For two decades, White people have been dominating English-language literature and discourse on Iraq, Orientalising, dehistoricising and sectarianising it. White men in government, non-government think-tanks and academia expect to lead the conversation instead of humbling themselves to pluralistic Iraqi voices. Despite effort by some Iraqis in the diaspora to guide the conversation, it is geared back to a dominating West-centric perspective. Iraqis are marginalised and Iraqi women are tokenised. Iraqi women academics are especially excluded from the conversation. So much so that a nascent Iraqi Women Academics Network now draws attention to the pluralistic voices and experiences of Iraqi women scholars. When Iraq’s October Spring emerged in 2019, I was part of a small network of Iraqi bloggers who shared instant, verified news of the protests to foreign journalists to ensure Iraqis’ voices and stories reached a global audience. Western media covered the protest movement and focused on Iraqi voices. Within a year, those journalists became Iraq experts, invited to speak on think tank panels discussing Iraq. The only Iraqi women invited to speak were presumed to represent a monolithic idea of what Iraqi women think. Iraqi women experts of minoritised ethnoconfessional backgrounds continue to be overlooked. While European and Western subjectivities are often interpreted as global objectivity, this has become more obvious in the Iraqi context. Two decades after the invasion, Western journalists and analysts continue to discuss Iraqis’ stories on their behalf, and their experiences are deemed objective reflections on Iraqis’ lived experiences. In my paper, I discuss my experience and analyse what went wrong by discussing how White Ignorance has been useful in upholding the epistemic violence that sits at the core of media coverage and policy analysis of Iraq. I also borrow from the counterfactual method to expose “blind spots” and contingencies in Iraq epistemology that extend the Iraq invasion’s violence. This paper invites the reader to imagine how different things could have been and how much richer Iraq discourse would have been had it included Iraqi women academics’ pluralistic voices and scholarly contributions.

Ruba Ali Al-Hassani is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at lancaster University’s Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion, and a Research Consultant with King’s College london. An interdisciplinary sociologist, she focuses on state-society relations & social movements in Iraq, law & social control, and transitional justice & collective trauma. She co-founded the Canadian Association for Muslim Women in law and the Iraqi Women Academics Network, and has taught at York University and Trent University, Canada. Ruba holds a B.Sc. in Psychology & Sociology, a M.A. in Criminology, an ll.M. in transitional justice, and a forthcoming PhD in law.

Following the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Iraqis did not possess enough capital and technology to reconstruct their war-torn country. Since Iraq also did not receive much-needed support promised previously in different forms by Western leaders, it was left with little option but to approach resourceful Eastern countries in order to rebuild its shattered vital infrastructure and secure a great deal of its economic and technological requirements. For their part, almost all rich and influential Asian countries gave a positive response to the new Iraqi looking-East orientation by rekindling their political-diplomatic, economic and even military relationship with the post-Saddam Iraq.

Shirzad Azad is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. His previous works have been published by several peer-reviewed journals, including Middle East Policy, The International Spectator, Asian Affairs, Contemporary Arab Affairs, Asian Politics & Policy, Contemporary Review of the Middle East, and East Asia: An International Quarterly.

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime and to replace it with one based on democracy. The regime was defeated quickly, but twenty years later it is clear that the United States has failed to re-engineer Iraq into a democratic country. This is not surprising because the occupation was poorly planned and executed. More fundamentally, however, it failed because nation-building, that is the deliberate re-engineering of a society, is an impossible task even authoritarian regimes have failed to accomplish.

Marina Ottaway is a Middle East Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a long-time analyst of political transformations in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East. She is working on a project at the Wilson Center about the countries of the Arab Spring and Iraq, having joined after 14 years at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she played a central role in launching the Middle East Program. Prior to that, she carried out research in Africa and in the Middle East for many years and taught at Georgetown University, the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, the American University in Cairo, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the University of Zambia and Addis Ababa University. Her extensive research experience is reflected in her publications, which include nine authored books and six edited ones. Her most recent include Getting to Pluralism, co-authored with Amr Hamzawy, and Yemen on the Brink, co-edited with Christopher Boucek. While at Carnegie, she supervised its Guide to Egypt’s Transition, a website that provides background and analysis on issues that will shape Egypt’s political future, and Iraqi Elections 2010, an online guide to Iraqi politics. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

This study aims to explain the intrasectarian rivalries in the post-2003 Iraq in terms of their bases of activity and support. Local community-based al-Sadr Tendency emphasised locality and party affiliation in the election campaign but modifies its general policy to expand its scope of influence to unpenetrated regions. Post-2003 ruling elite circles with little local supportive base implemented the same strategy to all constituency types, placing more importance on distributing resources.

Keiko Sakai is a professor of Iraqi politics at Chiba University and Dean of Center for Relational Studies on Global Crisis. She was co-editor of Iraq Since Invasion (2020).

20 years on from the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, this article offers a critical reflection on the evolution of the worldviews, norms and policies informing the international dimension of the intervention, as well as both the local and international repercussions thereof. It demonstrates how international policies were formulated with little consideration for the needs of Iraqis, but were instead informed by international agendas. Nonetheless, the adaptation and failures of policies on the ground in Iraq have influenced wider international agendas.

Dylan O’Driscoll is Associate Professor at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR) at the University of Coventry, UK, where he leads the Peace and Conflict Research Theme. He is also Associate Senior Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Irene Costantini is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of Naples, l’Orientale, Italy. Her research is focused on the politics of international interventions in conflictaffected context, particularly across the Middle East and North Africa Region.

While the US sought to create an Iraqi army to serve as the institution that holds the monopoly on the use of legitimate force in Iraq, such a Weberian rubric has proved elusive. Rather, an oligopoly on violence, characterised by hybridity and plurality, represents a decentralisation of warmaking and warfare in Iraq’s security sector since 2003. This article primarily focuses on the organisations and institutions responsible for warmaking in Iraq in light of the American decision to disband the Iraqi armed forces and concludes with what this transformation means for methods of projecting war, by both Iraqi actors and the US.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is Associate Professor of Middle East history at California State University San Marcos and an advisory board member of the International Security and Conflict Resolution programme at San Diego State University. He obtained his doctorate in Modern History at University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, part of which was plagiarised by the British government prior to the 2003 Iraq War, otherwise known as the “Dodgy Dossier.” He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008), The Modern History of Iraq (Routledge 2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (Routledge, 2018).

Two and a half years after their signing, rather than the historical breakthrough President Trump presented, the Abraham Accords appear a somewhat contradictory work in progress. If, on the one hand, they promoted greater integration among the signatories, they did not prove the expected rallying point nor really tackled the Middle east’s many political and security problems. In March 2022, the establishment of the Negev Forum raised new expectations, but its impact is still to assess. At the same time, the weakening of the US role hampers the possibility washington could provide the process with clear guidance and leave the regional actors large room for manoeuvre.

Gianluca Pastori is Associate Professor, History of political relations between North America and europe, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy. In the same Faculty, he also teaches International History (Milano), and History of the international relations and institutions (Brescia). He is author or editor of several books and essays on the history of international relations, security issues and military history.

The 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal significantly altered the Middle east’s geopolitical landscape, resulting in a shared security threat and increased cooperation between Israel and moderate Gulf states. The turning point of this Arab-Israel rapprochement was the Abraham Accords of 2020, which marked the normalisation of ties and new strategic partnership between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. The implications, changes and challenges, as well as potential for other countries to join the peace circle, is explored.

Jonathan Ghariani recently completed his doctorate at the University College london, in Hebrew and Jewish Studies . His thesis focused on the diplomatic history of Arab-Israeli relations and geopolitical negotiations. He holds a master’s degree in Security and Diplomacy at Tel Aviv University, Israel and a bachelor’s degree in Government Diplomacy and Strategy from IDC Herzliya. Ghariani has also completed internships at the Institute for National Security Studies and at the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies. Most recently, he was a visiting scholar at the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he spoke and published his research on Israel’s historical relations with Morocco and Oman.

This essay examines how Qatar’s international relations are changing as the decade of regional rivalries which followed the Arab uprisings in 2011 gives way to an era characterised by great power competition, which presents new challenges as well as opportunities for states such as Qatar and its neighbours. An opening section provides an overview of the rifts among the Gulf States that formed a near-constant backdrop to most of the 2010s and only came to an end in 2020. This leads into a second section which examines the pace and depth of Gulf states’ reconciliation in the two years since the signing of the Al-Ula Declaration in Saudi Arabia on
5 January 2021. A third section analyses how Qatar is balancing international relationships and picking a path through the growing polarisation of global geopolitics and ends by looking ahead and assessing how Qatar’s international relations may further evolve.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a fellow for the Middle east at the Baker Institute. His research examines the changing position of the Gulf states in the global order, as well as the emergence of longer-term, non-military challenges to regional security.

A major change in Saudi Arabia’s international profile has been the much greater role assigned to its sovereign wealth fund. Certainly, in the past few years the Public Investment Fund has been substantially reconfigured, effectively supplementing its more traditional regional investments with a fresh focus on strategic stakes and ventures in the US and other key foreign states. After outlining the PIF’s current decision-making structures and strategy overview, this article explores some of the fund’s most notable recent investments, also addressing key issues and concerns.

Christopher Davidson is a former reader in Middle east politics at Durham University, a former visiting associate professor at Kyoto University in Japan, and a former assistant professor at Zayed University in the UAe. His books include From Sheikhs to Sultanism: Statecraft and Authority in Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East. In 2022 he served as the US Department of Justice’s expert on the politics of the Gulf monarchies, with reference to national security and foreign influence operations.

Gulf sovereign wealth funds (SwFs), large state-owned investment funds, have historically been known as quiet global investors deploying capital through a long-term approach, mainly in western financial markets. More recently, however, Gulf ruling elites have been leveraging them to proactively drive nation-building projects, deepen strategic international partnerships and claim a more prominent role on the world stage. why is that the case? The article argues that Gulf SwFs are now pivotal agents in the region’s shifting international politics. A new generation of leaders is using them to pursue elite-based interests and economic development goals that induce deeper economic and political influence in a regional sphere of influence. They also drive Gulf governments’ attempts to boost alternative revenue streams through significant investments in disruptive technologies and low-carbon projects, simultaneously expanding the rentier monarchies’ international reach beyond their role as fossil fuel producers. The article delineates the rise of SwFs as alternative mechanisms of regime maintenance; they enable incumbent elites to advance foreign policy ambitions and maintain shared expectations about the appropriate organisation of a political economy by harnessing the impending energy transition and the impact of the climate crisis.

Alexis Montambault-Trudelle is pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of edinburgh. His research focuses on Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to explore the effects of internal political dynamics on sovereign wealth management. He investigates how intra-elite dynamics, regime structures and state-society relations in the post-2015 Saudi political landscape shape the sovereign wealth fund’s institutional design and behaviour, whether in the kingdom or across the global financial market. He is particularly interested in the political economy of Gulf states and the multiple facets surrounding the relationship between states and the financial market.