This book is a must-read. Informed by feminist insights and gender-and-development research, it takes the reader back to the 1990s to explain how the punitive sanctions regime—imposed by the United Nations Security Council following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait—not only adversely affected the literacy, health, and welfare of large proportions of the Iraqi population but also had specific gendered effects, notably in terms of the deterioration of women's social roles, legal status, and family positions. Deftly combining feminist analysis, interview data, discussion of the details of the sanctions regime, and presentation of statistics on the social and infrastructural effects of the sanctions, Yasmin Husein al-Jawaheri makes an argument that is bold, sophisticated, and entirely convincing.
Women in Iraq entailed field research in the early part of this decade. A section on the research methods deployed explains that some 227 Iraqi women were interviewed in households of varying socioeconomic means across three districts in Baghdad City. We are not told whether the author conducted all the interviews or if a research team did so. In any event, the book draws on only a small number of those interviews to highlight the arguments, rather than presenting systematic quantitative information based on the entire sample.
The book consists of seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the reader to the sanctions regime, the author's main arguments, and the sample. The second chapter provides an historical overview of postcolonial state building and the evolution of women's status, including their involvement in the occupational structure and the rather progressive social policies they enjoyed. The focus of Chapter 3 is women's employment and income under the sanctions in the 1990s. Chapter 4 examines the crisis of female education under the UN sanctions, and Chapter 5 looks at the impact of economic sanctions on gender relations within the family. The psychological impact of sanctions on Iraqi women is the focus of Chapter 6, and a concluding chapter offers a summary, while also extending the argument to the gendered effects of the collapse of the state since the 2003 invasion and occupation. An appendix includes tables with figures relevant to Chapters 2, 3, and 4, highlighting differences in women's social positions in 1988 and 1998.
There is widespread recognition that the sanctions against Iraq were so poorly conceived and crudely (and cruelly) implemented that they ended up harming the population while entrenching and enriching the political elite. This argument was made by Sir Dennis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, before his angry resignation in 1998; by Martti Ahtisaari, a UN official and former Finnish president who examined the effects of the sanctions; and by Jean Drèze, a Belgian economist, who boldly condemned the sanctions very early on.
Al-Jawaheri's contribution is to demonstrate the gender-specific effects. Iraq's employed women were located primarily in the public sector, with a large proportion as teachers, and as the 1990s wore on, they found their incomes deteriorating and their jobs essentially worthless. To make up for the withdrawal of social services, many left their jobs to look after their families, or engaged in various survival strategies in the growing informal economy to augment the family income. Similar to the findings of feminist scholars studying the effects of structural adjustment policies, al-Jawaheri shows how rising unemployment and inflation, along with the deterioration of the social and physical infrastructure, exacerbated class and gender inequalities, put pressure on women in households, and led to crises in family relations. In some cases, families pooled resources to start new businesses; in other cases, family ties disintegrated in the face of economic hardship, and widowed or divorced women found themselves alone—and sometimes on the streets. Polygamy, early marriage, domestic violence, and “honor killings” soared, along with fertility, infant and child mortality, and maternal mortality. As the social fabric deteriorated, women faced a resurgent patriarchy at home and on the streets.
The desperation expressed by some of the women interviewed by al-Jawaheri makes for difficult reading, but this is rich interview data that confirm the utter stupidity, if not criminality, of such policies. It also draws our attention to the extent of Iraqi suffering under a reckless and authoritarian state, a decade of punitive sanctions, and the invasion and foreign military occupation since 2003. The evidence shows that most Iraqis felt socially and personally secure prior to the imposition of the sanctions, but whatever social and personal security they retained after the sanctions was then wholly quashed by the invasion and subsequent resistance.
Is there anything to criticize in this book? Unfortunately, it is marred by what seems to have been poor fact finding. The author refers twice to a 1995 Arab Human Development Report (pp. 69, 70), but the first AHDR appeared in 2001. There is a lengthy bibliography, but numerous studies are included that are not referred to in the text. Neither of these minor criticisms, however, should detract from what is an important study, well conceived and finely presented. Al-Jawaheri's book now joins a growing literature on women in Iraq, including studies by Nadje Al-Ali, Nicola Pratt, and Haifa Zangana. It should prove to be a model for other analyses of the gender impact of conflict, war, and sanctions.
