Omar Dewachi

Ungovernable Life

Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Omar Dewachi is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Juli 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 221mm x 146mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 446g
• ISBN-13: 9780804784443
• ISBN-10: 0804784442
• Artikelnr.: 47551693

Autorenporträt

Omar Dewachi is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Ungovernable Life: An Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction gives an overview of key concepts and provides background
on the rise and eventual unraveling of Iraq's health care infrastructure.
It develops the notion of "ungovernability" as a concept to probe both the
logics and limits of biopower, and introduces the notion of mandatory
medicine as a framework for understanding the history of state making in
colonial and postcolonial Iraq. Problematizing the dearth of empirically
grounded knowledge about Iraq in media and academic discourses, the chapter
proposes an alternate genealogy of Iraq's state breakdown-one read through
the material history of the country's health care infrastructures and
doctors from the colonial period to the present. In response to recent
literature on the recession of the welfare state as driven by neoliberal
logics, the chapter suggests that scholars must develop different
methodological and conceptual tools when considering the case of Iraq and
other states unraveling under war and sanctions.
1Intervention Pathologies
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the British takeover of Iraq from the Ottomans during
the World War I and how the logics of this intervention drew heavily upon
discourses of tropical medicine and ecology. The chapter shows how British
efforts to subdue and rule Iraq were couched within pathologizing
discourses that portrayed Iraqi territories and populations as a medical
problem with which imperial powers had to reckon, and which they had to
understand and correct. Detailing the unruly strategies and corporeal
vulnerabilities of those conducting this initial imperial campaign, the
chapter argues that discourses about the medical and ecological
ungovernability of Iraq shed light upon the imaginations and anxieties of
its imperial occupiers and, more broadly, reflect defining features and
fragilities of the colonial enterprise.
2Vitality of the State
chapter abstract
The chapter analyzes how, during the interwar period, Iraq became a
laboratory for statecraft to determine the limits of both colonial and
European health care regimes, as competing visions of the future of
Britain's health care system based in London found a proxy site for
experimentation in Baghdad. The chapter highlights how the newly
established public health directorate departed from the discursive
determinism of tropical medicine and embraced the ethos of a
"bio-politician," such that the biological conduct of the population now
articulated the contours of state power. The chapter focuses on the
management of the cholera epidemic of 1923 during the annual Shia
pilgrimage, which coincided with anxieties about the rapid spread of
pathogens facilitated by modern transportation. The nationwide coordination
required to manage the epidemic was taken as proof of the importance of
centralizing health care administration in the capital city as opposed to
decentralized provincial control.
3Doctors without Empires
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how the dismantlement of Ottoman medical networks
generated debates about science and nation-building under the British
mandate. Previously shaped by regional medical training under Ottoman rule,
Iraq's newly established medical training program would be defined by a
long-term relationship with the British medical enterprise both in Iraq and
at the metropole. Doctors descended upon Iraq from the former Ottoman
territories to participate not only in medicine, but also in a new
nation-building project. A diverse array of medical-political actors
debated the formation of health institutions as part of a larger
conversation over the shape of Iraqi citizenship. The chapter analyzes the
dynamic political and scientific stakes that led to the inception of Iraq's
first national medical school, the Royal College of Medicine. Contentious
debates about the College's language of study reflected broader anxieties
and disagreements around the imagination of the new nation.
4The Royal College
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the autobiographies of Iraq's doctors and their
documentation of the early years at Baghdad's Royal College of Medicine. It
highlights the tensions around the sustainability of the school and its
attempt to fashion Iraq's modern citizens, crystalized in the figure of the
medical doctor. The Royal College sought to cultivate doctors to become
cosmopolitan and Western-oriented, through training both inside and outside
Iraq. The rootedness of this professionalization within Western tastes,
expertise, and pedagogy revealed a core tension within Iraq's biopolitical
project: doctors were expected to formulate professional expertise based
upon relations with the metropole while also serving the interests of the
state to expand biomedicine to the rural areas of the country-areas doctors
regarded as antithetical to their optimal course of professionalization.
Doctors' simultaneous obedience to and evasion of state policy reveal the
contradictions involved in state building through science.
5Development and Its Discontents
chapter abstract
Tracing contestations around state development programs in the 1950s, this
chapter illustrates how these interventions drew upon therapeutic
discourses of "ungovernability" in ascribing a distinct political and
biological backwardness to rural populations. Popularized in the writings
of Iraqi sociologist Ali al-Wardi, the notion of an urban/rural duality of
Iraqi society became central to development discourses. Specifically, this
chapter focuses on the consequences of state development interventions on
the massive migration of farmers to the capital and the subsequent
construction of Thawra City (Sadr City)-initially Iraq's most extensive
social housing project and eventually its largest urban ghetto. As a
historically-rooted reflection on the promise and unruliness of
biopolitical interventionism, the chapter shows how large-scale development
projects in Iraq produced geographical, biological, and political
transformations that conditioned the 1958 socialist revolution.
6Infants and Infantry
chapter abstract
This chapter addresses the paradoxes of statecraft arising during the
eight-year Iran-Iraq war, among the longest inter-state military conflicts
in the twentieth century. In response to battlefield losses, the state
focused on the expansion of its health care services and cultivated the
broader social significance of wartime survival and productivity. The
regime's mantra-"we fight with one hand, and we build with the
other"-captured the interconnections between the war and social
mobilization to respond to the "assault" on the physical and social body.
The chapter focuses on complex population politics that are often obscured
or ignored in academic discourse on the conflict, and shows how Cold
War-era state medicine and international health politics became implicated
in the conflict. The chapter interrogates the Iran-Iraq war as a terrain
for the mobilization of different regimes of population politics that
shaped everyday life during the conflict.
7Empire of Patronage
chapter abstract
This chapter shifts the ethnographic focus from Iraq to Britain in order to
trace the trajectories of Iraq's doctors in Britain's NHS. The loss of
Iraq's doctors to the West since the 1990s is one of the main tragedies of
recent wars and interventions. Beginning during the devastating 1990-2003
United Nations sanctions and accelerating during the violence and turmoil
of the post-2003 US-led occupation, the ongoing exodus en masse of Iraqi
doctors to the imperial metropole and other destinations speaks not only to
the lack of security but also to the longstanding transnational genealogy
of the Iraqi state. Based on fieldwork in London with Iraqi doctors
practicing or seeking careers within the NHS, the chapter comes full circle
to show how Britain's historical involvement in medicine and state building
in Iraq refracts through the quest of doctors to seek careers and refuge in
the metropole of the Empire.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
This chapter reflects on the legacy of US biopolitical warfare, addresses
key concepts, and raises questions for future inquiry. The chapter explores
the implications of the fragmented health care geography arising from the
targeting and dismemberment of Iraq's health infrastructure. Broadening the
conversation beyond discourses and productions of ungovernability in Iraq,
the chapter reflects upon how the notion of the "ungovernable" might be a
useful conceptual tool in understanding the workings and limits of power.
The chapter closes by gesturing toward the cruel symmetry between the
colonial depictions of Iraq's biological unruliness and the increasingly
undeniable research indicating the spread of both disease and
antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the country. This symmetry between
colonial imagination and present-day reality intends to spur reflection and
encourage further research on the varied legacies and wounds of recent wars
targeting health infrastructure and the biopolitical apparatus.