Re-imagining Babylon : Epistemic Violence and Iraq Discourse

Ali Al-Hassani, Ruba (2023) Re-imagining Babylon : Epistemic Violence and Iraq Discourse. ORIENT Magazine, 3 (Focus:). pp. 41-49.

Abstract

For two decades, White people have been dominating English-language literature and discourse on Iraq, Orientalising, dehistoricising, and sectarianising it. White men in government, non-government think-tanks, and academia expect to lead the conversation instead of humbling themselves to pluralistic Iraqi voices. Despite effort by some Iraqis in the diaspora to guide the conversation, it is geared back to a dominating West-centric perspective. Iraqis are marginalized, and Iraqi women are tokenized. Iraqi women academics are especially excluded from the conversation. So much so that a nascent Iraqi Women Academics Network now draws attention to the pluralistic voices and experiences of Iraqi women scholars. When Iraq’s October Spring emerged in 2019, I was part of a small network of Iraqi bloggers who shared instant, verified news of the protests to foreign journalists to ensure Iraqis’ voices and stories reached a global audience. Western media covered the protest movement and focused on Iraqi voices. Within a year, those journalists became Iraq experts, invited to speak on think tank panels discussing Iraq. The only Iraqi women invited to speak were presumed to represent a monolithic idea of what Iraqi women think. Iraqi women experts of minoritized ethnoconfessional backgrounds continue to be overlooked. While European and Western subjectivities are often interpreted as global objectivity, this has become more obvious in the Iraqi context. Two decades after the invasion, Western journalists and analysts continue to discuss Iraqis’ stories on their behalf, and their experiences are deemed objective reflections on Iraqis’ lived experiences. In my paper, I discuss my experience and analyze what went wrong by discussing how White Ignorance has been useful in upholding the epistemic violence that sits at the core of media coverage and policy analysis of Iraq. I also borrow from the counterfactual method to expose ‘blind spots’ and contingencies in Iraq epistemology that extend the Iraq invasion’s violence. This paper invites the reader to imagine how different things could have been and how much richer Iraq discourse would have been had it included Iraqi women academics’ pluralistic voices and scholarly contributions.