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Living IraqLand, Law and the Political Imagination

Edited by Haytham Bahoora and Zainab Saleh

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Published 31 December 2026

About this book

Analyses how imperial powers have shaped Iraq at the political, cultural, legal and environmental level

  • Excavates continuities between Iraq’s past and present, contextualising post-2003 conditions by revisiting, reframing and reconstructing the nation’s historical trajectories as experienced by Iraqis themselves
  • Examines the Iraqi present and past through an interdisciplinary lens, in particular through the medical humanities, legal studies, environmental studies, literary studies, and gender and sexuality studies
  • Offers a sustained engagement with the political, cultural and environmental consequences of US wars on Iraq, including conditions in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003

Living Iraq brings together scholars of history, culture, literature, ecology, law and the social sciences to explore how Iraqis have experienced and navigated a century shaped by imperial domination, authoritarian rule and popular struggle. Focusing on post-2003 Iraq, yet tracing continuities between past and present, this book examines everyday life, environmental harm and evolving legal and cultural practices.

The contributions in this book offer a nuanced account of a society shaped by overlapping national and imperial power structures. Living Iraq highlights how Iraqis have endured, contested and reworked shifting regimes of sovereignty throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Reviews

What an edited volume! This brilliant collection of essays by the foremost scholars of Iraq has a magisterial historic, disciplinary and geographic sweep.
Table of contents

List of Figures
About the Contributors
Acknowledgements

Preface
Timothy Mitchell

Introduction
Haytham Bahoora and Zainab Saleh

Part I: Political Imagination
1. Of Wounds and Words: Muzaffar al-Nawwab and the 2019 Uprising in Iraq
Sinan Antoon
2. Revolutionary Possibility and the Bounds of Imperial Subterfuge in Iraq
Arbella Bet-Shlimon
3. An Arabian Family Romance: Nissim Ahmad Sousa’s Path and the Pitfalls of Originary Discourse
Ella Shohat
4. The Unstable Table: Reading Jewish Past Through the Iraqi Present
Orit Bashkin
5. Historiography and the Persistence of Realism in the Post-2003 Iraqi Novel
Haytham Bahoora
6. The Art World After Iraq: Exhibitions, Ethics, and the Cultural Afterlives of Violence
Rijin Sahakian

Part II: Land
7. The Value of Climate Change: Understanding Global Ecological Decline from Iraq
Bridget Guarasci
8. Border-Crossing and Border-Making in Late Ottoman Iraq
Camille Cole
9. The Making and Unmaking of Assyrians in Baghdad
Alda Benjamen
10. “As Long As They Work”: Racialization, Difference, and Conceptions of Laboring Bodies in Kurdistan
Kerem Uşşaklı
11. “In 99 Years, this Place will Be Flat”: The Future of Vitality in Cement Valley, Iraq
Kali Rubaii
12. “This River is What We Have”
Mona Damluji

Part III: Legal Terrains
13. The Iraqi Tribal Code and the Securitizing State
Sara Pursley
14. “Money as a Weapons System”: Private Contracting and the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
Zaynab Quadri
15. Phenomenology of Care: Social Medicine in British-Mandated Iraq
Sara Farhan
16. Honor, Chastity, Modesty: A Gendered Triad for Oppression and Violence
Balsam Mustafa and Shams Hussein
17. Discipling Gender and Sexuality: Women’s and LGBTQ+ People’s Rights in Contemporary Iraq
Zainab Saleh
18. Iraq’s Tishreen Movement and Living Constitutions: Towards Self-Determination
Ruba Ali Al-Hassani

Index

About the contributors

Haytham Bahoora

Haytham Bahoora is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His research has explored the relationship between aesthetics and politics, the emergence and transformations of new genres and styles in modern Arabic prose and poetry, and the intersections of textual, material, and visual forms in Arabic cultural production. His work has appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, the Review of Middle East Studies, The Arab Studies Journal, and numerous edited volumes. His book Aesthetics of Arab Modernity: Modernism in Colonial Baghdad is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Zainab Saleh

Zainab Saleh is Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. Her research focuses on subjectivity, nostalgia, belonging, war, empire, citizenship laws, and violence in Iraq and the Iraqi Diaspora. She is the author of Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2026), and Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford University Press, 2021; Winner of The Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award at the Arab American Book Award). Her work also appeared in American Anthropologist, Arab Studies Journal, Anthropology News, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, Costs of War project with Brown University, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Palestine/Israel Review, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.