Journal Article

Echoes from below? Talking democracy in Bahalf ringthist Iraq

Rohde, Achim

2017

Overview

Drawing on Iraqi print media published during the late 1980s and 1990s, this study contributes to the historiography of Ba[half ring]thist Iraq by offering a fresh reading into open sources that have long been used by scholars. It focuses on issues like democratization, freedom and the rule of law and how they were articulated in Iraqi print media. This discourse functioned as a strategic tool of communication to reproduce and stabilize the existing order. By moving beyond mechanisms of bureaucratic control, repression or cooptation, the study highlights a neglected element of the former regime's techniques of governance. The evidence presented in this study suggests that the Iraqi Ba'thist regime aimed to demobilize a target audience it suspected of harbouring oppositional feelings and pro-democracy ideas that went beyond what Saddam Hussein was willing to consider. It did so by installing, simulating or tolerating spaces of contestation that helped to ease the 'cognitive dissonance' Iraqis sensed between an official discourse of a people united in love for its leader, and the daily experience of brutal repression and deteriorating living conditions. (Author abstract)