Iraq

Frequent contributor Bob Tollast has posted a valuable interview at Global Politics.  

What factors push humans to the path of war? Is it our thirst for resources, or do political, religious or ethnic differences play a bigger role?

Often overlooked in such analysis is human nature and identity formation, which Fanar Haddad examines in detail, gaining deep insights into the Iraq conflict in his excellent study Sectarianism In Iraq.

Haddad is a London based academic and analyst of Middle Eastern affairs. His research interests are Middle Eastern social history, identity, minority politics, nationalism and popular memory. He previously lectured at the University of Exeter and worked in the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He has published widely on Iraq and the broader Middle East and is author of Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity. Currently he lectures at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London.

Looking at the Iraq war through the prism of identity politics, Haddad’s book also stands out for its analysis of social media such as YouTube to understand the propaganda of civil conflict. As much as being a book about Iraq, Haddad’s work is full of insights for anyone interested in conflict studies, and provides some answers to the question Rodney King once posed: “can’t we just get along?”

You can find the pre-publication version of a new article by Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro on the decline in violence in Iraq in 2007 at this link.

ABSTRACT 

Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many analysts credit the “surge,” or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Anbar Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. A combination of recently declassified data on violence at local levels combined with information gathered from seventy structured interviews with coalition participants enables a systematic test of these claims. These data show little support for the cleansing thesis. Instead, a synergistic interaction between the surge and the Awakening was required: both were necessary; neither was sufficient. U.S. policy thus played an important role, but Iraq provides no evidence that similar methods will produce similar results elsewhere without local equivalents of the Sunni Awakening. 

H/T Mike Few.