Toby Dodge
Biographic Data
| ID | 3591213 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Toby Dodge |
| GIVEN NAMES | Toby |
| FAMILY NAME | Dodge |
| SIGNATURE | DODGE T |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1262-4921 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 195 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Iraq, Regime Change, and the Reconstruction of the Security Field: The Rebirth of Impunity in a Disaggregated State
This paper examines the causes and consequences of the politics of impunity that have come to dominate Iraq after regime change in 2003. It does this by reviewing and deploying Walter Benjamin’s work, Towards the Critique of Violence, which overtly separates law from justice, anchoring law instead into its own founding myths or gewalt. The paper places Benjamin’s work in dialogue with sociological understandings of a disaggregated or polymorphous…
Special Issue Introduction: Consociationalism and the State: Lebanon and Iraq in Comparative Perspective
Iraq, Consociationalism and the Incoherence of the State
This paper uses Iraq as a case study to answer the research question, how do consociational settlements impact the state? Firstly, the paper argues that consociationalism, at best, has an under-theorized conception of the state, implicitly defaulting to an unexamined neo-Weberian model. The paper then surveys state theory and finds that key works on the state in the Middle East are vulnerable to the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. To overc…
Afghanistan and the Failure of Liberal Peacebuilding
The collapse of the US-aligned Afghan government and the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban in 2021 as the United States withdrew its forces was ultimately caused by a change in US government policy in June 2003. At that point, the George W. Bush administration dropped its aversion to state-building and its plan for a limited intervention designed to rid the country of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US instead undertook an extended exercise in libera…
The Failure of Peacebuilding in Iraq: The Role of Consociationalism and Political Settlements’
This article argues that an informal consociational elite bargain was placed at the centre of post-invasion attempts at transition and peacebuilding in Iraq. It is this informal consociationalism that undermined the coherence of the state and delegitimized the political system. The article critically examines the consociational and political settlement literature. It concludes that Pierre Bourdieu's approach to competition in the political field …
Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and Its Problems
This paper looks at the applicability of formal, informal, liberal and corporate consociationalism to Iraq. It examines the drafting of the Iraqi constitution in 2005 and the political system it consecrated. It argues that the political system in Iraq is a good example of informal consociationalism, with government formation governed by unwritten consociational rules and norms. It then examines the negative problems connected with this system, pr…
Introduction: BetweenWataniyyaandTa'ifia; understanding the relationship between state‐based nationalism and sectarian identity in the Middle East
This introduction to the four papers that make up the themed section locates them in the wider theoretical, comparative, and historical perspectives from which they originate. First, it places the study of communalist or sectarian identities in the Middle East in broader comparative debates about the study of ethnic and nationalist identities. It then examines the causalities underpinning the shifting relationship between these different identiti…
Beyond structure and agency: Rethinking political identities in Iraq after 2003
This paper examines ethno‐symbolic and instrumental explanations of ethnic and sectarian identities placed within the constructivist turn in the study of political identity, both in the abstract and how they have been deployed to explain the increasing contemporary influence of ethnosectarian mobilisation in Iraq and the wider Middle East. The paper identifies explanatory value in these approaches but finds their focus on either ideational struct…
Sectarianization and De-sectarianization in the Struggle for Iraq’s Political Field
Iraq’s political system, an elite pact justified through ethno-religious consociationalism or sectarian apportionment (Muhasasa Ta’ifiyya), was created in the aftermath of invasion and regime change in 2003. The system’s legitimation was based on a very specific understanding of Iraqi society and the role of elections in managing that society. However, this system did not prevent the brutal civil war that raged in Iraq from 2004 until 2008. Once …
US foreign policy in the Middle East
This chapter examines the main dynamics that have transformed US foreign policy towards the Middle East since World War I from the time of Woodrow Wilson to that of Donald Trump. It first considers the applicability of realist, Marxist, and constructivist theories of international relations before discussing the ways in which the Cold War, oil, and Israel have shaped American foreign policy. In particular, it shows how the United States’ tactical…
Iraq: A Year of Living Dangerously
The events of 2018 demonstrate that Iraq’s structural problems are no nearer to being solved than they were before the liberation of Mosul a year ago
Bourdieu goes to Baghdad: Explaining hybrid political identities in Iraq
This paper critiques the primordial and ethnosymbolic theories of identity that have come to dominate explanations of Iraq's descent into violent instability after the 2003 invasion. It argues that Iraq's contemporary politics can only be understood by examining its history over the longue durée not the past fifteen years. The paper critically interacts with modernist theories of nationalism and their relevance to explaining identities in the Mid…
Back to the future
The US occupation needed to identify and marginalize other indigenous political forces that might destabilize a pro-US agenda. The decision makers that drove the US to invade and their top administrator who ran the first year of the occupation were unambiguous that the target of the war and its aftermath was the political economy of Iraq. On the eve of the US invasion in 2003, the political economy built by the Ba'athist regime had proven to be b…
The Danger of Analogical Myths: Explaining the Power and Consequences of the Sykes-Picot Delusion
Even before its hundredth year anniversary on 16 May 2016, the Sykes-Picot agreement had become a widely cited historical analogy both in the region itself and in Europe and the United States. In the Middle East, it is frequently deployed as an infamous example of European imperial betrayal and Western attempts more generally to keep the region divided, in conflict, and easy to dominate. In Europe and the United States, however, its role as a his…
Can Iraq Be Saved
Using the Sykes–Picot agreement to explain the Middle East falsely extrapolates from a single moment. This misuse of history will lead to poor policy
Intervention and dreams of exogenous statebuilding: The application of Liberal Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq
The central thesis of this article is that when faced with state collapse, rising violence, and a complex stabilisation effort, the US, UN, and NATO in Afghanistan and the US and Britain in Iraq, deployed the dominant, if not only, international approach available, Liberal Peacebuilding. The article traces the rise of Liberal Peacebuilding across the 1990s. It argues that four units of analysis within neoliberal ideology, the individual, the mark…
Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change
State and society in Iraq ten years after regime change: The Rise of a New Authoritarianism
This article examines the rise of a new authoritarianism in Iraq ten years after the invasion that removed Saddam Hussein. It traces the centralization of political and coercive power in the hands of Iraq's Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. From his appointment in 2006, Maliki successfully moved to constrain the power of parliament and the independent agencies set up by the American-led occupation to oversee the state. He removed key politicians an…
Enemy Images, Coercive Socio-Engineering and Civil War in Iraq
Previous attempts to explain US policy towards Iraq from 2003 onwards have understood US intentions and actions through a coherent, rational-utility-maximizing model of the state. This article seeks to de-centre this rationalist explanation by examining the ideational drivers that shaped the Bush administration's understanding of Iraq and hence its policy towards the remaking of its post-invasion politics. In order to gain ideational coherence, b…
Iraq's Road Back to Dictatorship
Fred Halliday: High modernism and a social science of the Middle East
This article examines Fred Halliday's research and writing on the politics of the Middle East. It classifies Halliday as a 'high modernist', who organized his work around a constant commitment to a universal rationality, historical progress and an opposition to relativism and a particularist reading of the Middle East. The article identifies the two dominant units of analysis that shaped Halliday's work on the region throughout his life. These we…
The failure of sanctions and the evolution of international policy towards Iraq, 1990–2003
The day after Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 660 condemning Iraq’s aggression and demanding that it withdraw. A week later it passed Resolution 661 demanding that UN Member States prevent all trade and financial transactions with Iraq. In all of its previous history, the Security Council had only imposed sanctions to discipline errant states twice before. The precedent used for the dra…
The US and Iraq: Time to Go Home
Given the record of the US occupation and the profound limitations of America's present stature, the Barack Obama administration is right to continue to draw down the American presence in Iraq. But in remembering the egregious mistakes of its predecessor the administration should not claim victory as it exits. It should not, as Vice President Joe Biden did in the midst of the de-Ba'athification crisis, claim all is well in Baghdad. A more honest …
The ideological roots of failure: The application of kinetic neo-liberalism to Iraq
This article argues that American policy towards Iraq went through four major shifts between the invasion in 2003 and the announcement of the surge in 2007. The best way to understand the Bush administration's evolving policy towards Iraq is by examining the ideological parameters within which it was made. The article assesses various approaches to understanding the relationship between ideology, policy making and foreign policy, concluding that …
Coming face to face with bloody reality: Liberal common sense and the ideological failure of the Bush doctrine in Iraq
Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied
An examination of the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British Empire, from 1920 and 1932. Parallels are drawn between the polices of a declining British empire and those of the current administration.
Bourdieu goes to Baghdad: Explaining hybrid political identities in Iraq
This paper critiques the primordial and ethnosymbolic theories of identity that have come to dominate explanations of Iraq's descent into violent instability after the 2003 invasion. It argues that Iraq's contemporary politics can only be understood by examining its history over the longue durée not the past fifteen years. The paper critically interacts with modernist theories of nationalism and their relevance to explaining identities in the Mid…
The Failure of Peacebuilding in Iraq: The Role of Consociationalism and Political Settlements’
This article argues that an informal consociational elite bargain was placed at the centre of post-invasion attempts at transition and peacebuilding in Iraq. It is this informal consociationalism that undermined the coherence of the state and delegitimized the political system. The article critically examines the consociational and political settlement literature. It concludes that Pierre Bourdieu's approach to competition in the political field …
Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied
Beyond structure and agency: Rethinking political identities in Iraq after 2003
This paper examines ethno‐symbolic and instrumental explanations of ethnic and sectarian identities placed within the constructivist turn in the study of political identity, both in the abstract and how they have been deployed to explain the increasing contemporary influence of ethnosectarian mobilisation in Iraq and the wider Middle East. The paper identifies explanatory value in these approaches but finds their focus on either ideational struct…
Sectarianization and De-sectarianization in the Struggle for Iraq’s Political Field
Iraq’s political system, an elite pact justified through ethno-religious consociationalism or sectarian apportionment (Muhasasa Ta’ifiyya), was created in the aftermath of invasion and regime change in 2003. The system’s legitimation was based on a very specific understanding of Iraqi society and the role of elections in managing that society. However, this system did not prevent the brutal civil war that raged in Iraq from 2004 until 2008. Once …
Enemy Images, Coercive Socio-Engineering and Civil War in Iraq
Previous attempts to explain US policy towards Iraq from 2003 onwards have understood US intentions and actions through a coherent, rational-utility-maximizing model of the state. This article seeks to de-centre this rationalist explanation by examining the ideational drivers that shaped the Bush administration's understanding of Iraq and hence its policy towards the remaking of its post-invasion politics. In order to gain ideational coherence, b…
Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and Its Problems
This paper looks at the applicability of formal, informal, liberal and corporate consociationalism to Iraq. It examines the drafting of the Iraqi constitution in 2005 and the political system it consecrated. It argues that the political system in Iraq is a good example of informal consociationalism, with government formation governed by unwritten consociational rules and norms. It then examines the negative problems connected with this system, pr…
State and society in Iraq ten years after regime change: The Rise of a New Authoritarianism
This article examines the rise of a new authoritarianism in Iraq ten years after the invasion that removed Saddam Hussein. It traces the centralization of political and coercive power in the hands of Iraq's Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. From his appointment in 2006, Maliki successfully moved to constrain the power of parliament and the independent agencies set up by the American-led occupation to oversee the state. He removed key politicians an…
The ideological roots of failure: The application of kinetic neo-liberalism to Iraq
This article argues that American policy towards Iraq went through four major shifts between the invasion in 2003 and the announcement of the surge in 2007. The best way to understand the Bush administration's evolving policy towards Iraq is by examining the ideological parameters within which it was made. The article assesses various approaches to understanding the relationship between ideology, policy making and foreign policy, concluding that …
Iraq: The contradictions of exogenous state-building in historical perspective
This article compares Britain's failed attempt at building a stable, liberal state in Iraq from 1914 to 1932 with the USA's struggle to stabilise the country after regime change in April 2003. It sets out a template for endogenous state-building based on the evolution of the European state system. It then compares this to exogenous extra-European state-building after both World War I and the Cold War. It focuses on three key stages: the impositio…
Intervention and dreams of exogenous statebuilding: The application of Liberal Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq
The central thesis of this article is that when faced with state collapse, rising violence, and a complex stabilisation effort, the US, UN, and NATO in Afghanistan and the US and Britain in Iraq, deployed the dominant, if not only, international approach available, Liberal Peacebuilding. The article traces the rise of Liberal Peacebuilding across the 1990s. It argues that four units of analysis within neoliberal ideology, the individual, the mark…
Coming face to face with bloody reality: Liberal common sense and the ideological failure of the Bush doctrine in Iraq
Iraqi Transitions: From regime change to state collapse
This paper focuses on the US occupation of Iraq from the seizing of Baghdad in April 2003 until the official hand-over of sovereignty to the Iraqi government in June 2004. It seeks to explain the reasons for the failure of US forces to impose order on and then stabilise the country by examining the political and sociological legacy of Saddam Hussein, US planning before and after the war and how the occupation set about trying to build political s…
Introduction: BetweenWataniyyaandTa'ifia; understanding the relationship between state‐based nationalism and sectarian identity in the Middle East
This introduction to the four papers that make up the themed section locates them in the wider theoretical, comparative, and historical perspectives from which they originate. First, it places the study of communalist or sectarian identities in the Middle East in broader comparative debates about the study of ethnic and nationalist identities. It then examines the causalities underpinning the shifting relationship between these different identiti…
Iraq's Road Back to Dictatorship
The Causes of US Failure in Iraq
Iraq, Consociationalism and the Incoherence of the State
This paper uses Iraq as a case study to answer the research question, how do consociational settlements impact the state? Firstly, the paper argues that consociationalism, at best, has an under-theorized conception of the state, implicitly defaulting to an unexamined neo-Weberian model. The paper then surveys state theory and finds that key works on the state in the Middle East are vulnerable to the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. To overc…
The failure of sanctions and the evolution of international policy towards Iraq, 1990–2003
The day after Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 660 condemning Iraq’s aggression and demanding that it withdraw. A week later it passed Resolution 661 demanding that UN Member States prevent all trade and financial transactions with Iraq. In all of its previous history, the Security Council had only imposed sanctions to discipline errant states twice before. The precedent used for the dra…
Iraq and the Next American President
The original justification for the invasion of Iraq, the incompetence displayed in its aftermath, and the high costs of the occupation have undermined the possibility of bipartisan agreement on Iraq. The danger for both US policymakers and the long-suffering Iraqi people is that American politics will continue to shape Iraq policy well beyond the next US presidential election on 4 November 2008. While both candidates have presented starkly differ…
Afghanistan and the Failure of Liberal Peacebuilding
The collapse of the US-aligned Afghan government and the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban in 2021 as the United States withdrew its forces was ultimately caused by a change in US government policy in June 2003. At that point, the George W. Bush administration dropped its aversion to state-building and its plan for a limited intervention designed to rid the country of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US instead undertook an extended exercise in libera…
Can Iraq Be Saved
Using the Sykes–Picot agreement to explain the Middle East falsely extrapolates from a single moment. This misuse of history will lead to poor policy
The Sardinian, the Texan and the Tikriti: Gramsci, The Comparative Autonomy of the Middle Eastern State and Regime Change in Iraq’
Iraq, Regime Change, and the Reconstruction of the Security Field: The Rebirth of Impunity in a Disaggregated State
This paper examines the causes and consequences of the politics of impunity that have come to dominate Iraq after regime change in 2003. It does this by reviewing and deploying Walter Benjamin’s work, Towards the Critique of Violence, which overtly separates law from justice, anchoring law instead into its own founding myths or gewalt. The paper places Benjamin’s work in dialogue with sociological understandings of a disaggregated or polymorphous…
A Sovereign Iraq
The passing of UN Resolution 1546 and the granting of sovereignty to the Interim Iraqi Government were heralded in June 2004 as marking a watershed in both international and national attitudes to Iraq. In spite of the protracted negotiations in New York, the delivery of international legal sovereignty back to Baghdad was the most straightforward aspect of the whole Iraqi problem. Domestic sovereignty, the ability of the new Iraqi government to ru…
Avoiding Globalization? The Political Economy of Development in the Middle East and North Africa
US intervention and possible Iraqi futures
Saddam Hussein ruled through the ‘shadow state’ a network of patronage and violence that transformed Iraqi society. For the United States to successfully break the shadow state and build a stable government, it has to change how it interacts with the Iraqi population. This would involve the move from despotic power, the deployment of military force to facilitate the state's survivalal, to infrastructural power, and the creation of legal rational …
Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied
An examination of the construction of the modern state of Iraq under the auspices of the British Empire, from 1920 and 1932. Parallels are drawn between the polices of a declining British empire and those of the current administration.
A Sovereign Iraq
The passing of UN Resolution 1546 and the granting of sovereignty to the Interim Iraqi Government were heralded in June 2004 as marking a watershed in both international and national attitudes to Iraq. In spite of the protracted negotiations in New York, the delivery of international legal sovereignty back to Baghdad was the most straightforward aspect of the whole Iraqi problem. Domestic sovereignty, the ability of the new Iraqi government to ru…
Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied
Iraqi Transitions: From regime change to state collapse
This paper focuses on the US occupation of Iraq from the seizing of Baghdad in April 2003 until the official hand-over of sovereignty to the Iraqi government in June 2004. It seeks to explain the reasons for the failure of US forces to impose order on and then stabilise the country by examining the political and sociological legacy of Saddam Hussein, US planning before and after the war and how the occupation set about trying to build political s…
The Sardinian, the Texan and the Tikriti: Gramsci, The Comparative Autonomy of the Middle Eastern State and Regime Change in Iraq’
Iraq: The contradictions of exogenous state-building in historical perspective
This article compares Britain's failed attempt at building a stable, liberal state in Iraq from 1914 to 1932 with the USA's struggle to stabilise the country after regime change in April 2003. It sets out a template for endogenous state-building based on the evolution of the European state system. It then compares this to exogenous extra-European state-building after both World War I and the Cold War. It focuses on three key stages: the impositio…
The Causes of US Failure in Iraq
Iraq and the Next American President
The original justification for the invasion of Iraq, the incompetence displayed in its aftermath, and the high costs of the occupation have undermined the possibility of bipartisan agreement on Iraq. The danger for both US policymakers and the long-suffering Iraqi people is that American politics will continue to shape Iraq policy well beyond the next US presidential election on 4 November 2008. While both candidates have presented starkly differ…
Coming face to face with bloody reality: Liberal common sense and the ideological failure of the Bush doctrine in Iraq
The failure of sanctions and the evolution of international policy towards Iraq, 1990–2003
The day after Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 660 condemning Iraq’s aggression and demanding that it withdraw. A week later it passed Resolution 661 demanding that UN Member States prevent all trade and financial transactions with Iraq. In all of its previous history, the Security Council had only imposed sanctions to discipline errant states twice before. The precedent used for the dra…
The US and Iraq: Time to Go Home
Given the record of the US occupation and the profound limitations of America's present stature, the Barack Obama administration is right to continue to draw down the American presence in Iraq. But in remembering the egregious mistakes of its predecessor the administration should not claim victory as it exits. It should not, as Vice President Joe Biden did in the midst of the de-Ba'athification crisis, claim all is well in Baghdad. A more honest …
The ideological roots of failure: The application of kinetic neo-liberalism to Iraq
This article argues that American policy towards Iraq went through four major shifts between the invasion in 2003 and the announcement of the surge in 2007. The best way to understand the Bush administration's evolving policy towards Iraq is by examining the ideological parameters within which it was made. The article assesses various approaches to understanding the relationship between ideology, policy making and foreign policy, concluding that …
Fred Halliday: High modernism and a social science of the Middle East
This article examines Fred Halliday's research and writing on the politics of the Middle East. It classifies Halliday as a 'high modernist', who organized his work around a constant commitment to a universal rationality, historical progress and an opposition to relativism and a particularist reading of the Middle East. The article identifies the two dominant units of analysis that shaped Halliday's work on the region throughout his life. These we…
Enemy Images, Coercive Socio-Engineering and Civil War in Iraq
Previous attempts to explain US policy towards Iraq from 2003 onwards have understood US intentions and actions through a coherent, rational-utility-maximizing model of the state. This article seeks to de-centre this rationalist explanation by examining the ideational drivers that shaped the Bush administration's understanding of Iraq and hence its policy towards the remaking of its post-invasion politics. In order to gain ideational coherence, b…
Iraq's Road Back to Dictatorship
Intervention and dreams of exogenous statebuilding: The application of Liberal Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq
The central thesis of this article is that when faced with state collapse, rising violence, and a complex stabilisation effort, the US, UN, and NATO in Afghanistan and the US and Britain in Iraq, deployed the dominant, if not only, international approach available, Liberal Peacebuilding. The article traces the rise of Liberal Peacebuilding across the 1990s. It argues that four units of analysis within neoliberal ideology, the individual, the mark…
Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change
State and society in Iraq ten years after regime change: The Rise of a New Authoritarianism
This article examines the rise of a new authoritarianism in Iraq ten years after the invasion that removed Saddam Hussein. It traces the centralization of political and coercive power in the hands of Iraq's Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki. From his appointment in 2006, Maliki successfully moved to constrain the power of parliament and the independent agencies set up by the American-led occupation to oversee the state. He removed key politicians an…
Can Iraq Be Saved
Using the Sykes–Picot agreement to explain the Middle East falsely extrapolates from a single moment. This misuse of history will lead to poor policy
The Danger of Analogical Myths: Explaining the Power and Consequences of the Sykes-Picot Delusion
Even before its hundredth year anniversary on 16 May 2016, the Sykes-Picot agreement had become a widely cited historical analogy both in the region itself and in Europe and the United States. In the Middle East, it is frequently deployed as an infamous example of European imperial betrayal and Western attempts more generally to keep the region divided, in conflict, and easy to dominate. In Europe and the United States, however, its role as a his…
Back to the future
The US occupation needed to identify and marginalize other indigenous political forces that might destabilize a pro-US agenda. The decision makers that drove the US to invade and their top administrator who ran the first year of the occupation were unambiguous that the target of the war and its aftermath was the political economy of Iraq. On the eve of the US invasion in 2003, the political economy built by the Ba'athist regime had proven to be b…
US foreign policy in the Middle East
This chapter examines the main dynamics that have transformed US foreign policy towards the Middle East since World War I from the time of Woodrow Wilson to that of Donald Trump. It first considers the applicability of realist, Marxist, and constructivist theories of international relations before discussing the ways in which the Cold War, oil, and Israel have shaped American foreign policy. In particular, it shows how the United States’ tactical…
Iraq: A Year of Living Dangerously
The events of 2018 demonstrate that Iraq’s structural problems are no nearer to being solved than they were before the liberation of Mosul a year ago
Political science (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (27 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Political economy (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East (18 works) · State (computer science (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Democracy (7 works)