CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media

The essays that comprise CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media began their lives as presentations at a small, by-invitation workshop, “Emerging Work on Communicative Dimensions of Islamic State,” held on May 3-4, 2017 at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication. Consistent with CARGC’s mission to mentor early-career scholars, the workshop was a non-public event featuring graduate students, some affiliated with the Jihadi Networks of Communication and CultureS (JINCS) research group at CARGC, and others from around the United States and the world, in addition to postdocs and faculty members. Parameters were purposefully broad to encourage independent thought and intellectual exploration: contributors were asked to write short essays focusing on any single aspect of Islamic State that was part of their research. The result is a group of fascinating essays: using mostly primary sources (textual, visual, or audio-visual), examining several media platforms and modalities, considering multiple levels of theoretical deployment and construction, and shedding light on various aspects of Islamic State communication against the broad back drop of history, ideology and geopolitics, the following include some of the most innovative approaches to Islamic State to date, and promise a wave of fresh voices on one of the most important challenges to global order.https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_briefs/1000/thumbnail.jp

Leveraging secrets : Displaced archives, information asymmetries, and ba'thist chronophagy in iraq

During ruptures in state power in both 1991 and 2003, varying groups and individuals seized many Iraqi state archival records, with some later taken outside of the country. Different Iraqi groups gathered unprotected archival records, as did US troops in 2003, while other records were destroyed on the ground in Iraq, likely by state employees, to maintain the records' secrets. Would the information in these records be revealed, destroyed, or used by others to leverage power? Using the concept of information asymmetry, this article explores the battle over information held in Iraqi state archival records by tracing the shifting power relations and attempts to write Iraqi history based on the information the records contain. Accordingly, this article takes up the question of scholarly engagement with the displaced records

The Legibility of Power and Culture in Ba‘thist Iraq from 1968-1991

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018From 1968 until 1991, the state led by the Iraqi Ba‘th Party fought a war against groups in Iraq that did not comply with state dictates. Situated in the Third World of postcolonial lineage, Iraq was in a milieu shaped by regional tensions and the larger Cold War. This work traces a battle of ideas waged by the Iraqi Ba‘th on its political opposition, drawing on Ba’th Regional Command Committee (BRCC) files held at the Hoover Institute and hundreds of publications from various branches of the Iraqi government controlled by the Iraqi Ba‘th. The dissertation’s introduction wrestles with the complex ethical issues of using such controversial archives. Each chapter of this dissertation takes a different lens to explore Iraqi cultural, intellectual, and media history, with the aim of contributing to understandings of the Ba‘th period in Iraq and its complex legacy. I show that transnational influences from Soviet interventions around the Third World had a direct impact on Iraqi Ba‘thist discourse and cultural production. With the United States distant and ideologically demonized, the Soviet Union proved to be more influential on Iraq, a relationship that eventually turned sour. Iraq had been a member of the Non-Aligned Movement since the movement’s beginning but this membership took on new importance when Saddam Hussein issued the I‘lan al-Qawmi in February of 1980, attempting to promote solidarity among Arab and postcolonial nations as well as pre-empt a potential superpower invasion. Consistent with Iraq’s place in the larger postcolonial milieu, programs to increase literacy were key to attempts to develop society and a stronger Iraqi economy to challenge economic imperialism. These literacy programs were remarkable in their size, scope, and overall results, but they neither eradicated illiteracy nor consistently generated support for the Party, illustrating the limits of the Party’s ability to reshape society as it aimed. Drawing on larger debates about tradition and heritage in the postcolonial world as well as in the Arab region, Iraqi Ba‘thist use of turath or heritage in state discourse was central to efforts to win this battle of ideas. Al-Turath al-Sha‘bi (Popular Heritage) was a successful and influential state journal that arguably represented the pluralism of Iraqi society throughout the 1970s until being commandeered by the Iraqi Ba‘th to increasingly serve as its mouthpiece from the 1980s onward. In contrast, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Ba‘th moved away from this pluralism in heritage discourse and insisted on the connection between Islam and Arabism (din wa turath) as that which gave their qawmiyya (Pan-Arab nationalism) strength. As such, debates about turath are shown in Chapter Four as a prelude for a later embrace of Islam by the Iraqi Ba‘th. Finally, the Iraqi Ba‘th used a series of discourses and techniques to manage and repress Iraqi political opposition from 1968-1991. Spatial Arabization campaigns targeting Kirkuk accelerated with the use of shu‘ubiyya discourse, shown here to begin in February 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, continuing throughout the war against Iran. The Iraqi Ba‘th racialized its enemies as Persians discursively while likewise Arabizing groups into the Iraqi nation, attempting to redefine race based on loyalty to the Iraqi Ba‘th. The racialized categories of “Persians” and “shu‘ubis” were not accepted by Iraqi opposition groups and thus these attempts at racialization did not ultimately shape new categories of identity. Such racialized discourses did, however, stimulate sectarianism in Iraqi society. These pernicious, divisive, and violent tactics haunt Iraq to this day

How conflict affects land use: agricultural activity in areas seized by the Islamic State

Socio-economic shocks, technogenic catastrophes, and armed conflicts often have drastic impacts on local and regional food security through disruption of agricultural production and food trade, reduced investments, and deterioration of land and infrastructure. Recently, more research has focused on the effects of armed conflict on land systems, but still little is known about the processes and outcomes of such events. Here we use the case of Syria and Iraq and the seizure of land by the Islamic State (IS) since 2014 as an example of armed conflict, where we investigate the effects on agricultural land use. We apply a reproducible approach using 250 m satellite-based time-series data to quantify the areas under cultivation from 2000 to 2015. Despite a common belief about widespread land abandonment in areas under conflict, results point to multiple trajectories regarding cropland cultivation in the IS seized area: (1) expansion of cropland to formerly un-cultivated areas, (2) cropland abandonment, and (3) decrease of high-intensity cropland. Our study highlights the need to understand these diverse conflict-related and context-dependent changes to the land system