“I am the citizen Fatima, mother to ten children under the age of fourteen…My husband is completing his military service, and we don’t have anyone to provide for us,” reads a petition submitted to the Vice Chair of the Baath Party Revolutionary Command Council Izzat Ibrahim Al-Duri in 1989. The lady who wrote the letter is complaining about her lack of income and struggles to keep her family going and is asking Al-Duri to help provide financial relief. The petition is one of many found in the archives, where people from across Baghdadi society, from rich to poor, wrote to the local party, to the Iraqi leadership and even to President Saddam Hussein asking for help or assistance. Those who wrote these petitions had two things in common, they were in need and they trusted the regime enough to request favours or assistance. Some were well-connected and members of the Bath party, while others were politically independent with no real connection to anyone important. The petitions are rarely examined by scholars of Iraq even though they provide crucial insight into how people in Baghdad lived and survived. Trying to piece together the different ways Baghdadis take on citizenship of their city, how they navigate daily life and how they survive is the subject being explored in Alissa Walter’s new book Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad.
Walter draws upon oral history interviews, citizen petitions and archival research to capture the experiences of Baghdad’s residents during different phases of authoritarian rule. Spanning late Ottoman to post 2003 US invasion and occupation, Contested City charts the evolution of Iraqi politics and urban governing and how these changed the face of the city.
During the Ottoman period, “Baghdad’s neighborhoods functioned as islands unto themselves…Each neighborhood developed distinctive identities over time.” By the time the British captured Iraq, the city underwent rapid urbanisation and by the 1940s, distinction between different areas blurred. While new infrastructure, which included new roads and transport options, meant Baghdadis were no longer confined to their neighbourhoods and new residents moved in all the time, though Baghdad continued to be administered through a neighbourhood system. Each area had its own local bureaucracy and these low level officials would make crucial decisions about how resources or punishments would be meted out. This neighbourhood system enabled the state to embed itself into different communities, but as Walter points out, Baghdadis would take advantage of any system offered to them and use it as part of their own survival strategy. Indeed, the petition system enabled Baghdadis to bypass their local officials and get assistance or to complain about local corruption. For the Iraqi state this was a way of taking the barometer of the city and gave them insight into what people thought.
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The state was in constant negotiation with its citizens, Baghdad’s residence had agency in shaping what happened to them and how the state dealt with them. Maintaining control over the populace was of central importance, during the 1990s, food shortages and UN sanctions made life in Iraq very difficult. Saddam Hussein introduced a nationwide food distribution system to fight off starvation. “In the hands of Saddam’s regime, however, these humanitarian goods had the potential to be brandished as a powerful new form of leverage to keep dissidents and deserters in line.” The embargo on Iraq and the food distribution system did lead many opponents of Saddam to praise his approach and popularise anger at the international community. The distribution system was handed to neighbourhoods, local party officials, popular committees and shop keepers made decisions on who gets what and policed the population. The committees were made up of local people and so they exercised key responsibilities to determine their own fate.
Contested City offers us a way of thinking about how agency, citizenry and neighbourhoods function under authoritarian rule and in war situations. It challenges simple assumptions about state-society relations in Iraq and offers insight into people’s lived reality and how they navigated the challenges in a modern urban city. The book, however, does not offer us much insight into how the situation in Baghdad compared with other Iraqi cities, which needs to be considered when thinking about how Walter’s study applies to the national picture.
In the Baath era, the party’s penetration into Baghdadi society at every level and locality was much stronger than in other parts of Iraq, especially cities and towns in the south, and as other scholarship has shown us, this partly explains the different repression and crackdown methods employed by the state. But Contested City does offer us a useful framework that can be thought about when examining other areas in Iraq and beyond. Contested City is an excellent historic work and urban studies contribution that should be of interest to anyone interested in Iraq or questions about daily life under authoritarianism or war.