(iPoster) The Strategic Logic of Hybrid Armed Groups in Post-Authoritarian Iraq

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security III

Abstract

In post-authoritarian contexts, why do some communities develop hybrid armed groups (HAGs)—alternative formations that blend features of state and non-state functions—while others do not, despite facing similar threats and despite comparable, even similar, opportunity structures? Conventional accounts fault the ensuing security and political vacuums, state weakness, opportunistic elites, and foreign interferences, but these are confronted by all communities, playing a moderating role at the best, overlooking a more fundamental effect: the repressive legacy of authoritarianism. In this article, I show how the type and intensity of repression by an authoritarian regime shapes the institutional responses in its aftermath. Whereas selective authoritarian repression, targeting individual troublemakers, informs no post-authoritarian alternative hybrid arrangements, systematic and collective repression, targeting entire communities and sustained over decades, influences a community’s institutional preference in post-authoritarian politics, with collective memories of violence and victimhood act as a guiding history for preferences that favors the growth and institutionalization of hybrid armed structures. With Iraq as an ideal case study, this article combines process tracing and discourse analysis approach, within a comparative case logic, to demonstrate how the effects of systematic and collective repression under the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) are reactivated, moralized, ritualized, and memorialized to justify hybrid armed structures such as the Shiite’s Popular Mobilization Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga Forces, whereas selective repression led to no such formations in other communities. By emphasizing the relational, institutional, and discursive legacies of repression, the findings contribute to three important lines of literature: armed groups rise and origins, hybrid regimes, and post-authoritarian state-building.

Author

• Yasir Kuoti, Boston University