Undoing of a State

For the first time in its modern history, the post-2003 state faced a severe legitimation crisis, which was compounded by its inability to establish the authority to dominate. Chapter 4 argues that the fragmentation of the state’s authority resulted from the undoing of its domination capacity by the US-led invasion during the first three months of the occupation. The extent of the fragmentation was plain to see in 2003 when militia-backed political groups moved into the space where the state used to be – by the end of the 2006 civil war, those groups had firmly consolidated their demarcated domains of authority over Iraq’s economy and politics. The chapter investigates the Coalition Provisional Authority’s biggest civil project: repairing the national electrical grid. Technical and material elements of that project became sites of physical and political contestation over the state’s consolidation at a moment when its domination had disappeared. The chapter also traces the trajectory of “state-building” as an influential and ultimately dangerous framework, from its roots in 1980s US academia and 1990s UN peace-keeping practices to its arrival in Iraq with the US-led invasion.