https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4526-2739
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ABSTRACT
The “youth bulge” in developing countries means that we need to pay close attention to how young people want to be governed. That need is particularly great in developing countries that are also deeply divided. But in divided societies, conventional opinion polls often do not suffice, yielding shallow opinions hostage to elite machinations and mutual mistrust. To shed light on what young people would want if they had a chance to learn and deliberate about the issues, we follow a survey with an intensive deliberative field experiment in one such society – Kirkuk. Contrary to widespread concerns about the predominance of ethnic interests, young educated Kirkukis support the view that different ethnic groups should have an equal say. There is also broad support for an institutional arrangement – Kirkuk’s becoming an autonomous region – that may provide space for instituting “equal say”. And deliberating with balanced information broadens support for that arrangement.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Didier Caluwaerts for his help and support in the early stages of this project. We also wish to thank André Bächtiger, Maarja Luhiste and Jürg Steiner for comments on an earlier draft. Finally, we are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insightful criticisms and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Ian O’Flynn http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4526-2739
Jalal Mistaffa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0075-6786
Notes
1 Jüde, “Contesting Borders?” See also Manning, “Political Elites.”
2 Wolff, “Governing (in) Kirkuk,” 1362.
3 NCCI, “Kirkuk Governorate Profile,” 5.
4 Markusen, “The Islamic State,” 4.
5 Anderson and Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk, 85.
6 More precisely, intermarriage was common between Kurds and Turkomans in Kirkuk city. Bet-Shlimon, “Group identities,” 918. ICG, “Reviving UN Mediation,” 8–9, n. 30.
7 Reuters, “Iraq, BP to sign deal.”
8 UNDP. United Nations Development Program.
9 Knights and Ali, “Kirkuk in Transition,” 23.
10 For a critical appraisal, see Ottaway and Kaysi, “The State of Iraq,” 12.
11 For an overview, see O’Flynn and Caluwaerts, “Deliberation in Divided Societies.”
12 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 349–60.
13 Kuyper, “The Instrumental Value of Deliberative Democracy.”
14 ICG, “Reviving UN Mediation,” 7; Natali, “The Kirkuk Conundrum,” 438, 441; Wolff, “Governing (in) Kirkuk”, 1371.
15 Anderson and Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk, 192–203.
16 Cf. Anderson, “Power Sharing.”
17 Luskin et al., “Deliberative Across Deep Divides,” 116.
18 Cf. Anderson and Stanfield, Crisis in Kirkuk, 42–4; Rydgren and Sofi, “Interethnic Relations,” 29; Wolff, “Governing (in) Kirkuk”, 1369.
19 See O’Driscoll, “Conflict in Kirkuk,” 37.
20 Rudaw, “Kirkuk Province Votes in Favour.” The vote was boycotted by Arab and Turkoman council members.
21 Kaplan, “Foreign Support.”
22 E.g., Al Monitor, “Iraqi Kurds;” ICG, “After Iraqi Kurdistan’s Thwarted Independence Bid,” 14.
23 Cf. Anderson and Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk, 189–203; ICG, “Iraq and the Kurds,” 7–10; Romano, “The Future of Kirkuk,” 274–7; Wolff, “Governing (in) Kirkuk,” 1375–9. O’Driscoll, “Conflict in Kirkuk”, explains how discussions could learn from other, similar cases such as Brčko, Bosnia.
24 Granted, there is support for some sort of special status within all three groups. Anderson and Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk, 195–6; Wolff, “Governing (in) Kirkuk”, 1371. However, we highlight official positions here since official positions are what parties seek to enforce on members.
25 Natali, “The Kirkuk Conundrum”, 439; Wolff, “Governing (in) Kirkuk”, 1370.
26 Wolff, “Governing (in) Kirkuk,” 1370–1.
27 Anderson and Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk, 201–2.
28 Romano, “The future of Kirkuk,” 273; Rudaw, “Kirkuk Province Votes in Favour.”
29 ICG, “Reviving UN Mediation,” 8.
30 Sowell, “Ethnic Dimensions.”
31 See note 14 above.
32 Steiner, “Deliberative Research.”
33 Two of the authors of this article are ethnically Kurdish.
34 See note 8.
35 For background context, see Barwari, “Understanding the Political Economy of the KRI.”
36 O’Flynn and Sood, “What Would Dahl Say?” 47.
37 Caluwaerts and Deschouwer, “Building Bridges.”
38 The event’s start-time had to be pushed back because of an unscheduled ceremony to commemorate a Turkoman student killed fighting IS in Mosul.
39 One male student refused to give his ethnicity.
40 We include the English translation of the booklet in Appendix B.
41 One student who gave her ethnicity as Turkoman did not fill out the questionnaire for the second time. The data from this student were eliminated from the analyses.
42 Allowing participants to confess their ignorance rather than simply forcing them to guess.
43 Historically, Turkomans have suffered at the hands of federal leaders and institutions. At the time that we conducted our study, however, the most relevant issue was Kurdish control of Kirkuk.
44 We could add the police to this list but there are two types of police: local and federal. The local police are trusted by Kurds and the federal police by Arabs and (relative to conditions on the ground in Kirkuk) Turkomans. Given that we had phrased the item ambiguously (“the police”), we omit it from the ethnic trust index.
45 How much we can learn from these comparisons is hampered by small sample sizes. Small sample sizes mean that we cannot distinguish some substantively meaningful changes from noise – many of those changes are not statistically significant. This does not mean that if the experiment were replicated on a larger sample, we would see “no” effect. It just means that we cannot say what the effect would be.
46 Given that our focus is on the future of Kirkuk, we do not discuss all the questions posed in the questionnaire in the main text. We consign discussion of remaining items to Appendix C.
47 Bernstein et al., “Overreporting Voting.”
48 That said, ’s “autonomous region” index suggests that participants were ambivalent or uncertain about the precise institutional form that should take. They strongly support the view that Kirkuk should have greater power, make its own decisions, be protected from outside interests, develop its own political identity, and have equal standing in Iraq. Yet their support for federal structures and powers (an obvious way, at least to us, of instituting these views) is only half as strong.
49 For details, see Cor and Sood, “Guessing and Forgetting.”
50 See and overview, see Fishkin and Luskin, “Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal. ”
51 Westwood et al., “Deliberative Pluralism.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ian O’Flynn
Ian O’Flynn (corresponding author; [email protected]) is a senior lecturer in political theory in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University UK. He is the author of Deliberative Democracy and Divided Societies (2006) and his work has appeared in journals such as British Journal of Political Science and Political Studies.
Gaurav Sood
Gaurav Sood is an independent data scientist, specializing in measurement and causal inference. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford and a B.S. in Computer Science from Rutgers University, and postdocs from Georgetown, Princeton, and Stanford. His work has appeared in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis.
Jalal Mistaffa
Jalal Mistaffa holds a PhD from Newcastle University UK. He is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sulaimani, Iraq. His main research interests are in comparative federalism and the politics of the Middle East.
Nawhi Saeed
Nahwi Saeed holds a PhD from Newcastle University UK. He is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Charmu, Iraq. His main research interest is in power-sharing in post-conflict societies with the focus on Iraq and the Kurdistan region. He has written several articles for Kurdish, English and Arabic media outlets.