Upcoming Events
The following events are sponsored or co-sponsored by TAARII. If you are interested in additional information about any of these events, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
WOCMES Panel: “Iraq in the 1990s: Cultural and Political Trends”
Date: Monday, July 19, 2010 (5:00–7:00 p.m.)
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Description: At the third World Congress of Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) in Barcelona, TAARII Board Member, Dina Khoury (George Washington University), will chair the panel “Iraq in the 1990s: Cultural and Political Trends,” which included presenters Ali Bader, Haider Saeed, Dhiaa al-Asadi, and Joseph Sassoon.
Much of the writing and analyses of 1990s Iraq focuses on the Sanctions and their impact, the neo-tribal policies of the regime, and the disintegration of the state. The Iraq of the 1990s is a dystopia shaped by criminal state practices, tribal politics and pauperized populations. While there is much that is true in this picture of Iraq, there is very little in the literature that allows us to understand how Iraqis coped and at times flourished within the constraints created by the regime and the sanctions. By bringing together Iraqi intellectuals and scholars of different backgrounds and persuasions who lived in Iraq in the 1990s or who write on Iraq in that period, this panel attempts to move the discussion of the period away from an analysis of high politics to the ways in which different segments on the Iraqi population survived. Ali Bader is one of the leading intellectuals of the period. Author of several novels, some of them award winning, he has been the leading proponent and leader of a group of intellectuals of the 1990s who argue for the emergence of a different kind of intellectual movement in the absence of strong state controls over the institutions of culture. In his submission to this panel, he attempts to flesh how his generation differed from their predecessors and explores the reasons behind this difference. Haider Saeed, another of the group of intellectuals in the 1990s, argues that the absence of state controls in the 1990s, created the opportunity for Iraqi intellectuals, for the first time, to move away from the central question of the relationship of the intellectual to the state to a more critical assessment of the cultural history of Iraq. Drawing on the works European intellectuals who write critical and linguistic theories, Iraqi intellectuals of the 1990s sought to move away from the agendas set up by their predecessors on the struggle between modernity and tradition, authenticity and imitation, to a critical analysis of the modernization project itself. Dhiaa al-Asadi, a Ph.D. candidate at Birmingham University, an intellectual who had been involved in the redefinition of Shi’i practice and political thought through his reading and work with Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr in the 1990s, examines the socio-activism of the Sadrist movement in the 90s and argues that it constituted a paradigm shift in modern political Shi’ism. Dr. Joseph Sassoon, Lecturer at Georgetown University, will draw on his research in the Ba’th Party Regional Command Archives, to discuss the transformation in the practices of the Ba’th party at the local level, focusing particularly on its cultural policies in regional offices. He will look at the list of books available to party members at local libraries to arrive at certain conclusion on the cultural practices of the Ba’th party.
Additional Information: Please see the WOCMES website (http://wocmes.iemed.org/en/preorg-iraq1990) for more information on the panel.
TAARII Reception, Annual MESA meeting
Date: November 2010
Location: San Diego, California
Description: Details to be announced.
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