Iraq, Regime Change, and the Reconstruction of the Security Field: the Rebirth of Impunity in a Disaggregated State

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the politics of impunity that have come to dominate Iraq after regime change in 2003. It does this by reviewing and deploying Walter Benjamin’s work, Towards the Critique of Violence, which overtly separates law from justice, anchoring law instead into its own founding myths or gewalt. The paper places Benjamin’s work in dialogue with sociological understandings of a disaggregated or polymorphous state. It examines, in detail, the rebuilding of one of the state’s disaggregated and competitive fields, the security field and militia domination of it. This analytical framework and case study are used to examine how the politics of impunity came to dominate the Iraqi state, from the US invasion and regime change in 2003, to attempts to rebuild the coercive institutions of the state in its aftermath. The paper uses Benjamin’s notion of gewalt and foundational violence to examine how, with US assistance, the militias aligned to Iraq’s political parties came to dominate the security field and exercise coercive power with impunity.