The 1975 Algiers Agreement between Iran and Iraq brought an end to Iranian support of the Kurdish opposition, marking a turning point in the Iraqi regime’s conciliatory policies toward the Assyrian community. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein had risen to power within the Baʿth, gaining the presidency in June 1979. The Iran–Iraq War heightened the Baʿthification of society by the state. As a result, Assyrians began to experience the reversal of conciliatory policies towards their community, which led in turn to the reconstitution of the Assyrian nationalist movement as a whole.

Chapter 4 highlights the ways in which urban Assyrian intellectuals took advantage of Law 251 in their dealings with the state. In their magazines and clubs, they used accepted narratives to argue for greater cultural, political, and administrative rights. This campaign was pursued subtly in the press, but more vocally in popular culture. Assyrian intellectuals and singers also engaged with Arab and Kurdish intellectuals, contributing to a hybridized Iraqi sphere that cut across sectarian and ethnic divides, contributing to Assyrian intellectual discourses that extended far beyond Iraq’s borders.

The Conclusion provides a brief synthesis of the above arguments, and offers a sketch of the post-Anfal period that highlights Assyrian political and intellectual activism in the enclaves of the safe haven established in 1991. The Conclusion briefly describes the ongoing crisis that the Iraqi Assyrian community has continued to face since 2003.

Chapter 1 describes the ways in which Assyrians located themselves in urban centers such as Baghdad and Kirkuk, and how they negotiated around their ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic grievances, either personally or communally, within the larger Iraqi context. Communities like the Assyrians began to emerge from the periphery, disrupting the existing patriarchal order and igniting socioeconomic tensions with Arab nationalists, Baʿthists, and conservatives, who felt particularly threatened by those affiliated with communism and the left – notably minorities and women. In 1959 violence erupted in Mosul and Kirkuk, and in 1963 a right-wing coup toppled the Qasim government, paving the way for the rise of the Baʿth Party.

Chapter 3 analyzes the early period of Baʿthist rule during the 1970s, arguing that the activities of Assyrians in the Iraqi opposition and the influence of diasporic organizations on Western governments led the Baʿth to adopt conciliatory policies. These included Law 251, which extended cultural and linguistic rights to “Speakers of the Syriac Language” in April 1972. Yet rural Assyrians were not fully convinced. The community as a whole continued to navigate between the state and the opposition, negotiating for more rights within the volatile and temporary space opened up under circumstances of political instability.

Chapter 2 shifts the focus from urban centers to the rural north during the early Iraqi republican period (1961–75). The chapter complicates the traditional understanding of the Kurdish uprising as an exclusively nationalist movement, demonstrating that Assyrians, as well as Communists who survived the coup, were significant actors in this conflict. Starting in 1961, Assyrians like Margaret George joined the Kurdish opposition, and local Assyrian parties moved north after being denied registration in Baghdad. As the civil war continued, cooperation between the Kurds and Assyrians expanded transnationally. But the civil war had devastating consequences: depopulation of the countryside, the destruction of villages, and the loss of religious and cultural sites in northern Iraq.

This penultimate chapter is based on nearly three years of fieldwork at various Hezbollah cultural institutions in Tehran (2012–2014). Here, I examine acts of citizenship among another group touched by the legacies of the Iran–Iraq war. However, these women ascribe to a notion of democratic politics which deviates from the Western sensibilities of popular sovereignty. Contrary to acts of citizenship performed by female relatives of war martyrs, post-2009 Hezbollah–affiliated cultural activists view rights to be only one pillar of the state’s structure, and not necessarily the most important element of statecraft to be protected. They engage with the tensions which exist between the state’s Islamic and Republic elements, and the entanglement of religion and politics, but without necessarily intending to resolve or undo them in the interest of the people. In this chapter, I move into the ambit of citizenship and politics among pro-state Hezbollah affiliates in post-2009 Iran to make this counterintuitive argument: the legislation of religion is not necessarily a fruitless effort for the state even when it fails to uniformly produce its ideal religious citizen. Indeed, hybrid regimes’ contradictions and ambiguities work in different ways to produce particular types of citizens.

This chapter highlights how gender was rethought and reworked and how gender roles were remade during the 1980–1988 period to contest the established idea in political science that feminism and nationalism are incompatible. In turn, this finding also suggests that national governance from 1980 to 1988 was not as rigid and authoritarian as we previously had assumed it to be during this period.