Introduction Excerpt for Contested City

Introduction

AHMED* WAS BROKE. IN the 1980s, he worked for the Directorate of Civilian Defense in Baghdad, but his governmental salary was so low that he drove a taxi in the evenings for extra income. Even then, he had to borrow his father’s car, since he had no vehicle of his own. His one prized asset was a plot of residential land on the outskirts of Baghdad, a standard benefit given to public-sector employees in Iraq. Still, Ahmed was too poor to build on that land, and the lot sat empty while his family of six crammed themselves into a bedroom in his father’s house.

In 1988, Ahmed wrote a simple letter to the Baʿth Party Revolutionary Command Council, the highest authoritative body in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He requested that the nation’s top leaders “help me to build on this plot of land so that I can secure a home for my children.” He wrote that his children depended on “the compassion of God, your compassion, and your kindness for them,” begging for the leaders to show “fatherly care” for his family.¹

A senior official reviewed Ahmed’s letter. He then contacted the local Baʿth Party officials in Ahmed’s district of Baghdad, asking them to verify Ahmed’s story and issue a decision on his request. After a brief investigation, Ahmed’s local Baʿth Party officials approved his request for financial aid to build a house.²

This book explores everyday politics and citizen survival strategies in Baghdad, Iraq, from 1950 to 2011. This chronological span includes halcyon years of oil-funded prosperity from 1950 to 1979, a difficult season of warfare with Iran and Kuwait from 1980 to 1991, thirteen years of devastating economic conditions under UN-imposed international sanctions from 1990 to 2003, and violent upheaval during the US invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011.

Confronting these challenging circumstances over the years, Baghdadi residents pursued a variety of survival strategies to provide for themselves and for their families. Focusing my analysis on survival strategies that required interaction between citizens and the state, I explore how Baghdadis shrewdly negotiated their relationships with regime representatives to secure resources both in times of prosperity and in times of poverty. Drawing on oral history interviews, citizen petitions, and archival research, this book foregrounds the voices and experiences of Baghdadis in proactively negotiating with their government to survive, and even thrive, during periods of war, sanctions, and authoritarian rule.

These neighborhood-level bureaucrats in modern Iraq acted as key decision makers about how resources or punishments would be doled out in their jurisdictions, as seen in Ahmed’s case. This localization of governance through neighborhood-based officials worked to “facilitat[e] citizens’ access to the state, and inversely, the state’s access to citizens.”⁴ Realizing this, Baghdadis astutely leveraged their relationships with local officials to increase their odds of success. Exploring examples of citizen advocacy illuminates how sub-national governance structures worked in a centralized state.

Though I will occasionally refer to “the regime” for the sake of simplicity, this book’s focus on the actions of local bureaucrats illustrates how the Iraqi state was never a unified entity, but a complex, hierarchical bureaucracy with influential actors at every level. Examples in this book will expose moments when various neighborhood-based officials experienced tension about their loyalties to their communities and their obligations to the state’s top leadership. In day-to-day matters of governance, then, “the state” does not exist on high, separated from and with a clear view into society, but rather operates within webs of power relations that are embedded in local communities.

This neighborhood-based approach to state-society relations requires an introduction to Baghdad’s neighborhoods and how they have been divided and governed over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Baghdad was a provincial city in the Ottoman Empire. During that time, Baghdad’s neighborhoods (mahalla, pl. mahallat) functioned as islands unto themselves: encircled by walls, guarded by gate keepers and night watchmen, and internally regulated by a state-appointed community elder (mukhtar).⁵ Each neighborhood developed a distinctive identity over time: in the late Ottoman period, Sunni tribes took up residence in western Baghdad, while Christians and Jews tended to live in the eastern half of the city. Guilds, Islamic Courts, and military barracks brought members of the same profession into certain areas of the city, imparting to those neighborhoods an association with those professions.⁶ Accordingly, Baghdadis often identified themselves by their neighborhood, developed deep roots within their local communities, and carried with them the reputation of their district.⁷

With the British conquest of Iraq in 1917 during World War I, the city of Baghdad experienced exponential population growth and an almost complete overhaul of its built environment. The British ruled colonial Iraq indirectly, installing a political ally from Saudi Arabia, Faisal bin al-Husayn al-Hashemi, as the new king of Iraq in 1921. The Hashemite royal family, as his dynasty came to be known, worked with the British to transform Baghdad into a modern capital city.

By the 1930s and 1940s, the Ottoman-era reputations of Baghdad’s old neighborhoods began to blur as rural-to-urban migration, the construction of new subdivisions in the capital, and the building of new bridges and highways brought new residents to the city and connected Baghdad’s different districts more closely to one another. People no longer lived their lives within the small confines of their neighborhood, but could easily travel by bus, train, or car across the city and back for work or school.⁸ However, while western Baghdad was no longer associated with Sunni tribes by the 1950s, for instance, the pattern of dividing Baghdad into distinctive residential quarters overseen by community intermediaries persisted throughout these changes (see chapter 1).

The Hashemite monarchy was violently overthrown by a military officer, ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim, in 1958. The 1958 Revolution of Iraq ushered in a ten-year period of political instability: Qasim ruled for just five years before he was overthrown by another military officer, ʿAbd al-Salam ʿArif in 1963. After ʿAbd al-Salam’s untimely death in a plane crash in 1966, his brother ʿAbd al-Rahman ʿArif took power. In 1968, the Iraqi Baʿth Party staged yet another coup, and this regime proved to be lasting. The Iraqi Baʿth Party regime was led initially by President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and supported by his vice president, Saddam Hussein. Saddam—referred to throughout this book by his first name, following Iraqi convention—took over as president in 1979. The Baʿth Party espoused the values of Arab nationalism and socialism, though Saddam’s ideological leanings proved to be flexible and opportunistic, adapting as political and economic conditions changed.⁹ He ruled Iraq until 2003, when the United States invaded and overthrew his regime.

When Baʿthist leaders consolidated their power in Iraq in 1968, they retained this long-standing governance tradition of administering Baghdad through neighborhoods. Under the Baʿth Party system, Baghdad was divided into nine districts (qadaʾ), which were in turn divided into eighty-eight large neighborhoods (hayy). The term hayy best aligns with an urban “neighborhood” in English: this was a mid-sized residential area often bounded by large thoroughfares. These eighty-eight large neighborhoods were further divided into more than four hundred mahallat, each the size of just a few city blocks. Lacking more English synonyms, a mahalla is also commonly referred to as a “neighborhood,” but in its most intimate sense: a cluster of streets and houses that comprise one’s most proximate neighbors and local shops where people live out their daily routines. Each of these mahallat is assigned a three-digit number that Baghdadis include in their postal address. Even the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not alter the practice of governing Baghdad through neighborhoods: the American governing body in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), decided to continue the practice of distributing municipal services through the preexisting administrative framework of Baghdad’s eighty-eight neighborhoods and nine districts, though subsequent Iraqi governments have redrawn some municipal borders within the city in recent years.

FIGURE 1 Baghdad’s administrative districts, 2003.

In the Baghdad context, then, a “neighborhood” is not a loosely defined residential community but a significant administrative unit, with clearly defined borders and official government functions. Each of these geographic units holds personal and bureaucratic layers of meaning for Baghdadi residents. A middle-class Baghdadi man might identify as a resident of the posh Mansur district. When pressed further, he would specify that he lives in the Khadraʾ neighborhood within the Mansur district, which is home to many white-collar professionals. He might share the personal significance he attaches to his home in Khadraʾ: that he moved to this neighborhood as a child because some housing in this neighborhood was reserved for the police, and his father worked as an officer. On administrative paperwork, his address would clarify that his house is located within mahalla 631 in Khadraʾ neighborhood in the Mansur district in the city of Baghdad.

These formally defined administrative jurisdictions for mahallat, large neighborhoods (hayy), and districts (qadaʾ) formed the backbone for governance and service delivery in modern Iraq. In the era of Baʿth Party rule from 1968 to 2003, each area was overseen by an office of Baʿth Party officials, from the smallest level of a Baʿth Party “cell” (khaliyya) at the mahalla level all the way to a Baʿth Party “branch” office (faraʿ) at the district level. Neighborhoods, then, formed the basic building blocks of the Baʿth Party apparatus in Baghdad, and, in turn, constituted the most important municipal structure for Baghdadis’ daily lives.

There were other local governance systems in place outside of the official Baʿth Party apparatus. Large neighborhoods (hayy) were additionally overseen by a government-appointed mukhtar, an elder who lived within the neighborhood and who was responsible for assisting the Baʿth Party regime with keeping track of his residents and collaborating in security operations in his area. Over time, the Baʿth Party created various “Popular Committees” to surveil economic activities in each neighborhood, too (see chapter 3). The Baghdad municipality had its own system for dividing the city into large zones for administering public utilities like water, sewage, and electricity.

FIGURE 2 Baʿth Party organizational hierarchy in Baghdad.

The result was that Baghdad citizens navigated life within nested levels of locally embedded regime representatives. The mukhtars, neighborhood and district Baʿth Party officials, and neighborhood Popular Committees performed various functions simultaneously: monitoring citizens, distributing resources, advocating for or against their residents, and making decisions about local governance concerns in their jurisdictions. The way that Baghdadis navigated their relationships with these neighborhood officials constituted a form of everyday politics that informed the development of the city and shaped the processes of daily governance on the ground.

Many observers of Saddam Hussein’s twenty-four-year presidency have emphasized the centrality of Saddam himself in Iraq’s day-to-day governance. Decisions were “mostly concentrated in the president’s hands and epitomized by lack of consultation,” and his decrees were as good as law.¹⁰ It is true that Saddam weighed in on matters both big and small. He personally oversaw seemingly trivial decisions, such as deciding whether or not a Baʿth Party member could divorce his wife.¹¹ He directed battlefield strategies in Iran and Kuwait, to the point of overriding his generals’ advice though he had no military background.¹² Saddam earned some begrudging respect as a dictator who was willing to put in “long hours” at work, who read all the memos that came across his desk, and who held minor bureaucrats to account for mistakes that they made.¹³

Yet the preoccupation with Saddam Hussein’s central role in decision-making overlooks the important roles that others, including low-ranking officials, played in Iraq’s day-to-day governance. In practical terms, the “face” of the government for residents of Baghdad was not Saddam’s mustachioed countenance but a variety of functionaries who worked within their neighborhoods: it was often the neighborhood party officials who ultimately made the decisions that would impact individuals’ lives. Focusing on Saddam’s centralized power has contributed to a common misconception that party officials and bureaucratic underlings merely received and implemented orders without question or input, and has obscured the more complex reality of local governance in an urban area like Baghdad in which the sheer size of the city required delegation to lower ranking regime representatives. Understanding the active role of street-level bureaucrats also explains how Baghdadi residents were able to take advantage of their proximity to regime representatives to advocate for themselves.

In this book, I will frequently refer to “neighborhood and district Baʿth Party officials” or more simply to “local” officials. This terminology may initially seem imprecise: when I talk about a “neighborhood,” do I mean a mahalla or a hayy? However, this phrasing captures the fact that most internal discussions within the Baʿth Party about citizen concerns moved up and down the party hierarchy between the firqa, shuʿba, and faraʿ offices, where representatives from the mahalla, hayy, and qadaʾ levels would weigh in and issue opinions about decisions pertaining to their jurisdictions. When relevant, I will specify whether it was a firqa-level official or a faraʿ-level official who advocated for a certain outcome. In most cases, however, internal party communication involved multiple offices from the district level down to the most local mahalla level, and the phrase “local officials” helps to capture this. The purpose of my analysis is generally not to distinguish if a firqa or shuʿba office made a decision but to emphasize how many governance issues were decided by local party officials, rather than by more senior leaders at the national level.

Out of all the communities in Iraq, why focus on the city of Baghdad? The field of urban history in Iraq is a growing but nascent field, and much work remains to be done to understand the evolution of provincial cities, small towns, and rural areas in Iraq’s modern history.¹⁴ Restricting the boundaries of this study to the city of Baghdad permits analysis of how state-society relations functioned in postcolonial Iraq in the “best” possible scenario for the government, where the state enjoyed the highest concentration of resources, power, and influence. State ministries, security services, and municipal offices were all based in Baghdad, along with the military base at Camp Rashid and the headquarters for the Popular Army. Saddam’s presidential palaces stood as gleaming examples of the power and wealth of his government. In contrast to the semi-autonomous Kurdish zone in the North or the rebellious provinces in the South, Baghdad’s population did not mount significant protests against the state during the 1991 intifada due in part to the regime’s overwhelming presence in and control over the capital city. Studying state-society relations in the capital, then, permits analysis of Saddam’s regime at its strongest, while still including a broad ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic sampling of Iraq’s population. Here we can see how Saddam’s government aspired to rule and the extent to which it was able to act on its ambitions, whereas the North and South of the country were able to blunt the regime’s goals to varying degrees.

There were also those who ardently opposed Baʿthist rule. Some broke the law to try to make their fortunes in the black market and through smuggling operations. Still more risked draconian punishments to carry out petty crime to make ends meet (see chapter 5). Some joined the Baʿth Party to gain access to resources; some joined underground resistance movements against the regime.

While scholarship exists on extraordinary resistance efforts by Iraqi opposition groups, such as by the Shiʿi Daʿwa Party or by the Iraqi Communist Party, this book focuses on routine interactions between citizens and regime representatives because the vast majority of Baghdadis did not belong to opposition groups, nor did they even belong to the Baʿth Party. Studies indicate that Baʿth Party membership in Iraq involved no more than 16 percent of the national population.¹⁵ Instead, most Baghdadis were political independents trying to survive the political and economic challenges of their day.

Regular interactions between Baghdad’s residents and the Baʿthist regime constituted a routine form of contestation and negotiation in daily life: picking up monthly food rations, writing letters to party representatives about medical expenses, securing housing for one’s family. As Ilana Feldman observed in her study of bureaucratic practices in Gaza, “intimate connections with people and place are forged in significant part through regular practices of living,” which include “the quotidian formations of place that emerge out of the everyday practices of government services.”¹⁶ Appealing to a bureaucrat for more welfare benefits was not a spectacular, headline-grabbing form of contestation with the regime, but it was the most common form of advocacy that Iraqis engaged in, and these efforts have not previously received much scholarly attention.

The outbreak of war in 1980, 1990, and 2003, along with the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad’s neighborhoods by death squads and militias from 2005 to 2009, altered the city landscape yet again. In short, the physical and imagined landscape of Baghdad has been impacted by the history of the interactions of Baghdadi citizens with their rulers and, after 2003, with occupying forces, militias, and new power brokers. The history of state-society relations in Baghdad is intimately linked to the construction (and destruction) of the physical city over time.

This book draws on roughly eighty-five interviews with Baghdadis and another dozen with American civilians and soldiers who participated in local governance projects in Iraq after 2003. Following IRB protocols, all Iraqi interviewees have been anonymized in this book to protect their identities, and pseudonyms are indicated with an asterisk. Interviews were conducted in three stages between 2015 and 2023. My first fieldwork trip in Iraq was in the city of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2016 because visa restrictions at the time prohibited most US citizens from traveling to Baghdad. In Erbil I met with former residents of Baghdad who had fled to the safer Kurdistan region. The focus of this round of interviews was on food rations and economic survival strategies during sanctions (see chapter 3).

To broaden this sample, I then worked remotely with a team of three Iraqi research assistants to extend these interview questions to two dozen people currently living in Baghdad. Interviewees in Erbil and Baghdad reflected a broad cross-section of Iraq’s diversity. Together with my team, we spoke with roughly equal numbers of men and women; with Shiʿa, Sunnis, Christians, and Sabean-Mandeans; former Baʿth Party members, Communists, and political independents; Arabs and Kurds. Most of those we spoke with had lived in Baghdad their entire lives; those I met with in Erbil were filtering their memories of Baghdad through their experiences of displacement.

In 2019 I began a new phase of research focused on Baghdadis’ experiences during the US occupation from 2003 to 2011. I initially relied on phone interviews to overcome travel barriers, especially once the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. I spoke with a dozen Iraqi and American interviewees who worked on a local governance project in Baghdad that became the focus of chapter 6. After Iraq changed its visa restrictions in 2021, I made three trips to Baghdad and conducted follow-up interviews with Iraqis who had worked on American-created local councils.

My positionality as a non-Iraqi American citizen could be an asset in certain situations. Sectarian violence in Iraq after 2003 created acrimonious political and social divisions in Iraqi society, and my position as an outsider sometimes made it easier for Iraqis to speak with me about the past. Other times, my positionality as an American citizen could be sensitive, as when inquiring about Iraqis’ experiences with occupying US forces. Collaboration with Iraqi researchers was a helpful strategy to overcome these barriers, and I am deeply appreciative for my partnership with sociologist Dr. Ali Taher al-Hammood. Together we embarked on a new round of interviews in 2022 designed to better understand changes in local governance and public services after 2003. We designed structured interview questions that he and his research team carried out with sixty Iraqis in four different areas of Baghdad—Sadr City, ʿAdhamiyya, Kadhimiyya, and Fadhil—selected to represent Sunnis and Shiʿa with different socioeconomic backgrounds.¹⁷ Interviewees’ insights informed my analysis throughout the entire book, and their responses were especially valuable for describing changes in state-society relations after 2003 discussed in chapter 6.

Many archives in Iraq were destroyed or damaged in 2003 due to looting, fires, and other damage connected to the US invasion and America’s failure to protect critical heritage sites in Iraq.¹⁸ The Baghdad municipal archives are reportedly among those files that were destroyed, so I was unable to review these records for my research. However, the Iraq National Library and Archives in Baghdad—though also damaged in 2003—still contains a trove of valuable publications and records about city planning in Baghdad. There I consulted reports by the Baghdad Municipality and Ministry of Planning.

Other sources I used for this book include Baʿth Party newspapers Al- Thawra and Baghdad Observer. The Cairo University Library and the British Library house dissertations written by Iraqi graduate students in the 1960s and 1970s, which were particularly helpful for illuminating how Baghdad’s new housing developments were impacting society. This research is featured in chapter 1.

Much of my analysis in this book draws on my research in digital records from the Iraqi Baʿth Party archives available at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. To a lesser extent, I also consulted some of the audio recordings seized from Saddam’s presidential office that were made available to researchers at the Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. These expatriated Iraqi archives have generated controversy since their seizure in 2003 and relocation to the United States. My reliance on these records therefore merits further discussion of the practical and ethical considerations of conducting research in these records.¹⁹

The Conflict Records Research Center made accessible to researchers 200 hours of audio recordings and 52,000 digitized pages of documents taken from Saddam’s presidential office.²⁰ These digital records were originally housed at the National Defense University, where I accessed them. This collection was closed in 2015 due to budget cuts, though the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, is currently in the process of redacting and reopening the collection.²¹ The original documents and audio recordings from Saddam’s office were part of a vast collection of up to 200 million pages of documents seized by the United States Department of Defense, known as the Harmony Records database. The original audio and paper files were returned from the US Defense Department to the Iraqi government in May 2013.²²

The Iraqi Baʿth Party archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University contain approximately 8 million pages of bureaucratic memos and party personnel files that were originally stored in the headquarters of the Baʿth Party Regional Command near the Republican Palace in the Green Zone. Most of these documents date from the 1980s and 1990s, continuing up to the moment the Baʿthist regime fell in April 2003.

The collection of the Baʿth Party archives now at the Hoover Institution was spearheaded by the Iraq Memory Foundation, led by an Iraqi academic who had been living in exile, Kanan Makiya.²³ These Baʿth Party records were initially stored in Iraq Memory Foundation safe houses in Iraq until the organization successfully appealed in 2005 to relocate the records to the United States, fearing for the safety of the files in the midst of escalating violence in Iraq after 2003.²⁴ The American Bush administration incorrectly believed these seized records contained documentary evidence about Saddam’s crimes against humanity that could provide post hoc justification for the US invasion of Iraq. To this end, the US Department of Defense paid the Iraq Memory Foundation more than $6 million to collect and process the Iraq Baʿth Party archives. (Information about the Department of Defense’s contract with the Iraq Memory Foundation was only made public in 2019.)²⁵ Once the records reached the United States, the US Defense Intelligence Agency completed the process of digitizing the records, a project that the Iraq Memory Foundation staff had begun in Iraq.²⁶

In 2008, the Iraq Memory Foundation turned over the files to the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, and the collection was opened to researchers by 2010. As confirmed in a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2012 between the Hoover Institution and the Iraqi government, the government of Iraq retained legal ownership of these documents, while Hoover claimed only “temporary custody” of these files.²⁷

Moving the Baʿth Party archives from Iraq to the United States generated intense controversy; some have described this relocation as “looting” or “theft” of documents that form a significant part of the Iraqi historical heritage. Archivists and academics in Iraq and around the world condemned the expatriation of these archives to the United States.²⁸

The return of the original paper documents to Iraq was a repeated point of discussion, negotiation, and controversy for more than ten years. Finally, in August 2020 the Hoover Institution returned the nearly 8 million pages of original paper files of the Iraqi Baʿth Party archives to the custody of the Iraqi government.²⁹ To date, the Iraqi government has not opened these archives to the public. The Hoover Institution has retained digital photographs of the Iraqi Baʿth Party files and continues to make these available to researchers in its main reading room at Stanford University and through a new annex office in Washington, DC.

I conducted research in the Baʿth Party archives full time for nearly a year at the Hoover Institution; these records form the basis of Part II in this book. I worked primarily in the Baʿth Party Regional Command boxfiles dataset, which consists of bureaucratic memos related to daily governance concerns. This sub-collection contains 2.7 million pages of documents held within 6,420 boxfiles.³⁰ These are searchable through a rudimentary index originally put together by Iraqi Memory Foundation staff members. Identifying relevant documents is a tedious and time-consuming process: the digital photographs of the Baʿth Party documents are not text-searchable, so one must often spend hours clicking through hundreds of digitized pages of memos before identifying documents noted in the boxfile’s metadata or that related to the index’s search term. Because of this, it is a nearly impossible task to systematically identify all relevant documents on a particular topic, so the conclusions presented here must be considered preliminary. I was able to hone my searches by focusing my queries on thematic topics in the index (prostitution, rations, crime, petitions, and so forth) and also by searching the names of the different Baʿth Party branches, divisions, and sections associated with Baghdad.

To protect the identities of individuals mentioned in the Iraqi Baʿth Party archives, the Hoover Institution does not allow researchers to make copies of these files, whether digital copies or hardcopy printouts. I found that retyping these files in the original Arabic was the most effective system of note-taking, allowing me to accurately reference the files and to double-check my translations later. This book is based on thousands of pages of records that were painstakingly transcribed in this way.

The Baʿth Party archives provide valuable insights, but working with this collection has limitations and comes with costs. On the one hand, it is one of the few available archives anywhere in the world that offers behind-the-scenes insights into life in a postcolonial authoritarian regime.³¹ On the other hand, the fact that these archives are not censored or redacted can give a false sense that the documents present a complete and accurate picture of Baʿthist governance. As scholars of Iraq have noted, the Baʿth Party documents create an illusion that the Iraqi regime was almost always internally consistent, impartial, and procedural. Historian Dina Khoury wrote that the Baʿth Party archives “represent the party’s creation of its own world” that does not necessarily convey a complete and clear picture of reality.³² One example of the somewhat artificial reality presented in the Baʿth Party archives is the near total absence of violence in its pages.³³ Despite the fact that torture, execution, and cruel prison conditions were routine practices in Saddam’s Iraq, the Baʿth Party archives rarely refer to such actions. Memos simply mention if someone has been “arrested,” rarely with any additional information about their fate in the hands of security forces. Only in exceptional circumstances do Baʿth Party memos admit to the blood spilled in the name of maintaining power.³⁴

There are ethical considerations for researchers using this archive, as well, especially around the notion of consent. To begin, many of the Iraqis identified in the archives did not consent to, and certainly did not have access to, the dossiers collected on them by the Baʿth Party’s security services and party officials. Targets of surveillance operations, people named in informants’ reports, suspected political opposition group members: none of these people assented to have the details of their lives recorded and filed away in this archive, and many were likely unaware that such files about them existed. The Baʿth Party violated the privacy of Iraqis by monitoring them through secret police. Historian Rebecca Whiting poses an ethical question in response: is the researcher reading these files reenacting this violation of privacy?³⁵

At the most basic level, it is imperative for researchers to safeguard the privacy of civilians named in the records. To protect their identities, I refer to everyone in this book with a pseudonym and remove any identifying details. When referring to archival memos that name civilians, I chose not to divulge the full citation information that would allow someone to find the original file in the Baʿth Party records as a way to further protect their privacy.

One reason I was drawn to focus my attention on citizen petitions in the Baʿth Party archives—the subject of chapter 4—is precisely that these letters were penned voluntarily by Iraqi citizens, in their own voices, framing their own stories. These petition writers expected, and even demanded, that their stories be reviewed by bureaucrats who would file a report about their petition. In other words, these Iraqis knew that their letters would be received and filed away in an archive by bureaucrats. This is a very different situation from that of the atrocity records discussed by Whiting that contain secret surveillance or evidence of human rights violations. While this book does sometimes reference surveillance and security files—chapter 5 focuses on crime and policing—most of my research has sought to highlight the agency of Baghdadis in how they presented themselves to government officials out of their own volition. These Iraqi-penned petitions help to remedy the top-down gaze of regime officials recorded in the Baʿth Party archives.

Another ethical quandary is the issue of researchers’ access to the Baʿth Party archives, even after the repatriation of the original files to Iraq in 2020. Because the Iraqi government has not yet chosen to allow Iraqis access to the Baʿth Party archives in their possession, the only accessible copies of this archive are at the Hoover Institution, and visas for Iraqi researchers to come to the United States have been difficult to obtain. Because of the restrictions on making copies of the documents, carrying out research in this collection is a time-intensive process that even American researchers find difficult to afford because of the high costs of living in the Stanford, California, or Washington, DC, areas. My extensive research in these archives was only made possible by competitively securing grant funding, and many grants I received for dissertation research are only available to US citizens. The archives are thus embedded in multiple layers of unequal power dynamics and privilege. Without access to these records in Iraq, Iraqis do not yet have the the opportunity to reclaim their stories and their files, and, with them, their framing of the past. Restoring custody of these records to the Iraqi government was a crucial first step, but it remains important for Iraqi citizens to gain access to their files in the Baʿth Party archives so that they can control their own files and record their own tellings of history.

The ethical dilemmas surrounding the expatriation of the Baʿth Party archives have forced scholars of Iraq to take positions about whether or not to use these materials. Some researchers have chosen to boycott the Baʿth Party archives in protest of their seizure and removal to the United States. However, historians of Iraq like Dina Khoury and Arbella Bet-Shlimon have argued that it is possible to do respectful research in the Baʿth Party archives. As Khoury has insisted, “use of the archive [does not] lend legitimacy to the manner of their acquisition.”³⁶ However, there is an ethical imperative that researchers be intentional about taking approaches that mitigate some of the possible harms that can come from this research. As Bet-Shlimon has argued:

The alternative [boycotting the archive] is to declare moral superiority by simply avoiding entire classes of research projects. But perhaps considering the limits of this approach will lead scholars to more critical, thoughtful approaches to these problematic archives that think through the archive itself rather than just treating it as a repository of information.³⁷

Safeguarding the privacy of Iraqis named in the files and complementing archival records with oral history interviews are two possible approaches for mitigating some of the potential downsides of this archival collection. Bet-Shlimon further encourages historians to weigh the costs and benefits of using these records in considering the impact on the Iraqi people: does bringing these records to light offer something sufficiently valuable to the Iraqis who lived this history, or is it better simply to not research this topic at all?³⁸ It is possible to write excellent social histories of Iraq without using these controversial Baʿth Party archives. However, there is no alternative source that can replace these records to analyze how the Baʿth Party governed in order to tell the history of state-society relations. Every Iraqi who grew up before 2003 has stories about interactions with the fearsome Iraqi security forces or with intimidating regime representatives in their areas. Consulting these Baʿth Party records provides evidence that documents Iraqis’ experiences and reveals the larger bureaucratic systems that were at work behind the scenes that were not always perceptible to citizens on the ground.

I highlight these problematic dynamics of power and privilege associated with the Baʿth Party archives to locate my own positionality in relation to the research presented here. As subaltern scholars have urged, scholars must remain cognizant of the power dynamics inherent in carrying out their research, especially when examining the lives of nonelites, guarding themselves against deigning to “speak for” subalterns in the same way that state officials did, or presenting their research as “objective,” without acknowledging their own privilege.³⁹ I offer my findings from the Baʿth Party archives with humility, recognizing the limitations and problems of these archives. I look forward to the day when Iraqis will gain access to these records to interpret them within their own contexts and lived experiences. I continue to listen to Baghdadis as my authoritative guides in shaping my understanding of their city. My mistakes and shortcomings in writing this history of state-society relations in Baghdad are my own. If any part of my research in the Baʿth Party archives can be useful for Iraqis, I will be glad for it.

Notes

1. Names of Iraqis have been changed throughout to maintain anonymity. Pseudonyms are indicated with an asterisk. Letter to the vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, November 26, 1988, Baʿth Regional Command Collection (hereafter BRCC), file number withheld to protect identities.

2. Baghdad organization to the party secretariat, “Issuing an Opinion,” January 25, 1989, BRCC file number withheld to protect identities.

3. Joel Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27; Elise Massicard, Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 2.

4. Massicard, Street-Level Governing, 4.

5. For more on Ottoman mukhtars, see Massicard, Street-Level Governing, 25–30.

6. Nicholas Krohley, The Death of the Mehdi Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 184, 186, 191.

7. Dina Khoury, “Violence and Spatial Politics between the Local and Imperial: Baghdad, 1778–1810,” in The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, ed. Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 188, 194.

8. Krohley, The Death of the Mehdi Army, 20; John Gulick, “Baghdad: Portrait of a City in Physical and Cultural Change,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33, no. 4 (1967): 246.

9. For more on the Iraqi Baʿth Party’s ideology, see Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Baʿth Party (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Aaron Faust, Baʿthification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Sam Helfont, Compulsion in Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

10. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Baʿth Party, 172.

11. Head of the Presidential Diwan to the party secretariat, November 11, 1987, BRCC file number withheld to protect identities.

12. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Baʿth Party, 139.

13. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Baʿth Party, 171.

14. The workshop “Urban Iraq in the Twentieth Century: Cross-Perspectives,” held in Baghdad in October 2022 highlighted recent scholarship and gaps in the literature in both English-language and Arabic-language scholarship. See also Arbella Bet-Shlimon, “Beyond Baghdad: Writing a History from the Iraqi Periphery,” in Damluji et al., “Roundtable: Perspectives on Researching Iraq Today,” Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1 (2015): 239–41.

15. Faust, The Baʿthification of Iraq, 84.

16. Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 157.

17. Additional findings from our research collaboration are published in a co-authored article, “The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Baghdad: A Comparative Neighborhood Study,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 55, no. 2 (2023): 353–61. Dr. al-Hammood graciously allowed me to use qualitative data from our research collaboration in my book.

18. Ian M. Johnson, “The Impact on Libraries and Archives in Iraq of War and Looting in 2003: A Preliminary Assessment of the Damage and Subsequent Reconstruction Efforts,” International Information and Library Review 37, no. 3 (2005): 209–71.

19. I published further remarks on the ethics of research in the Baʿth Party archives: “The Repatriation of Iraqi Baʿth Party Archives: Ethical and Practical Considerations,” Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World 16, nos. 1–2 (2022): 117–36.

20. “Saddam Hussein Collection,” Conflict Records Research Center, https://conflictrecords.wordpress.com/collections/sh/.

21. Michael Brill, “Reintroducing the Saddam Hussein Regime Collection of the Conflict Records Research Center,” Wilson Center website, February 27, 2024.

22. Brill, “Reintroducing the Saddam Hussein Regime Collection.”

23. Michael Brill, “Setting the Records Straight in Iraq,” War on the Rocks, warontherocks.com, July 17, 2020.

24. Bruce Montgomery, “Immortality in the Secret Police Files: The Iraq Memory Foundation and the Baath Party Archive,” International Journal of Cultural Property 18, no. 3 (August 2011): 315–16.

25. Wisam H. Alshaibi, “Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives,” MERIP 291 (Summer 2019).

26. Brill, “Setting the Records Straight in Iraq.”

27. State Department Memo from the Secretary of State to the American Embassy in Baghdad, “Negotiating Return of Documents with Iraqi Government,” August 8, 2012. Memo released through an FOIA request filed by Wisam Alshaibi and shared with the author.

28. For more on this controversy, see Bruce Montgomery, “US Seizure, Exploitation, and Restitution of Saddam Hussein’s Archive of Atrocity,” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 2 (May 2014): 559–93; Michelle Caswell, “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records,” American Archivist 74, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 211–40; Walter, “Ethical and Practical Concerns,” 120–23.

29. Michael Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq, With the Secrets They Contain,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2020.

30. Collection Overview, “Register of the Hizb al-Baʿth al-ʿArabi al-Ishtiraki in Iraq,” Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

31. East German Stasi records and Guatemalan police records are two notable collections that share some similar attributes to the Baʿth Party archives. See Kristen Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

32. Khoury, Iraq in Wartime, 17.

33. Ann Laura Stoler has noted that many colonial archives have the tendency to erase violence, and arguably this applies to many postcolonial regimes as well: Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 33, 160.

34. One major exception is in the correspondence between Saddam Hussein and his appointed governor of Kuwait, his relative ʿAli Hassan al-Majid. Majid included frank depictions of his violent treatment of the Kuwaiti population, often scribbled by hand in the margins. See Joseph Sassoon and Alissa Walter, “The Iraqi Occupation of Kuwait,” Middle East Journal 71, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 615.

35. Rebecca Abby Whiting, “Living and Dying on Record: ‘Atrocity Archives’ as Sacred Remains,” Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World 16, nos. 1–2 (2022): 141.

36. Khoury, Iraq in Wartime, 15.

37. Arbella Bet-Shlimon, “Beyond Conflict: Archives and Ethics in the Middle East,” American Historical Association Conference (virtual), January 26, 2021.