Browsing by Author "Cannard, Jonathan"

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    The Infrastructures of Occupation: Iraq, 2003 – 2012
    (2022) Cannard, Jonathan; Kar, Bodhisatva
    The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, beginning a nine-year-long military engagement and occupation. Alongside more orthodox military activity, the US occupation attempted to rebuild and reshape Iraq's infrastructure networks, most of which had been severely damaged during the 2003 invasion, the United Nations sanctions, and previous wars. This dissertation is a critical history of the efforts of the US occupation to produce new infrastructures in Iraq. Drawing on a specific range of primary sources (namely, the documents of the various institutions of the occupation), the dissertation attempts to write a new narrative of the so-called reconstruction of Iraq. It rejects the absolutist understanding of state sovereignty as reflected in the state-building discourse as a productive analytical frame, and instead offers to look closely at the material, social, and cultural contingencies that shaped the state's agency. This narrative explores the materiality and the performativity of discourse in examining the effects of infrastructure on Iraqi politics, economy, and subjectivity. The first chapter focuses on material infrastructures, exploring the materiality of power and the interactions of US discourses and practices with Iraqi material and social actants. The second chapter examines financial infrastructure, analysing the occupying regime's attempts to produce the instruments of monetary policy, while conjuring a new figure of financial subjectivity. The third and final chapter focuses on political infrastructure, examining the process of drafting of the constitution and the production of civil society organisations through an infrastructural lens. All three chapters are linked by explications of the political and economic assumptions built into technical objects, the deployment of infrastructure as a counterinsurgency strategy, and revelations of the limits of state agency.