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 facilitated the expansion of public goods, the Baʿth party leadership embraced national rhetoric over alternative ethnic and sectarian identities. While some manifestations of dissent were evident—particularly from the Iraqi Communist Party—most ordinary Iraqis, be they Sunni, Shiʿi, or Kurd, tended towards what Blaydes calls “political acquiescence and depoliticization.”
These times of plenty did not last. An array of data allows Blaydes to chart the impacts of successive crises—the prolonged war with Iran, the oil price crash, the disastrous invasion of Kuwait, and a decade of UN sanctions—across the Iraqi population. She documents how southern, predominantly Shiʿi provinces paid a high per capita price in killed, missing, and captured in action in the two wars, and, interestingly, how the regime was keen to ameliorate these costs with financial and symbolic payouts. In the north, the relative comity between Baghdad and the Kurds deteriorated as the Iran–Iraq War dragged on. Despite attempts to entice collaborators, the regime's inability to harvest useable intelligence led to less and less discriminate counterinsurgency tactics, culminating in the notorious Anfal campaign of 1986–89. Even in the Sunni community the regime's response to these crises displayed considerable variation not predicted by theories of monolithic Sunni support for Saddam's regime. UN sanctions hit child health outcomes in the south particularly hard, but they also stressed Anbari Iraqis, who increasingly found themselves on the outside of tightening regime distributive networks.
These crises, and the regime response, produced distinctive sectarian and ethnic identities. Heavy-handed repression of Shiʿi religious activists clustered around the al-Sadr family crystallized these networks as sites of opposition, while a similar strategy ended up sublimating internal Kurdish disagreements and fomenting a shared national identity. As Blaydes writes, “Kurdish nationalism was not a foregone conclusion, but rather an outgrowth of Iraqi state policies related to governance challenges faced by the Baʿthist regime” (p. 135). These dynamics manifest in a variety of data, including files on party membership and the distribution of honorifics (“friend of the president”) from the late 1980s to the early 2000s that help to show the consolidation of the Baʿth party in areas in and proximate to Tikrit.
State of Repression adds to the empirical record of modern Iraq, but it also makes broader contributions. Many studies of modern authoritarian regimes, particularly the more closed ones of the type that Hussein's Iraq represents, are handicapped by scarcity of internal data and must often infer motivations for various regime policies and behaviors from outcomes. The vast array of internal documents available in these archives enables Blaydes to observe crucial patterns more directly, sidestepping functionalist explanations to examine the logic of a highly repressive authoritarian regime as it worked in real-time. For example, Chapter 9 amasses data on desertion, paramilitary mobilization, and coup attempts to trace how Hussein established and maintained Baʿth party control over the Iraqi military. Given the military hypertrophy during the long war with Iran, Hussein's success at establishing party sovereignty in this “hard case” helpfully pushes the theoretical agenda on authoritarian ruling coalitions forward.
Her work also fills a notable void by bringing into relief the life of ordinary citizens living in these regimes, how they navigate bureaucracies, gather information about their situation, and provide for themselves and their families. This again is a welcome addition to our theoretical literature on authoritarianism, enriching the study of elections, ruling parties, and regime elites with a bottom-up perspective. Chapter 8, for example, uses the geographic distribution of political rumors collected by the regime to draw inferences about the character of social networks. As she argues, the greater circulation of rumors in Shiʿi areas—and the salience of topics to Shiʿi interests—shows that these networks were tightening as shared identities developed, whereas more penetrated (Sunni) areas would presumably have lower levels of interpersonal trust, and therefore lesser rumor circulation. Future research in nondemocratic contexts will benefit from the way Blaydes has used these “hidden transcripts” to gain insight into how civilians relate to each other.
The book's great strength is its deft exploitation of the archival material, and Blaydes’ creativity with these sources is commendable. One trade-off is less space for observing the mechanisms of identity formation among the specific groups. For example, Blaydes theorizes that indiscriminate repression informs group members that they are only imperfectly monitored, generates within them a sense of shared fate, and increases their incentives to more tightly police their own members. Other types of data could well thicken the description of these processes. How did Shiʿa, and members of clerical networks specifically, interpret the regime's indiscriminate repression? Did Kurds’ attitudes towards in-group policing become more intense over the course of the Anfal campaign? In post-Saddam Iraq, are there lingering inter- or intrapersonal trust gaps between ordinary Sunnis (or Tikritis) and other Iraqis?
State of Repression documents in fine-grained detail how external crises and regime miscalculation transformed Iraq from a relatively promising and coherent developmental state in the mid-1970s to a tyranny crosscut by ethnic and religious divides. In the process, it generates insights into the interaction between repression and identity, an area of acute relevance in the Middle East and beyond.
