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State of Repression: Iraq Under Saddam Hussein. Lisa Blaydes (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). Pp. 376. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780691180274
In one common telling, Saddam Hussein's Baʿthist regime countered Iraq's inherent centrifugal tendencies by repressing Kurds and Shiʿa while co-opting Sunnis. Once his brutal dictatorship was dislodged by the coalition in 2003, it was more or less inevitable that these tendencies would resurface, first as ethnic and religious parties, then later as sectarian and separatist militias.
Lisa Blaydes’ State of Repression uses fascinating documents from seized Baʿth party archives to tell an alternative story about modern Iraq's ethnic and sectarian identities. Blaydes’ theory sits at the intersection of information about the population, resources, and repression. “Culturally distant” communities—which Blaydes conceptualizes as those either geographically distant from the regime's core constituency or speaking a different language than that core—are inherently more difficult for the regime to monitor, and thus more likely to be policed indiscriminately. These collective punishments, in turn, galvanize the emergence of shared identities and tight networks as aggrieved populations come to realize their shared fate. In contrast, more culturally proximate communities can be closely monitored, targeted surgically, and will thus yield higher levels of atomization and distrust. While the implications of the theory are quite broad, one insight of Blaydes’ work is that the salience of Shiʿi, Sunni, and Kurdish identities in modern Iraq is thus a relatively recent phenomenon, and indeed more accurately analyzed as an effect, and not a cause, of the country's political trajectory.
State of Repression opens with the observation that, in the 1970s, Iraq was more or less on the curve of other regional authoritarian developmental states. While oil revenues buoyed finances and...