Charting the Territory: Space and Power in the Iraq War

Abstract

I analyze the 2007 mapping and walling of Baghdad’s neighborhoods into ‘gated communities’ and ‘ghettos’ as a way of distinguishing and segregating Sunni and Shia ‘friends and ‘foes’. This walling was part of the Iraq War (2003-2010) in which a US-led military coalition invaded the state and framed its occupation as a project aimed to reconstruct Iraq into a modern democratic state. I situate this walling project within Foucault’s notion of gridding space, and argue that it exemplifies the materialization of the cell technique, and Carl Schmitt’s articulation of three modes of empty space in relation to territory. I argue that the walling process was an attempt to produce what I call a “continuous security”, predicated upon the assumption of a population´s characterized belonging to the circumnavigated territory. On the outskirts of the walls, however, the security measures remained to be discontinuous – risk here was high as the space was inhabited by a heterogeneous milieu. The outskirts, on the other hand, can be articulated as spaces of discontinuous security where “place-based” global sovereignty and uneven networks of places have come to characterize population. The imposition of the disciplinary mechanism of walling was met with resistance and had a disastrous impact on the life of Baghdad’s residents, as shown by Haifa Zagnana (2010) and soon was abandoned both by the US military and by the Iraqi government of that time.