Zainab Saleh’s Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq is an anticipated contribution that reveals how citizenship is a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right, specifically within the context of the modern Iraqi state. Saleh argues that denaturalization and deportation have been integral to state governance throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She demonstrates that Ottoman, colonial British officials, and subsequent national ruling elites used citizenship laws as a mechanism for discipline and retribution against those deemed “political undesirables.” Revoking nationality based on rhetoric of national security or perceived disloyalty, confiscating assets, properties, and documents, and inflicting physical and psychological trauma are among the continuities that Saleh aptly shows ebbing and flowing throughout Iraq’s modern history.

However, the book should not be considered a history of victimhood. Saleh highlights the “right to reclaim,” using memoirs, historical novels, and ethnographic research to show how expelled Iraqis have asserted their belonging to their homeland through literature, memory, and political activism. For instance, she highlights how Iraqi Jews in Israel and London continue to identify as “Arab Jews,” challenging the binaries of Zionism and Arab nationalism (14). The work addresses gender ruptures, such as the 1981 Iraqi law that offered monetary rewards to men who divorced their taba‘iyya wives (64). It also breaks a “wall of silence” regarding the widespread sexual violence used as a state tool during these deportation campaigns (106). It connects past injustices to current laws by critiquing the 2006 Iraqi Nationality Law, which, although reformist in some ways, continues to legally exclude Iraqi Jews from reclaiming the citizenship and property they lost in the 1950s (125–26).

Across four chapters, Saleh traces how citizenship in Iraq was used to legally and rhetorically construct certain populations as outsiders. The first chapter examines how Iraqi Jews were denationalized after 1948, as ultranationalist newspapers recast them as foreign and denaturalization laws in 1950 and 1951 stripped them of nationality and property. The second turns to how Iraqi Jews asserted their belonging to Iraq after expulsion, drawing on memoirs and interviews to recover Baghdad’s literary networks and the political activism of young Jews, especially within the Iraqi Communist Party, who identified as Arab Jews. The third chapter traces the origins of the 1924 Iraqi Nationality Law and its tiered system of citizenship based on Ottoman or Persian ancestry, showing how this distinction later underpinned the Ba’th regime’s mass expulsion of Iraqis of Iranian origin. The final chapter turns to Hawra al-Nadawi’s novel Qismat to explore the intergenerational trauma and subjectivity of this displaced community, using the concept of haunting to illuminate the repressed violence of displacement and the lived experience of families scattered across borders.

Saleh traces a legal genealogy beginning with the 1924 Nationality Law, which institutionalized a tiered citizenship system based on Ottoman or Persian ancestry. Inhabitants who held Ottoman nationality were defined as “authentic” Iraqis, whereas those whose ancestors had opted for Persian nationality, often to avoid Ottoman taxes or military conscription, were categorized as taba’iyya, a status passed down through generations, which was documented on their Certificate of Citizenship. This framework gave later regimes a ready-made mechanism for targeting specific groups: the 1933 decree used against Assyrians, the 1950 to 1951 laws targeting Jews, and the 1980s Resolution 666 used against the taba’iyya. The state relied on a consistent rhetorical arsenal, labeling targeted groups as an enemy within to justify stripping them of rights on grounds of perceived disloyalty. Saleh calls this pattern the “right to uproot,” a concept capturing the totalizing violence of state-mandated dispossession.

The human cost of this legal apparatus is substantial. The 1951 laws confiscated the property of Iraqi Jews, reducing a once flourishing community to poverty overnight, and similar confiscations targeted the taba’iyya in the 1980s. Saleh documents forced marches of families through minefields to the Iranian border and the disappearance of young men aged 18–28, many of whom were later found in mass graves. Even reform has been selective: the 2006 Nationality Law, although presented as progressive, explicitly excludes Iraqi Jews from reclaiming citizenship, effectively preserving the dispossession first codified under the monarchy. The state also weaponized gender and family structure, as Resolution 474 of 1981 offered Iraqi men payments of up to 4,000 dinars to divorce their taba’iyya wives, turning marriage into an instrument of state control. Through interviews, including with a woman referred to as Sahar, Saleh uncovers largely undocumented histories of sexual violence committed by state officials during deportations (109). Saleh draws on memoirs by Sasson Somekh, Nissim Rejwan, and Avi Shlaim to show how these writers reclaim the identity of “Arab Jew” and sustain cultural ties to Iraq despite exile. She extends this into fiction to engage with the taba’iyya’s repressed history. Combining legal gazettes, secret Ba’th Party memoranda, memoirs, and ethnographic interviews forms what Saleh calls an “archive of dispossession” (8). This mosaic of sources supports her central argument: that the Iraqi state has repeatedly used the legal unmaking of citizenship to manage political threats and construct a “pure” national identity at its citizens’ expense.

Where many scholars treat citizenship as an inalienable right, Saleh reframes it as a precarious privilege the state grants and revokes to discipline populations and eliminate perceived undesirables. Her methodology, which consists of memoirs, historical fiction, and interviews as well as conventional legal and state records, is designed to recover histories that official archives tend to erase. Saleh is candid about the limits of her evidence. She notes a significant disparity in available sources; Iraqi Jews left behind a rich body of literary and scholarly work, whereas the taba’iyya, marginalized and with less access to education, left comparatively little documentation. Deep social taboos around honor also meant she could not locate a single woman who had been divorced under the state’s incentive program. These limitations allowed her to employ Yael Navaro’s “negative methodological practice”Footnote ¹ as an indirect mechanism of tracing these trends. She relied on literature to discuss the taba’iyya’s intergenerational trauma. Finally, Saleh addresses a scholarly objection to her use of the term “expelled” for Iraqi Jews, as some argue that they formally registered to leave. She defends her terminology by pointing to the coercive context of property confiscation and state-sponsored persecution that made any such “choice” illusory (note 47, page 141).

Political Undesirables will appeal to several overlapping audiences. It speaks to those interested in modern Iraq’s history, particularly the transition from the British Mandate and monarchy to the Ba’thist Republic. It will also draw the attention of researchers working on the afterlife of social rupture and intergenerational trauma, especially appealing to those interested in how marginalized communities sustain a sense of belonging in exile. It also speaks to scholars examining the precarity of citizenship laws, denaturalization as a governing technique, and how states use legal frameworks to discipline populations and eliminate political dissent. It is equally relevant to readers interested in how states weaponize the gendered body as a site of governance through laws on marital denaturalization, state-sponsored divorce, and sexual violence. Although Iraq serves as the central case study, the book highlights broader patterns of state violence; it situates the Iraqi experience alongside historical examples from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Vichy France, as well as more recent cases in Bahrain, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. It is an essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how citizenship functions as a precarious privilege, how modern nation-states foreclose the “right to have rights,” and how the “right to reclaim” one’s identity can persist even after violent uprooting.