Analysis on Conflict Resilience in Iraq: The 2018 Parliamentary Elections in the Central Government and Kurdish Regional Governments, and Sectarianism
Author: Shun-wen Wang
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
Conflicts in Iraq are rooted in failures of governance, corruption, sectarianism and many other variables. This paper, however, focuses on the idea of “conflict resilience” which leads to an analysis of the depth of peace under the peace-building process in three major aspects: regimes, process capabilities and outcomes. This paper takes conflicts after Iraq’s parliamentary election and the KRG’s parliamentary election as examples, and it also deals with the sectarian leaders’ role for Iraqis and the security mechanism during the Arba’een pilgrimage.
This paper is divided into four parts: 1. The roots of conflict in Iraq and a review of papers on “conflict resilience”; 2. Conflict resilience after the 2018 parliamentary election; 3. Conflict resilience after the 2017 KRG independence referendum and the 2018 KRG parliamentary election; 4. Sectarianism and the Arba’een pilgrimage. Finally, it analyzes conflict resilience in Iraq in the three aspects of the regime, process capabilities and outcomes in order to make a conclusion.