Deleuze & Guattari on protest weakness in Iraq

TY - JOUR

T1 - Deleuze & Guattari on protest weakness in Iraq

AU - Robin-D'Cruz, Ben

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - Diverse forms of protest in contemporary Iraq have not altered the country’s political system and in some respects have reinforced it. This paper argues that the existing literature has not fully explained this protest weakness, due in part to a division between an agency-focused protest literature emphasising discourse, symbolic politics, and the micro-politics of protests, where less attention has been paid to the material and structural elements; and a literature focused on the political system which has typically adopted more macro and structural models. By contrast, this paper uses concepts from Deleuze and Guattari to explore empirical case studies of the encounter between protests and political power in Iraq. It finds the notion of social assemblage useful for drawing the expressive and the material, the micro and the macro, back together on the same ontological plane. Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the behaviours of rhizomatic (decentred) and arborescent (hierarchic) structures can also clarify a key source of protest weakness in Iraq as the rhizomatic tendencies of the country’s political system. This refers primarily to the tendency for destabilisations of the system engendered by protests to function as a mechanism for the expansion of its political power over new social territory.

AB - Diverse forms of protest in contemporary Iraq have not altered the country’s political system and in some respects have reinforced it. This paper argues that the existing literature has not fully explained this protest weakness, due in part to a division between an agency-focused protest literature emphasising discourse, symbolic politics, and the micro-politics of protests, where less attention has been paid to the material and structural elements; and a literature focused on the political system which has typically adopted more macro and structural models. By contrast, this paper uses concepts from Deleuze and Guattari to explore empirical case studies of the encounter between protests and political power in Iraq. It finds the notion of social assemblage useful for drawing the expressive and the material, the micro and the macro, back together on the same ontological plane. Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the behaviours of rhizomatic (decentred) and arborescent (hierarchic) structures can also clarify a key source of protest weakness in Iraq as the rhizomatic tendencies of the country’s political system. This refers primarily to the tendency for destabilisations of the system engendered by protests to function as a mechanism for the expansion of its political power over new social territory.

KW - Deleuze & Guattari

KW - Iraqi protest movements

KW - Social movements

KW - rhizome

KW - social assemblage theory

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85184424973&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/01436597.2024.2307554

DO - 10.1080/01436597.2024.2307554

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0143-6597

VL - 45

SP - 1589

EP - 1607

JO - Third World Quarterly

JF - Third World Quarterly

IS - 10

ER -