Manufacturing Sovereignty : International Law, Labour Struggle, and the Making of Iraq

This book delves into the legal and labour history of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq to explore the role international law and its institutions played in Iraq's state formation. Focusing on a turbulent period in global and Middle East history, it shows how the case of Iraq became a laboratory for experimentation with the concept of sovereignty by the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in Geneva.This resulted in the development of a doctrine of ‘semi-peripheral sovereignty’ to justify Iraq’s independence from the Mandate process.This novel doctrine and its operation within the provisions of the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty ensured the maintenance of British dominance over Iraq, especially to safeguard the extraction and transportation of its valuable oil resources to Western markets. The book traces how this legal doctrine impacted the everyday lives of working class Iraqis.It explores the governance of the extraterritorial spaces of capitalist accumulation and labour explo