Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper; the attendees of the Chatham House workshop in November 2019 that helped to refine the ideas set out in this paper; the numerous Iraqi government officials who shared their thoughts; and the staff of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House for their work in organizing the workshop and helping to facilitate this publication – in particular Dr Renad Mansour and Georgia Cooke.
This paper is part of a series produced by the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House. The Iraq Initiative is a fieldwork-based policy project that rethinks the nature of state-building and governance in Iraq. The project tackles the root causes of state failure to challenge assumptions held in Western capitals about stabilization and peacebuilding and reach a more nuanced approach to navigating Iraq’s complex and interlinked political, security, and economic environment.