Domination and Violence at a War–Counterinsurgency Nexus

Chapter 2 explores the significance of domination in state consolidation. It argues that while violence is the crudest and most basic form of establishing domination, it remains constitutive of state consolidation: within its boundaries, the state’s relationship to violence is constitutive. The chapter explicates an extreme case when the state lost all control over portions of its territory and population. These events were centered around the interstate war with Iran in the 1980s and a state-organized counterinsurgency campaign to capture the northern Kurdish territories in 1987 and 1988. The case allows us to zoom in on one of the longest legitimation and domination problems in Iraq: the reach of the state vis-à-vis Kurdish national aspirations. It also illustrates how this episode of state violence in Kurdistan triggered a series of developments that led to de facto and de jure Kurdish autonomy in Iraq. I show how the processes that contributed to the weakening of the Iraqi state consolidation are the same ones that also made a Kurdish autonomy possible.