Zainab Saleh’s Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq is a practice of fortitude. At the book’s threshold, the author offers a poignant auto-ethnographic vignette revealing her touching personal haunting during her girlhood in Iraq as she tried to assemble the inexplicable forced removal of several neighborhood peers by Saddam Hussein’s regime. This narrative, where the disappeared Iraqi girls of Iranian origin are no longer with her corporally but still exist psychologically, encapsulates Saleh’s fulcrum—a reckoning with rootedness in a geography, not as a weapon that can be wielded by nation-states in the form of legal citizenship, but as a courageous feeling of being at home. Political Undesirables delineates citizenship’s legal failure to protect disappeared Iraqis of Iranian origin and Iraqi Jews during 20th-century political crises, in particular, and more generally analyzes the category’s presumption as an inalienable right.

Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians, thrown into sharp relief after 7 October, and the second Trump administration’s inhumane mass deportations and aggressive wars have made many more practiced in enunciating righteous outrage. With this book, readers are asked to remain ignited by this outrage and harness its moral clarity as we engage in a long act of seeing Iraqi denaturalization, deportation, and denials of rootedness of the past reiterated in multiple, more present geographies. In the case of Iraq, government elites may have tried to position themselves against Iraqis of Iranian origin (tabaʿiyya iraniyya, often referred to as tabaʿiyya) and Jewish Iraqis, whom they disparaged for their hybridity, but this opposition activated neighbors such as Saleh, who could not abide the severing of their fellow country people from their communities. This totality of revealing both governmentality and resistance to it is an intervention in scholarship on Iraq’s decolonial endeavors and the contours of the country’s indigenous nationality.

Iraqi ruling elites created a precise mass expulsion of entire communities by transforming the strategy of political intimidation from a colonial practice into a national one. Indeed, the “right to uproot,” which includes othering, banishment, impoverishment, stonewalling, and projections of foreignness, is so worrying because it has become part of the temperament of the state. Saleh says, “Since the establishment of the modern state of Iraq in 1921, different Iraqi governments, whether monarchical or republican rule, have employed denaturalization as a mechanism to discipline Iraqi citizens who were designated as threats or traitors” (p. 7). One of the ways this was accomplished with such precision was through legal maneuvering. Through repeated close readings of the Iraqi Nationality Law of 1924 (Law 42), which privileges geography and lineage and is, in fact, imbued with an awareness of narrow possibilities for loss of citizenship, Saleh shows that security and disloyalty to the state are not accounted for as disqualifying.

Betrayals of Law 42 would take until the 1930s to be enacted, coming pointedly in the form of the 1933 Law of Denaturalization (Law 62), which allowed the government to denaturalize Iraqis whose actions threatened the state, and the 1938 amendment to Baghdad’s Penal Code (Law 51), which, although it did not stipulate denaturalization, criminalized iterations of leftist activism. What might have started as a British infection—as the colonial power had, since its 1914 invasion, deported Iraqis opposed to its rule—remained and spread under national rule. To showcase how denaturalization was made Iraqi, Saleh does not just read the actions of political elites as they amended laws against the grain. She also analyzes ultranationalist newspapers, memoirs, her own ethnographic fieldwork (in London with Iraqi Jews and tabaʿiyya women), histories of citizenship in Ottoman Iraq, and the historical novel Qismat, which focuses on the expulsion and afterlives of tabaʿiyya.

Reminding readers that denaturalization is at once colonial and national, Saleh’s calculus evokes critical Iraqi histories that resist the falsity of labeling Iraq an artificial state. For example, recent scholarship on Iraq has dismantled assertions about the colonial constructedness of the nation, correcting such conclusions that do not reflect reality. In fact, such assertions do more to mimic British colonial thinking that Iraq is a particularly ungovernable entity. In a cyclical yet still evolving way, this a priori ungovernability scaffolds the undignified rule colonial power sponsored in Iraq, which was folded into the governmentality of the subsequent independent Iraqi rulership they endorsed.

Iraq denaturalized tabaʿiyya and Jews as political undesirables. The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, participation in “threatening” radical movements such as communism, and the rupture of Zionism catalyzed these communities’ collective punishment and mass expulsion. At a juncture of Zainab Saleh’s aforementioned opening vignette, she reveals that the disappeared family eventually returned to her neighborhood through a compromising deal. She then also grants readers access to the knowledge that her own maternal grandfather experienced challenges to his Iraqi citizenship throughout the mid-20th century. Denaturalization is clearly personal for the book’s author, but it is not exclusive in impact. Indeed, she underscores the silence enforced by such upheavals and the cognitive dissonance politicized belonging encouraged. It is heavily implied that denying our voices and logic is the price paid for temporary protection in circumstances where citizenship is violently weaponized.

Still, an anchor of this work is the power of the populace through phenomena such as the “right to reclaim,” which challenges displacement by insisting that belonging can be forged through activism, prose, affect, and intentional reminiscing. Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq is a necessary recalibrating force in a landscape of Iraqi Studies that, as Iraqi sociologist Zahra Ali has problematized in “Politicizing Ethics: Decolonizing Research on Iraq,”Footnote ¹ can operate on an ethical inversion wherein Iraqis are often not as privileged as academic Westerners in getting to narrate their own experiences and undertake the most communally relevant research. Historically textured, politically activating, yet always civically minded, this book is sure to captivate readers and assist in reclaiming an Iraq that is for the people.