When Bullets and Ballots Collide: How the Dissolution of the Anti-Islamic State Coalition Stalled Iraq’s Transition to Peacetime

ABSTRACT

Iraq’s 2017 victory over the Islamic State (IS) ushered in a period of political gridlock and electoral violence. Rather than demilitarising to compete in elections, pro-government militias retained their weapons while simultaneously providing public goods and services. Iraq’s experience presents a challenge to existing theories of civil war transitions, which suggest that wartime coalitions either fragment or demilitarise as peacetime approaches. Iraq’s stalled transition presents a third possible outcome—a stalled transition—which emerges from constraints confronting pro-government coalitions. Iraq’s ecosystem of ‘militia-party hybrids’ resembles Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, where armed groups enter peacetime politics without fully demilitarising.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2024.2302732

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The Sadrists won 73 seats in the Council of Representatives, outperforming Mohamed al-Halbousi’s Progress Party (37 seats), and Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition (33 seats).

2. The protocol for the field interviews was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Utah State University in September 2021.

3. Data comes from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project. ACLED identifies 27,746 violent events in Iraq during this period and lists the primary belligerent on each side of the incident. In just over 19,000 of these incidents, we were able to definitively categorise each as either PMF, government, or neither.

4. Our data predates the ability to purchase a blue checkmark (e.g., ‘Twitter Blue’.).

5. Nearly all Kurdish words are associated with KRG public messages even though English comprises nearly two thirds of all KRG messages.

6. Given the limited text yielded by coalition accounts, we limited our probe to a descriptive study rather than combining cosine similarity with supervised classification models such as Support Vector Machines or Naïve Bayes.

7. We limit this analysis to Twitter accounts and messages due to lack of follower data from Facebook posts. In the online appendix, Figure 3 shows engagement rates by actor over time using data from both Twitter and Facebook.

8. Haeri’s public disagreement with Sadr is significant, because Sadr inherited the leadership of the movement from his late father, but lacks the clerical authority to become a spiritual guide for Iraqi Shi’a.

9. Safa al-Shaykh Hussein, 2023 ‘Iraq’s security sector: twenty years of dashed hopes’, Iraq 20 years on: Insider Reflections on the war and its aftermath, Chatham House, 17 April 2023, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/03/iraq-20-years-insider-reflections-war-and-its-aftermath/iraqs-security-sector-twenty-years.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Utah State University under a Creative Activity and Research Enhancement (CARE) grant award in AY 2021 – 2022.

Notes on contributors

Austin J. Knuppe

Austin J. Knuppe (b. 1986) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Utah State University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from The Ohio State University in May 2019. His research investigates the strategies civilians use to survive violent conflict.

Matthew Nanes

Matthew Nanes (b. 1989) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from University of California, San Diego, in 2017. His research investigates domestic security institutions and citizen-state relations, particularly in places plagued by violent intergroup conflict.