Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World - Volume 13, Issue 2-3, 2019

The article explores the author’s experience of crafting legal actions meant to bring a case against the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom for the genocidal conditions that arose from their actions against the people of Iraq from 1991 to 2003. Based on a similar effort, successfully brought to the International Court of Justice on behalf of the people and Republic of Bosnia in 1993, the strong potential for a legal and peaceful remedy to bring an end to Iraqi civilian suffering – as well as the potential to avert a future war – existed and drove the author to implore Iraqi legal action before the ICJ. Iraqi state officials, from the President’s Office to that of Deputy PM Tariq Aziz, through Iraqi diplomats in New York, were canvassed and engaged in an effort for the author to receive their support to act on Iraq’s behalf at the ICJ. Published here is the author’s recollection of this effort to prosecute international crimes against the Iraqi people as well as an overview of the ICJ case that while never brought forward, could have prevented the 2003 invasion and its aftermath.

A remembrance of the experience of Baghdad during the Second World War, is presented mainly from the vantage of the book sellers’ market of Suq Al Sarai, located in the centre of Baghdad near Al-Sarai and Al-Mutanabbi streets. The Suq, long the locale of cultural exchange and a foundry for Iraqi intellectual life, experienced the war in a unique way, with shortages of paper and accessibility to foreign books, journals and voices at the fore, rather than the absence of foodstuffs and other necessities of everyday life made short due to the war. The author notes how the violence and the attendant dislocation brought to this home of ideas and comity was to see itself repeated with even much greater bloodshed in a further violent clash during 2007.

This article explores the Iraqi-American life writer Zainab Salbi’s memoir Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny; Growing up in the Shadow of Saddam (2005) in the light of a Foucauldian framework to examine both visible and invisible tactics of power once exercised by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. The Foucauldian analysis of juridical forms and sovereign power as features of governmentality and political rationality are useful in understanding Salbi’s narration of Saddam Hussein’s use of the law and law-like regulations for perpetuating his authoritarian domination. I argue that through the ritual exercise of justice and conduct, the portrayed tyrant achieves the subjugation and constitution of individuals as well as the control of groups. The article suggests that by documenting her life story in an act of Foucauldian indocilité, or conscious insubordination, Salbi desubjugates the established politics of truth, and in so doing, detaches herself from the various modalities of subjectivity that the specific strategies of governmentality seek to formulate and impose on her as an Iraqi individual.

This article seeks to analyse the emerging Sino-Russian strategic understanding on the Arab uprisings of late 2010 and beyond by investigating its underlying motivations and its implications for Middle East and international politics. Building on the assumptions of ‘power transition theory’ in explaining great power interactions, it is argued that the Sino-Russian strategic understanding on the Arab uprisings dovetails with their pre-existing strategic posture in relation to global politics, and was motivated by their joint rising dissatisfaction with US unilateralist and hegemonic policies in the region. Such policies, from a Sino-Russian perspective, tended to exclude, rather than accommodate, the interests of both powers in this pivotal part of the globe. This prompted Russia and China to capitalize on their growing military and economic power and join efforts in the form of a strategic understanding in an attempt to effectively challenge an intrusive and overreaching hegemon and secure their interests in the region. This strategic understanding has had significant implications for the configuration of great power relationships in the direction of challenging US regional hegemony and facilitating a shift in the regional and global balance of power.

Eminent Iraqi writer Daizy Al-Amir passed away in Houston, USA in November 2018. Born in Alexandria in 1935, she was a prolific short-story writer who wrote and travelled across many countries and continents throughout the course of her life. Daizy Al-Amir’s legacy to Arab and women’s literature, particularly in Beirut, are many-faceted. This article pays tribute to two important aspects of Daizy Al-Amir’s work: her literary works published with the highly influential literary journal Al-Ādāb from the 1960s and her short stories about women in the Arab world that were published in Arabic–English translation.