Iraq’s Conflicting Nationalisms: 2011 American Troop Withdrawal - 2021 Popular Protests

The concept of post-coloniality in Iraq is complicated by the recent imperialist intervention of the United States in the Middle Eastern state from 2003 to 2011 and the remaining force still in the country today. The intention of the United States was to replace the socialist leadership of Iraq and de-Ba’athify the country to incorporate the oil-rich state into the global economy in favorable conditions for transnational markets and companies. American “nation building” in Iraq involved the rapid destruction of the previous political and economic system and its replacement with hyper-neoliberalism presented as a government-enforced “top-down” nationalism. This period saw a large number of sectarian militias, violence against women and queer communities, and economic privatization privileging a limited group with close ties to the Iraqi government and foreign companies. In resistance to this, two major counter-movements developed, one in the form of conservative religious nationalism, and the other a secular anti-oligarchy movement without defined leadership. This paper seeks to break down the trajectory of Iraq’s state-imposed nationalism and its counter-movements. This paper argues that while the recent “bottom-up” nationalist movements reject some of the hyper-neoliberal policies implemented during the American invasion such as foreign intervention and a powerful oligarchy, these campaigns stop short of altering, and even sometimes support, the hetero-patriarchal neoliberal tendencies of ‘post-colonial’ Iraq. Many trends in these counter-nationalisms support gender segregation, light punishments for ‘honor killings’, and continued privatization. Research for this paper draws from theories proposed by Benedict Anderson, David Harvey, and Wendy Brown in tandem with an analysis of recent social media and political parties’ publications related to the recent protests in Iraq from 2019-2021. This research seeks to more widely understand the growth of “organic” nationalist sentiment that in name rejects previous imperial projects from the Global North but maintains the same systems, only stylizing their political developments according to a local aesthetic.