De­nat­ur­al­isa­tion and re­clam­a­tion in Iraq: A review of Zainab Saleh’s book

De­vel­op­ment sum­mary

In Law and His­tory Review, Sara Farhan re­views Zainab Saleh’s Polit­ic­al Un­desir­ables: Cit­izen­ship, De­nat­ur­al­iz­a­tion, and Re­clam­a­tion in Iraq. Ac­cord­ing to the review, Saleh shows that cit­izen­ship in the modern Iraqi state has been a pre­cari­ous priv­ilege rather than an in­ali­en­able right, and that de­nat­ur­al­isa­tion and de­port­a­tion were in­teg­ral to gov­ernance through­out the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­tur­ies.

The book traces how Ot­to­man, Brit­ish co­lo­ni­al and later na­tion­al elites used cit­izen­ship laws to dis­cip­line and punish “polit­ic­al un­desir­ables”, and ex­am­ines how ex­pelled Iraqis re­claimed their be­long­ing through mem­oirs, lit­er­at­ure and polit­ic­al act­iv­ism.