Private sector development has been included as a key policy in the process of statebuilding in Iraq based on the argument that the private sector plays a stabilizing role in post-conflict societies: economically, it generates job opportunities, favors know-how transfer, and expands economic activities; politically, it replaces ethnic and religious divisions with rule-based competition and acts as a bridge between socioeconomic strata. Although this argument is increasingly accepted in the international agenda for statebuilding, little research has been conducted to investigate the implications of private sector development in post-conflict statebuilding. By empirically exploring the forms the private sector has assumed and developed in relation to the nature of the externally-driven statebuilding process in Iraq, this paper questions the role of private sector actors in the domestic dynamics of state (trans)formation and provides further insight into the debate on the tensions between the private and the public in post-conflict societies.
