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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Iraqi Kurdistan's efforts to project 'stateliness' in relation to the personalized connections, called wasta, underpinning to Kurdistan's everyday statecraft. As such, the paper aims to question the strict division between 'external' and 'internal' sovereignty of (pseudo)states.

Paper long abstract:

In 2017, Iraqi Kurdistan held a referendum for independent statehood, which, although carried with overwhelming support, was shut down by regional and international powers. Kurdistan was thus left in an aporia of psedo-statehood, but far from reigniting the military struggle of the past, the Kurdish struggle for independence has since then doubled down on efforts to present itself as a stable, bureaucratic, and regulated polity, well suited for international investment. This renewed focus on projecting ‘stateliness’ has overshadowed the more complicated and paradoxical process of statecraft that underpins the region’s continuing struggle for sovereignty, however. This paper shows how Iraqi Kurdish efforts to present stateliness are underpinned by, and often reliant upon, informal, flexible, and personalized socio-political processes. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork in the Iraqi Kurdish region, as well as previous fieldwork from 2016-2017, the paper shows how the areas of military reorganization, acquisition of services, and allotment of justice are strongly intertwined with situated webs of personalized connections, or wasta in local nomenclature. The paper argues that just as stateliness is parasitic upon wasta, so too is wasta parasitic on stateliness, leaving Kurdistan in an aporia of psedo-statehood, from which it struggles to emerge. Theoretically, this intercedes in debates on the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ sovereignty of states, as has been the preoccupation of political science and political anthropology respectively. The paper seeks bridge these two tendencies, by illustrating how (political science’s) ‘external’ aspects of sovereignty are often profoundly intertwined with (sociology’s) ‘internal’ aspects of sovereignty, and vice versa.