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Tribal Justice and State Law in Iraq

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2021

Mélisande Genat*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Extract

Literature on tribes in Iraq is scant and often falls prey to simplistic binary approaches to state-society relations. Scholars of legal pluralism provide tools to conceptualize interrelations between adjacent normative fields. Several legal specialists have talked about “a thin form of cooperation” between tribal “private orders” and the Iraqi state. By the same token, many scholars presuppose that the capacity of the tribes and the state to mediate and settle feuds covary in opposite directions and are correlated with the strength of state institutions (tribes step in to fill a vacuum during times of state weakness). However, careful examination of Iraqi penal legislation and its implementation in tribal areas invalidates this stereotypical paradigm. Already in her seminal 1973 article, Sally Moore drew the attention of scholars of legal pluralism to the idea that legal orders should be approached as partially discrete, overlapping social fields. The various arenas intersect and create meaning for each other.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Hamoudi, Haider Ala, al-Sharaa, Wasfi H., and al-Dahhan, Aqeel, “The Resolution of Disputes in State and Tribal Law in the South of Iraq: Toward a Cooperative Model of Pluralism,” in Negotiating State and Non-State Law: The Challenge of Global and Local Legal Pluralism, ed. Helfand, Michael A. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 215–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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3 This article draws on extensive doctoral field research conducted in Iraq between 2016 and 2021.

4 Qanun Ta'dil Qanun al-ʻUqubat al-Baghdadi (Raqm 9) 1961, http://iraqld.hjc.iq/LoadLawBook.aspx?SC=071120051557621.

5 The author has consulted Iraqi archives of the TCCDR. They consist of over eight thousand files from a private archive, the owner of which wishes to remain anonymous.

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13 Author interviews conducted in Tel ʻAfar, 2018–21.

14 Doctoral field research, 2020–21.

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17 2005 Iraqi Constitution, paragraph 19.8, English translation, http://gjpi.org/library/primary/iraqi-constitution.

18 Dakka was never permitted by Iraqi law. It previously fell under article 431 of the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code, but article 2 provides for harsher sentences, ranging from life terms to death sentences.

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21 Al-Qur'an, Surah Fatir 35:18.

22 During the war against the Islamic State (2014–17), Shi‘a tribesmen joined the Popular Mobilization Forces (al-Hashd al-Shaʻbi) en masse.