has described as the ‘third generation’ of liberal peacebuilding literature and the ‘peace-as-governance’ understanding of statebuilding (Richmond 2008, 2009).

The dilemma with this problem-solving approach, as Kerry Clamp observed about the ‘established democratic literature on restorative justice’, is that ‘we are transporting established modes and models of justice (retributive and restorative) and wondering why the outcomes (and failures!) of conventional criminal justice in the West are replicated’ (Clamp 2015, 5). On the ground in transitional situations, noted a SIPRI analysis of state legitimacy and peacebuilding efforts in the Central African Republic, ‘even when both sides use similar terms, such as the primacy of the “return of the state”, intervenors and local populations often mean different things, which can create false expectations and ultimately disappointment on both sides’ (Glawton, van der Lijn, and de Zwaan 2019, 1). In the case of Iraq, the ICTJ's Iraqi Voices reported that the Iraqis who were surveyed in later 2003 ‘viewed the concept of justice as the inverse of the previous regime and a just society as everything that the old system was not’, and that many supported holding public trials for the deposed dictator and his closest supporters. The ICTJ report noted, however, that the respondents also felt that it was important to differentiate Ba’ath party leadership from ‘mere party members’, and that the United States was distrusted because of Washington's previous political and military support for Saddam Hussein, its role in imposing years of punitive sanctions against Iraq (including the Oil for Food Program), and its failure to ensure security and prevent looting following the occupation. Rather than successfully addressing the human rights violations of Hussein's regime, the policy measures adopted ‘fuelled new cycles of violence’ and ‘contributed to the rise of militias and extremist groups’ (Houry 2020, 2). Looking back from the vantage point of 2018, a member of the 2002 Iraq Working Group argued that the mass dismissals of Ba’ath party members obstructed subsequent attempts at post-conflict peacebuilding, noting that ‘what had begun as a process of transitional justice soon became a tool for group revenge: rather than taking a victim-focused approach, de-Baathification targeted huge swathes of society without due process, to the detriment of the reconciliation process’ (Ihsan 2018, 2). As illustrated in the contributions to the Special Issue, it is by no means clear that Boutros-Ghali's notion of post-conflict peacebuilding, or any of its subsequent institutional expressions and prescriptions, were applied in this case.

Iraq offers several lessons for evaluating the limits of forced democratization through intervention within the extant literature on post-conflict state and peacebuilding. First, external state and peacebuilding following foreign-imposed regime change has broader implications for conceptualizing institutional engineering and reconciliation in divided, post-conflict polities. Institutional choices during the transitional phase of statebuilding have enduring effects that frame the extent and scope of political inclusion in the emergent order. Second, the securitization of peacebuilding and transitional justice at the onset of the transition can obstruct subsequent attempts to formulate national reconciliation strategies aimed at fostering social cohesion and inter-ethnic trust of the emergent democratizing order. Lastly, Iraq serves as a litmus test for evaluating the second order effects of expedient statebuilding and the adoption of one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions in non-Western post-conflict spaces.

Conclusion and overview of the articles

Collectively, the six contributions to this Special Issue offer a multi-level analysis of macro and micro-level factors and forces to elucidate the failures of liberal post-conflict peacebuilding within the context of externally imposed democratization in Iraq. The articles examine institutional and structural conditions relating to institutional engineering along with micro/societal level processes relating to mass protests and civil society mobilization, the role of religious institutions in peacebuilding, and the potential for bottom-up peace and reconciliation initiatives.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi (2021) examines how decisions regarding Iraq's armed forces at the onset of the 2003 U.S.-led occupation and subsequent statebuilding created the opportunity structure for the rise and proliferation of militias. By situating the formation, reformation, and restructuring of Iraq's security sectors by external actors, Al-Marashi explores how the choice to disband Iraq's armed forces and the decision to demobilize Arab Sunni tribal forces who mobilized against al-Qaeda by then prime minister Nouri al-Maliki obstructed efforts to adopt comprehensive disarmament and reintegration programmes. These early choices institutionalized exclusion in the state's fragile security architecture which fractionalized security provision and hampered security sector reform. This security vacuum facilitated the rise of ISIS and bolstered its mobilizational capacity to control swaths of territory in Iraq, which reinforced the state's reliance on militias for security and stability following ISIS’ defeat.

Toby Dodge (2021) critically evaluates informal consociationalism as a form of political settlement under the muhassasa (ethnic elite bargaining system) and argues that the emphasis on ethnic elite power-sharing undermines political competition and delegitimizes the same political system it purports to represent. Dodge illustrates this critique through close examination of Iraq's governing institutions, including exclusive power-sharing arrangements, electoral laws, and the constitution as the causes and consequences of mass protests in 2015 and 2019 onward. By examining how institutional choices affect subsequent statebuilding, Shamiran Mako (2021) similarly explores how lustration choices during the formative years of the occupation subverted peacebuilding and transitional justice focusing on the legacies and outcomes of de-Ba’athification. As Mako argues, American policymakers’ reliance on a narrow circle of Shia and Kurdish expatriate elites in the pre-war planning phase and post-war state reformation shaped the choice to adopt exclusive lustration programmes that disproportionately affected Sunni-Arabs from the emergent order and cemented their exclusion from governance. By comparing lustration in Iraq with lustration in post-war Germany and the Eastern and Central European communist transitions, Mako posits that lustration in Iraq was myopic and prioritized institutional overhaul over the development and implementation of a more comprehensive, gradual, and multi-tiered vetting process. Early structural and institutional failures cemented patterns of exclusion that subverted the application of transitional justice and peacebuilding.

As a continuation of the critical nexus between institutions and actor-centric models of transitional justice and peacebuilding, Marsin Alshamary (2021) explores the role of religious peacebuilding in Iraq through an examination of the Hawza – Shi’a Islam's most influential religious institution in Iraq. Rich with qualitative interview data based on extensive field work in Iraq, Alshamary illustrates two interlinked challenges to religious peacebuilding. First, the association of Shia religious establishments with political actors and Shia political parties, in particular, has produced a crisis of legitimacy. Second, activist clerics often encounter structural challenges when proposing theological and ideological reforms toward peacebuilding and reconciliation. Thus, while Shia clerics and religious institutions have engaged in various forms of peacebuilding, these constraints impede more comprehensive and tangible peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts. Through a critique of top-down national reconciliation initiatives, Ruba Al-Hassani (2021) likewise disentangles the obstacles and prospects of engaging in bottom-up restorative justice and peacebuilding in post-2003 Iraq. By deploying social constructivism as an analytical toolkit for conceptualizing actor-centric approaches to national reconciliation and peacebuilding, Al-Hassani illustrates the potential of restorative justice through storytelling for shaping legal and educational reforms in Iraq. Al-Hassani makes a compelling argument that centreing individual stories of minoritized groups’ experiences of suffering and marginalization in Iraq can positively shape public discourse toward national reconciliation and lead to institutional, legal, and educational reforms. Lastly, Zahra Ali (2021) argues that the aforementioned structural and institutional failures undergird bottom-up peacebuilding and challenges to the NGO-ization of civil society activism in contemporary protest movements in Iraq. Through ethnographic research of protest field sites in Iraq, Ali's sociological approach problematizes institutionalized notions of peacebuilding imbued in existing hierarchies of civil society networks to illuminate the ways in which youth and women activists challenge institutional failures since 2003 by transcending the prism of the redistribution-recognition dilemma. In doing so, protestors reframe bottom-up notions of justice and peacebuilding in response to ingrained institutional failures that have produced stark social and economic inequalities. This ‘new civil society’ deeply rooted in bottom-up, horizontal mobilization, reifies context-specific notions of peacebuilding and justice deeply rooted in micro-level grievances against the macro-level/structural institutions that produce them.

Collectively, this Special Issue contributes to ongoing critiques of liberal peacebuilding and highlights three factors for explaining the failures of foreign-imposed democratization and peacebuilding. First, expedient and incongruent institutional engineering and statebuilding during the formative years of the transition produced a fragile and fractionalized state. The dismantling of state structures and institutions following the invasion undermined Iraqi bureaucratic capacity, excluded technocrats with deep knowledge of the local context, and delegitimized the statebuilding process. Second, governance choices pertaining to security sector reform, exclusive lustration through de-Baathification, and the adoption of an informal consociational model as political settlement following foreign-imposed regime change and democratization under American tutelage, set the path by which previously excluded ethnic elites captured Iraq's political trajectory and institutionalized new patterns of exclusion sustained by entrenched patronage of Iraq's ruling elite. Lastly, the absence of context-specific and cross-sectoral transitional justice initiatives undermined bottom-up demands for inclusion and national reconciliation. These observations have implications for conceptualizing conflict mitigating strategies in states experiencing civil strife and political violence, including, but not limited to, Libya, Syria and Yemen as analogous regional examples.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the Institute for Iraq Studies at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII).

Notes on contributors

Shamiran Mako

Shamiran Mako is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.

Alistair D. Edgar

Alistair D. Edgar is Associate Professor of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University, with cross-appointment to the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

Notes

1 Author interview with Paul Wolfowitz, Washington, DC. February 2018.

2 FIRC denotes the ‘forcible or coercive removal of the effective leader of one state-which remains formally sovereign afterward-by the government of another state’ (Downes and Monten 2013, 109).