Traveller, archaeologist, linguist, intelligence officer and political adviser: between 1915 and 1926, the year of her death, Gertrude Bell had a central role in the British Intelligence Office in West Asia (the Arab Bureau) and as a member of both the British and Iraqi administrations. Like many prominent figures of the European colonial past, her role in these events remains controversial. A fierce supporter of Arab independence but a British imperialist nonetheless, her political position within the country to which she dedicated a good portion of her life was marked by contradictions. One key area was the management of Iraqi cultural heritage. This article analyses and contextualises Bell’s actions in this field, not just within the boundaries of Iraq, as has previously been done, but within the broader context of British and French influence in the Mandates established after the First World War. In this way, we can place Bell’s policies into a coherent ideology alongside the contemporary debates on the fate of archaeological heritage, while following her path from ‘unofficial’ and ‘unimportant’ to an accomplished ‘person’.

The 2026 war in Iran is thus far the high-water mark of the interventionism of the second Trump administration. This essay argues that the war in Iran is profoundly unjust and even worse than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Like the Iraq War, it fails to meet the main criteria of just war theory and lacks any plausible humanitarian justification. But it is also symptomatic of backsliding toward an autocratic way of war, rendering it wrong in ways that go beyond violations of the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The war in Iran is undemocratic, abdicates any sense of humanitarian or reparative responsibilities, and is highly revisionist of the prevailing international order. In these respects, it is even worse than the 2003 Iraq War.

The article examines efforts by the Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) to enumerate the harm its forces inflicted on Syrian and Iraqi civilians between 2014 and 2018. Drawing on more than 1,300 declassified civilian harm assessments, this article examines the rationale behind the decision to count civilian casualties, the policies that governed how civilian casualties were counted, and what CJTF-OIR officials did with the data collected. Although accurate counts are critical to ethical debates, we show that, on their own, these counts are insufficient when it comes to recognizing the harm inflicted upon civilians and holding militaries accountable. We trace coalition metrics back to concerns about consequence management, showing how martial considerations about optimizing violence—rather than moral concerns about constraining violence—governed the enumerative enterprise. We argue that the way the coalition previously counted civilian casualties erased certain harms from view, including the indirect, cumulative, and reverberating violence that civilians suffered during this conflict. Furthermore, we contend that these numerical indicators tell us little about how civilians experience these harms, a lack of which can become an impediment to ethical consideration. Finally, we contrast the coalition count with Airwars figures to reveal both the numerical discrepancies between the different counts and differences in how these figures have been used. We contend that counting casualties is critical, but also complicated, contestable, and—at times—too constrictive.

This article examines the political ecology of water and ethnic conflict in Kirkuk, Iraq. Kirkuk is an internally disputed frontier territory, controlled by the federal government of Iraq but claimed by Kurdish nationalists. Kirkuk contains some of Iraq’s largest oil fields and most productive agricultural lands. In recent decades Kirkuk has also faced water shortages tied to global climate change. The article deploys survey data, supplemented by qualitative historical research, to evaluate framing of environmental security and the relationship between water insecurity, ethnic conflict, and governance. We find that commitments to competing programs for territorial control in Kirkuk correlate with different framing of ecological risk factors. Arabic-speaking respondents frame water scarcity as a matter for the federal government. Kurdish-speaking respondents prefer to enlist the Kurdistan Regional Government or local politicians to deal with water scarcity, undercutting federal jurisdiction. These findings cast doubt on environmental security and peacebuilding theories which suggest that ecological scarcity can spur inter-ethnic cooperation toward sustainability. Rather, commitment to different ethnoterritorial programs justify different perspectives on ecological change. At a policy level, these findings show that political conciliation must come before progress in environmental peacebuilding.

Iraq higher education faces a host of challenges, some spurred by the 2003 war and others by more recent developments. Following a general trend of deteriorating freedoms, Iraqi academics in the social sciences and humanities face new policies from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research that prohibit them from studying any politically sensitive topics and from engaging meaningfully in developments in the country. The ministry itself was recently controlled by the Sadiqoun political party, which is affiliated with Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, an armed group designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the US Department of State, a designation that raises further challenges to international collaboration for Iraqi scholars. Compounding this, and particularly for political scientists, is political party interest in co-opting professors and departments to groom subservient party cadres.

Atrocity denial suffuses the bedrock of the academic field of modern Middle East studies. One of the most frequently cited works about modern Assyrians is a 1974 revisionist account of the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Its author, Khaldun S. Husry, dismisses Assyrian recollections of the violence as “propaganda of the victims.” Examining how Husry’s article came to be published reveals that the editor who published it, Stanford Shaw, promoted its logic as part of his denial of the Armenian genocide. As a result of the influence of this denialism, Assyrians—who continue to face displacement and dispossession over a century after hundreds of thousands of them, alongside Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Empire—are systematically demeaned in academic literature. Scholars routinely treat Assyrians as problematic, questioning their legitimacy through racist lines of inquiry. They then claim, as moral licensing for their contempt, that their aim is to critique ethnic nationalism and colonialism. Analyzing the disparagement of Assyrians in the Middle East studies field offers lessons about what good and bad critiques of ethnic nationalism look like, how to avoid historiographical and citational pitfalls when writing about marginalized people, and why revisionist histories of atrocities are profoundly harmful.

This article reports on outcomes and lessons learned from a four-day mhGAP-IG cascade training programme delivered in 2023 to psychosocial support workers from Red Crescent Societies in Iraq, Egypt and Jordan by primary care physicians who had themselves completed mhGAP-IG training. Participants demonstrated significant gains in knowledge, confidence and competence, supported by assessments and qualitative feedback. The training improved preparedness, clarified clinical language and enhanced comfort in addressing mental, neurological and substance use disorders. This experience highlights the feasibility of cascade training as a sustainable model to strengthen front-line mental healthcare capacity in conflict-affected low- and middle-income countries.

This article reconstructs the religious and political activities of the Lebanese Shi‘i scholar Mohamad Jawad Chirri, who founded the first purpose-built Shi‘i mosque in the United States in 1963. It uses Chirri’s biography to explain the institutional, ideological, and political concerns structuring the global Shi‘i revival of the mid-twentieth century, as well as the strategies adopted by Islamic revivalist figures to achieve their institutional ambitions in a competitive and increasingly globalized religious marketplace. A hypermobile activist who lived and travelled between southern Lebanon, southern Iraq, Michigan, and West Africa, Chirri’s institutional initiatives and public activism took place outside the purview of the centres of Shi‘i religious authority in southern Iraq and Iran. The article argues that Chirri’s work, thought, and legacy complicate diffusionist understandings of Islamic revivalist activity as an ideologically coherent project of politicization or radicalization in the years surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The ‘global’ Shi‘i revival should instead be understood as an entanglement of institutional projects linked by transnational familial, professional, and financial networks emerging in the 1950s.

This article uses the theory of recognition to analyze sectarian conflicts in Iraq. After describing the sectarian and historical background of contemporary Iraqi politics, the article critiques the implementation of consociationalism and policies influenced by liberal multiculturalism in deeply divided societies. It argues that these policies lead to a dangerous reification of identities. The article argues that a progressive implementation of deliberative democracy practices could improve identity-related issues in Iraq and explains how democratic practices are legitimized by the most influential Islamic religious figure in Iraq.

Realists and liberals dispute the post-war record of the transatlantic alliance. Yet, the crisis over Iraq has prompted consensus on the notion that transatlantic relations will ‘never be the same’. This article offers two central arguments. First, the US-European alliance was transformed, long before the Iraq crisis, by the end of the Cold War. Second, convergence on ends for the international order remain obscured by transatlantic disputes over means.