Abstract
This ambitious and often impressive book examines everyday politics, local governance, and state–society relations in modern Baghdad. Drawing on extensive work in the Baʿth Party archives and related sources, the author argues that Baghdad's neighborhoods, district officials, mukhtars, ration agents, and local party intermediaries were central to how rule actually operated on the ground. The book's central analytical move is to shift attention away from the state as a distant, monolithic entity and toward neighborhood-level actors who mediated access, punishment, services, and information. In the author's formulation, examples of citizen advocacy illuminate “how sub-national governance structures worked in a centralized state,” while in day-to-day governance, “the state” “does not exist on high, separated from and with a clear view into society, but rather operates within webs of power relations that are embedded in local communities” (2–3).
The book's strengths are methodological and empirical. The archival terrain is difficult, politically fraught, and labor-intensive. The author is attentive to the ethical complications of working with the Baʿth Party archives, including unequal access, privacy concerns, and the risk that official files create an illusion of bureaucratic coherence while muting the violence on which the regime depended. She also notes that Iraqi-penned petitions help offset the top-down gaze of state records. That methodological self-awareness strengthens the book considerably. It is a serious scholarly achievement to reconstruct the texture of local governance in Baghdad through records that are both difficult to access and difficult to interpret.
The introduction is especially effective in laying out the governing problem. Baghdad is treated not merely as the setting of Iraqi politics but as the key administrative and social space through which rulers and ruled encountered one another. Neighborhoods are shown to have been durable units of governance and meaning, and the author effectively demonstrates that one cannot understand Iraqi politics only through top leaders, coups, wars, or ministries. One must also understand the street-level officials who distributed resources, monitored behavior, endorsed appeals, and translated state power into daily experience.
Chapters 3 and 4 are the strongest parts of the book and the ones that most directly carry its central thesis. Chapter 3, on food rationing under sanctions, shows how the rationing system became one of the main points of contact between citizens and regime representatives. Although the system had centralized features, “most activity took place on a neighborhood level,” and local officials had “considerable responsibilities and leeway in running the ration system” (113). This chapter is illuminating because it shows how sanctions-era governance depended on localized intermediaries who registered households, transmitted requests, exercised discretion, and enforced rules. It makes clear that rationing was not merely administrative; it was also social, political, and disciplinary.
Yet chapter 3 also reveals the limits of the book's larger interpretive claims. The author writes that these lower-level officials “could act as important advocates on behalf of their neighbors and citizens in their small jurisdictions” (113). Here, the analysis seems to overreach. Local discretion certainly existed, and ordinary Baghdadis sometimes benefited from the decisions of street-level officials. But discretion is not the same as advocacy in any strong political sense, and it does not by itself establish meaningful citizenship. Authoritarian systems can also possess functioning subnational institutions (Tajbakhsh 2022). The presence of local officials, local mediation, or administrative leeway does not necessarily imply participatory politics from below. What chapter 3 shows most convincingly is a structure of localized dependence within a fundamentally top-down system.
Chapter 4, on petitions, is perhaps the richest chapter in the book. Petitioners wrote for housing, money, food, transfers, medical treatment, and relief from arbitrary decisions. The author is right that petitions reveal much about how Baghdadis understood government responsibility and how they navigated the narrow channels available to them. The chapter is also persuasive in showing that petitioning was overwhelmingly individualized rather than collective, a pattern that reflected the atomization of society under dictatorship.
At the same time, this chapter is also where the book's conceptual claims become most contestable. The author writes that “Though many would say that people living within a dictatorial system operate as political subjects, and not as citizens with rights, Baghdadis of all walks of life articulated a strong belief in a social contract in which the government was responsible for Iraqis’ basic necessities and for upholding justice” (132). She further argues that “any form of petitioning, whether to request aid or denounce wrongdoing, is a political activity” (145). These formulations are provocative, but they demand more conceptual precision than the book provides.
My central reservation is that the book overstates “citizen advocacy” and understates coercion, hierarchy, and top-down constraint. People living under dictatorship can certainly believe that the state owes them food, aid, medical care, or some measure of fairness. But that does not necessarily mean they are functioning as citizens with meaningful rights. Nor does it follow that petitioning should be read as advocacy in a robust political sense. In many of these cases, what the evidence shows is supplication within domination rather than citizenship in any strong form. I am especially skeptical of the book's reliance on terms such as social contract, rights, and justice without a fuller account of what those words can mean under a violent authoritarian regime. “Justice” seems too thick a term for much of what these petitioners sought; expectations of fairness, administrative relief, or mercy may be closer to the evidence. Likewise, the phrase “implicit social contract” feels too consensual for a system marked by surveillance, fear, violence, ritualized obedience, and extreme asymmetries of power.
The problem is not that the book uses theory. It is that it needs more conceptual clarity. In particular, it needs a sharper distinction between decentralization or local governance in authoritarian systems and decentralization in liberal-democratic ones (Tajbakhsh 2022). Without that distinction, the presence of local institutions, local inefficiency, or street-level discretion risks being treated as evidence of something more politically significant than it may actually be. One can have effective local administration in an authoritarian system as well. The existence of subnational governmental units does not in itself amount to democratic participation, meaningful citizenship, or advocacy. The book itself occasionally points to this problem. One revealing formulation describes a “right to the city” as “an illusory right that was permitted to function only in terms dictated by the state” (53). That sentence captures the structure of the regime more persuasively than some of the more affirmative claims about agency elsewhere in the book.
To be fair, the book does not ignore limits. Chapter 4 itself acknowledges that authoritarian regimes may allow petitions because they help leaders gather information, monitor lower-level abuse, and manage dissatisfaction. Saddam is shown valuing petitions as tools of surveillance and selective correction rather than as channels of autonomous political participation. The chapter also concedes that the regime controlled the boundaries of permissible “conversation” and that even those who petitioned not as “supplicants” but as “citizens,” nonetheless could not truly challenge authority. These are important qualifications. In my view, they point less to the petitions’ emancipatory potential than to the fact that they were not an expression of agency in any strong sense related to what we normally understand as citizenship, at least as an ideal.
A second reservation concerns scale. The book covers six decades, from 1950 to 2011. This sweep allows the author to highlight continuity in neighborhood-based governance across monarchy, republicanism, Baʿthist rule, sanctions, invasion, and occupation. But it also creates a methodological problem. These were very different political and historical contexts, and the meanings of neighborhood, mediation, petitioning, and local governance changed across them. A narrower chronological frame might have produced a thicker analysis of how those practices were transformed by war, sanctions, and regime change.
These concerns culminate in the conclusion, where the author writes: “Foregrounding the agency of Baghdadis in shaping their own history provides a counterbalance to state-centered accounts of Iraq's modern history. Here, Baghdadis are not just the objects of state initiatives but also drivers of change, effective in attenuating the impact of government policies on their lives and advocating for their interests” (222). I am skeptical of this formulation. It is one thing to show that ordinary Iraqis improvised, maneuvered, negotiated, and sometimes extracted concessions from local intermediaries. It is another to say that they were “drivers of change,” “shaping their own history,” and effectively “advocating” for their interests. Those are stronger claims than the evidence fully supports. A third shortcoming is the neglect of the private urban marketplace in land and housing. This is an unfortunate recurring feature of much contemporary urban scholarship, which often overpoliticizes urban governance under the pressure of an implicit anti-market normative bias. Except in communist systems where private property is absent, the life chances of ordinary people even in authoritarian systems are often shaped in large part, though to varying degrees, by markets in land, housing, and transportation. The question is not only how the state governs the city, but how access, exclusion, mobility, and opportunity are structured through urban markets. By largely omitting this dimension, the book narrows the social field too much and attributes too much causal weight to political administration alone.
Still, this is a valuable and substantial book. Its archival labor is formidable, its empirical material is rich, and its focus on neighborhood-level governance opens an important window onto Iraqi political and urban history. Even where one disagrees with its conceptual vocabulary, the book makes a real contribution by showing how ordinary Baghdadis navigated the pressures of dictatorship, sanctions, and occupation through the institutions closest to their daily lives. Its most enduring achievement lies not in proving “citizen advocacy” in any strong sense, but in reconstructing with care the constrained strategies through which city residents sought relief, survival, and limited room for maneuver within structures they did not control.