Talk: Performing Checkpoints, Effecting the State: Ethnographic Reflections from Baghdad

Key information

Date
Time
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Venue
Brunei Gallery
Room
Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre (BGLT)

About this event

Speaker: Dr. Omar Sirri; Discussants: Prof. Hagar Kotef (SOAS) and Dr. Sarah El-Kazaz (SOAS)

Discussants

Discussants: Prof. Hagar Kotef (SOAS) and Dr. Sarah El-Kazaz (SOAS)

Abstract

Urban checkpoints in Baghdad have for years been lamented by residents and state security personnel alike as ineffective architectures of security. Yet these installations remain implicated in effecting the state in Iraq’s capital city. This paper draws on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Baghdad carried out between 2017 and 2019, including participant observation at a federal police checkpoint in the district of Karada, east and south of the Tigris River. Building on scholarship that puts performativity in conversation with the critical study of security, I argue that both the theatrical and citational nature of checkpoint practices matter for how the state comes to be. Baghdad’s checkpoints help show how even through what I call ‘performative security breakdown,’ checkpoint routines—and the materials that bolster them—are still critical to conjuring the entity deemed responsible for their failure.

Bio

Omar Sirri received his PhD in political science from the University of Toronto in 2021. His doctoral dissertation is entitled Scarecrows of the State: An Ethnography of Security Checkpoints in Contemporary Baghdad. He is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the Issam Fares Institute for International Affairs and Public Policy at the American University of Beirut.

Organiser: SOAS Department of Politics and International Studies in association with SOAS Middle East Institute