Popular Contention in the Aftermath of Civil War: Evidence from Iraq

• In Event: Protest in Democracies and Autocracies: Crisis, Conflict, & Repression

Abstract

Legacies of civil war violence are known to shape political institutions in a profound and enduring way (Kalyvas 2000; Boudreau 2004; Slater 2010; Balcells 2012 Lazarev 2019;). They have also been found to shape political attitudes (Gilligan et al 2013) and political behaviors like voting (Bellows and Miguel 2009; Blattman 2009; Bateson 2012; Voors et al 2012). We know less about the ways in which violence shapes patterns of informal mobilization and contention. Responding to McAdam et al.’s (2001) call to examine violent conflict and non-violent or unarmed protest mobilization within a unified analytic framework, this paper asks how subnational patterns of violence during civil war shape dynamics of protest mobilization in the post-conflict period. In so doing, we contribute to a growing literature studying the effects of political violence in a subnational comparative framework.

Contemporary Iraq presents an important opportunity to study protest mobilization in the aftermath of conflict. The decade following Iraq’s 2006 civil war has been marked by several major protest waves, as citizens have mobilized around issues ranging from infrastructure failures to rising unemployment to delays in government formation following elections. New movement organizations have emerged and grown in influence in the post-Baath period, notably including leftist parties, trade unions, religious organizations, and women’s organizations (Mlodoch 2014; Majed 2019; Alshamary 2019). Yet relatively few social science works have examined Iraqi protests during this period, as recent studies have focused instead on Egypt, Tunisia, and other “Arab Spring” cases (Beinin and Vairel 2013; Lust and Khatib 2014; Asseburg and Wimmen 2017; Ketchley 2017; Beinin 2016; Bayat 2017; Vairel 2014; Volpi and Jasper 2018). Instead, political science scholarship on contemporary Iraq has remained focused on themes of military conflict and sectarianism (Condra and Shapiro 2012; Berman, Shapiro and Felter 2011).

Our project seeks to fill these voids by analyzing an original dataset of “contentious events” – protests, sit-ins, marches, and strikes, among other events – sourced from multiple Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers and covering the period 2010 – 2012. We use these data first to characterize protest patterns in post-war Iraq, with particular attention to the nature of claims and tactics, the locality of protests, and the identities of protest actors and organizations. We then use a series of regression models to estimate the effects of localized patterns of civil war violence (measured by the ESOC conflict event dataset, 2004 – 2009) on patterns of protest during our data collection period. Notably, our fine-grain data allow us to move beyond investigating only protest levels and towards understanding the effects of violence on a range of substantive protest outcomes, including 1) the identities and demands of demonstrators, 2) the likelihood that protests will use violent tactics, and 3) patterns in state response to protest, including policing and concessions. In this sense, the paper contributes both to general understandings of how conflict shapes subsequent political behaviors and outcomes, and to specific knowledge on the contours of contention and resistance in the Arab World following the 2011 uprisings.

Authors

• Chantal Berman, Georgetown University

• Killian Clarke, Georgetown University

• Rima Majed, American University of Beirut