In 1642, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes conducted a state-of-nature thought experiment in his book De Cive, placing people in a pre-social…

Baghdad: Since its inception as a state in the 1920s, geopolitics have imposed harsh realities onto Iraq. As such, it has had difficulty managing its…

As discussions on Iran's future swirled in the wake of President Ebrahim Raisi's death in a fatal helicopter crash last month, I remembered an…

The Iraqi parliament has finally approved a law denoting the country’s official national holidays, but there is debate about how ‘national’ some of…

Design flaws within Iraq's federal governance system—which was hastily drawn up in 2005 in the aftermath of the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein with…

“The victims of cruelty and injustice are not any better than their tormentors. Their position usually amounts to nothing more than waiting to swap…

Iraqi politicians love to talk.They issue formal statements, give interviews on satellite channels and are increasingly taking to social media to…

In his book, What is Democracy?, the French thinker Alain Touraine argues that democracy requires more than the freedom to choose rulers among those…

In the Middle East, the drums of war are often beaten to distract populations from domestic unrest and concerns. Enemies are identified as a looming…

Misfortunes are piling up for Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani, Iraq’s prime minister, as the international politics of the Middle East get more complicated…