Iraq 2014: Making sense of sectarian violence

Abstract Any attempt to resolve political violence in religious or ethnic terms is bound to fail at the outset, for it settles for addressing a representation of the symptoms and manifestations of violence rather than disclosing its constitutive moments and the political terrain of its lived relevance. My argument runs counter to such a phenomenological presentation of violence, asserting that the contemporary violent conflicts within Iraq are not a war of sect against sect, but rather one among powerful political contenders and their regional and/or international backers. To generalize and present war in the first sense is to apologetically cover up what essentially is a class conflict, above all among fractions of the ruling class and their political representatives, an explanatory that creates an image of senseless violence. This class scenario cries for a security state, order and the monopolization of violence, i.e., the making of a hierarchical class-based state. The constitution, coherence and homogeneity of any ruling class is not pre-given, rather it necessitates a project of political hegemony within the power block in which it is established, reproduced and guaranteed by the state. The absence of such a hegemony witnesses conflicts among fractions of the ruling class that permeate all societal levels to the extent that the state apparatus itself becomes an instrument, mean and object of the conflicts rather than its purveyors and means of pacification. The intersection of imperialist occupation, violent claims for hegemony among regional contenders and domestic struggle over political power assumes inevitably fractured and particularist forms: religion, confession and ethnicity. In this way, religion, confession and ethnicity are not the cause of violence; rather the contest for hegemony violently manufacture and set them in motion. The destructive occupation regime and the lack of political will to make a unified national field empower sects and ethnicities to be recast as ideological centrifuges. In this article I will reconstruct the developments up to the emergence of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) in December 2013/January 2014, in order to decipher the present and to warn that such catastrophes are to be expected in the future unless radical changes and reforms are made to the whole state edifice imposed on Iraqis from 2003.

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