International human rights law relies on states to localize global governance through codification and enforcement. However, amidst post-conflict state building, governmental instability complicates and often overlooks priorities of international human rights for more tangible domestic infrastructure. If the legal realm is disrupted with instability, violence, and discontinuity, how does society sustainably internalize and integrate international human rights law over time? This research evaluates the development of comprehensive rule of law, and its effectiveness, regarding female genital mutilation as a case study in Iraqi Kurdistan from the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 until 2013, the early years of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s parliament. By evaluating the legal and cultural realms’ contributions to the anti-FGM discourse in Iraqi Kurdistan, this research will determine the role of a continuous society overlaid by intermittent legal structures in the sustainability of negotiating cultural relativity with universal human rights.
