Brookings: Iraqi Sectarian Violence

Brookings recently released an interesting working paper called "Sectarian Violence:  Radical Groups Drive Internal Displacement in Iraq."  Written by Ashraf al-Khalidi (a pseudonym adopted by a Baghdad-based researcher for security reasons) and Victor Tanner, the report paints a depressing if all-too-familiar portrait of the steady progress of what political scientists studying ethnic conflict quaintly call "ethnic unmixing."    Based on four weeks of field research (the limitations of which the researchers make painfully apparent), the report concludes that:

• there has been an enormous surge in internal displacement driven by sectarian violence this year.  Official Iraqi figures count about 39,000 families (234,600 individuals) who have fled their homes since the February bombing of the Samarra mosque.   This is the lower limit, but is almost certainly a massive undercount since many of the displaced seek refuge with their relatives and do not register with the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.
• "the violence is neither spontaneous nor popular.  Displaced people view the most extreme religious fronts.... as the main drivers of sectarian displacement.  The displacement clearly helps further the political agenda of these extremist groups.  The groups all share in fact common goals:  to consolidate their territory, to maintain some of 'their' people in the territory of the 'other' and, in the context of a feeble government, to pose as both protector and provider."
• "Many ordinary people still do not think in terms of civil war, so long as it is  not neighbor against neighbor, but armed thugs attacking civilians.   Yet intolerance and mistrust are spreading, especially among the youth.  Street slang is violent and dehumanizing."
• "there are few voices of moderation.  The radical armed groups call for national unity in the same breath that they vow total war on the other side.  The pleas for calm and restraint by mainstream politicians are feckless."  (Note that this was written before the Mecca Declaration, issued by religious and political leaders across the Sunni-Shia divide - though I'm not sure that this would change their analysis).
• "the main pattern of displacement focuses on the consolidation of territory: in essence, people flee to areas where they feel safer."

The Brookings report doesn't tell us a lot that we didn't already know, but does a service by bringing the issue of internal displacement into focus and providing considerable ground-level perspective on the process.   In addition to the primary Sunni-Shia axis, the report also touches on the plight of minorities (Christians and others), third country nationals (especially Palestinians and Sudanese), and Kurds.  The report does not really consider the extraordinary number of Iraqis fleeing the country to become refugees, in Jordan or Syria or Turkey or elsewhere - which includes an estimated 650,000 people since 2005 and nearly 900,000 since 2003.  Al-Quds al-Arabi has been covering that dimension particularly heavily in recent days, with its editor Abd al-Bari Atwan describing the "massive flight from Iraq" as a crucial feature of today's Iraq easily missed as observers focus on the high politics and the civil war and America's choices. 

Four points to ponder in all of this.  First, this internal displacement is exactly what many political scientists studying ethnic conflict would have predicted (and did, in fact, predict).   It is a commonplace observation now that a combination of personal insecurity and the political interests of ethnic extremists tends to produce "ethnic unmixing" (a term I rather despise, but which has caught on in the literature).  The dynamics of ethnic insecurity in Baghdad and the other mixed areas look very, very similar to what we saw in the former Yugoslavia and many other similar cases. The Brookings report includes many examples of the subtle and less subtle forms of coercion used, including "advice from a friend or neighbor" ('this is not a good place for you now', 'I was at a meeting and heard your name mentioned', 'someone told me to tell you that you should move your family away'), blacklists and pamphlets circulating in neighborhoods, threatening phone calls and text messages, masked gunmen issuing threats at homes, actual violence against family members,  the targeting of members of one's own ethnic group who try to help people on the other side, the rise of visible signals of ethnic intolerance such as graffiti and verbal abuse, and more.

Second, many political scientists see this 'ethnic unmixing' as part of the solution, not part of the problem - or, at least, a necessary part of the solution once the problem has unfolded in this way.  Jim Fearon, for instance, sees one of the roles for America's continued military presence as giving the time to "allow populations to sort themselves out and form defensible lines that would lessen the odds of sudden, systematic campaigns of sectarian terror in mixed neighborhoods."  This was also Chaim Kaufmann's advice in this summer's Foreign Affairs colloquium.   Once enough "unsorting" has taken place, a de facto partition becomes possible, while relative personal security would allow for greater political cooperation.   In a sense, this is becoming the de facto American policy:  since the dynamics of ethnic unmixing are in fact unfolding on the ground, the longer the US makes no decision the further the realities on the ground will consolidate themselves.   

Third, however, both Fearon and the Brookings Report point to one of the major flaws in the Kaufmann/ solution:   the internal fragmentation and power struggles within the Sunni and Shia communities.   The forces pushing for ethnic 'unmixing' are also battling for primacy against internal rivals, and those rivalries won't go away just because the communities have become more geographically consolidated.  To the extent that conflict and insecurity are political tools for more radical factions, I would expect those factions to find ways to manufacture new sources of conflict and insecurity even if the Kaufmann 'goal' of relatively homogenous and defensible enclaves were achieved.   This is one of the many reasons that I see the tacit or active encouragement of 'ethnic unmixing' as a flawed strategy. 

Fourth, Fearon's Stanford colleage David Laitin (in Security Studies 13, 2004) provides fairly convincing evidence that, in fact, greater territorial concentration of ethnic groups actually significantly increases the prospects for violence.   More territorially concentrated ethnic groups are, all other things equal, one and half times more likely to launch or support insurgencies against states.  If Laitin's quantitative analysis is right that "territorial control by one group leads to a higher probability of war," then the personal security purchased at such high costs through 'ethnic unmixing' may have even higher costs in the long run. 

Overall, the Brookings report offers a valuable and dismaying portrait of the steady progress of 'ethnic unmixing' in Iraq.  The only "bright spot" which might be found in that process - that it might be a necessary step to restoring some degree of inter-sectarian peace - doesn't actually hold out as much promise as suggested by advocates of 'ethnic unmixing.'   That's worth thinking about if, as seems to be the case, such 'ethnic unmixing' and de facto partition emerges as the default reality due to the Bush administration's political and strategic paralysis.

Comments

[Muddy Mo]

The report states that one dynamic is that groups will try to, "to maintain some of 'their' people in the territory of the 'other'"

Are there any examples of this? It would seem the only way a group could maintain a minority population in the other group's territory would be when a significant urban population in the midst of a sparsely populated rural area.

[Duried Jerab]

I don't believe that 'ethnic unmixing' is the way out of the crisis nor will it avert the civil war. It has to be noted that the ethnicity of a person never really mattered prior to the occupation.
People from different sects lived side by side with no discrimination between Sunnis or Shias. Many of the Politicians in the Bath Party were in fact Shias.
The current struggle between secular factions is a direct result of the American policy and the presence of the occupation forces that have shaken the balance of power.
The occupation must end before any internal settlement actually occurs. Pursing 'ethnic unmixing' will only help to weaken and divide Iraq in all aspects.

[Badger]

I agree with D. Jerab. In fact I think the role of the "political science community" of today mirrors that of the "intelligence community" of 2003 as a rationalizer of US military aims. I outline this in a post called "How US intellectual fads mirror, in a dreamlike way, the military strategy", available by clicking on the Badger-link below.