Consolidating in the Margins

Chapter 3 focuses on a period in the 1990s when Iraqi oil flow was restricted and closely regulated by a special UN Security Council committee, thus severely reducing the state’s ability to collect or spend oil revenues. By homing in on the state’s enterprising response to the sanctions regime, we can see clearly how the state navigated its consolidation in the margins of the economy, of institutions, of borders, and of legality. What emerges from tracing the state in those margins is thus consistent with a number of sociological understandings of the state as a non-bounded actor. In other words, once examined on the ground, the state’s boundedness disappears, giving way to a multitude of actions that together contribute to the production of the state as a unitary actor.