Academic by Dr Benedict Robin-D'Cruz
Sociology of Religion , 2024
This article theorizes Islamist transformations by mapping the evolution of Sadrism in contempora... more This article theorizes Islamist transformations by mapping the evolution of Sadrism in contemporary Iraq through a period of state collapse, war, and political consolidation. Using Pierre Bourdieu, this perspective emphasizes how field-based crises can synchronize and amplify homological relations between the deep-lying structures which differentiate religious from political spheres of Islamist activity. The article identifies these homological processes and structures and explains how they have patterned underlying morphologies of Sadrist politics. This differs from existing literature on Islamist movements where religion has often been contextualized in terms of material social conditions, or priority ascribed to political struggles and structures and emphasis placed on surface-level symbolic practices. By contrast, a Bourdieusian lens provides a theoretically robust approach to study the relationship between religion and politics, and an evaluative framework for Islamist transformations which is less normative than some alternatives and more generalizable beyond the context of Islamism and Islam.
Third World Quarterly , 2024
Diverse forms of protest in contemporary Iraq have not altered the country’s political system and... more 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.
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2019
This article develops a concept of social brokerage to explain leftist-Sadrist cooperation during... more This article develops a concept of social brokerage to explain leftist-Sadrist cooperation during Iraq's 2015 protest movement. Conventional understanding holds that Iraq's secular-leftist civil trend and Shiʿi Islamist factions have been mutually isolated, and at times fierce antagonists, in Iraq's post-2003 politics. This view has been challenged by an emergent political alliance between a faction of the civil trend and the Shiʿi Islamist Sadrist movement. By comparing this alliance with the failure of another Shiʿi Islamist group, ʿAsaʾib Ahl al-Haq, to involve itself with and exploit the protest movement, this article isolates the conditions which determined the dynamics of leftist-Islamist interactions. Shifting the focus away from elite politics and structural-instrumental explanations favored by rational choice models, this article reveals a longer backstory of social and ideological interactions between less senior actors that transgressed leftist-Islamist social boundaries. From this context, potential brokers emerged, capable of skilfully mediating leftist-Sadrist interactions.
POMEPS STUDIES 35 Religion, Violence, and the State in Iraq, 2019
Cultural Antecedents of the Leftist-Sadrist Alliance:
A case study of Sadrist institution building
Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2019
This paper analyses the participation of Iraq's Sadrist movement in the public sphere. It reveals... more This paper analyses the participation of Iraq's Sadrist movement in the public sphere. It reveals how a secularisation of the movement's political practices has been shaped by the interaction of the social practices of ordinary Sadrists and their political and religious leaders with Iraqi political public space as a particular context for social action. At the same time, this secularizing process is in tension with the Sadrists' messianic mode of religious authority and the movement's distorted process of political professionalisation. The contestation of this secularising process is also linked to a wider ideological struggle between the political activist and clerical strata of the movement.
Papers by Dr Benedict Robin-D'Cruz
The Sadrist Movement in Iraq: Between Protest and Power Politics, 2022
For policymakers inside and outside Iraq, including in the West, Muqtada al-Sadr has been an enig... more For policymakers inside and outside Iraq, including in the West, Muqtada al-Sadr has been an enigmatic leader claiming many identities, shifting from insurgent militia leader to reformist protest leader, and from election winner and government coalition builder to revolutionary. His influence is of critical importance to Iraqi and regional politics. — This research paper argues that Sadr has pursued a strategy of ‘controlled instability’, seeking to expedite political destabilization, not with the intention of reforming or bringing down the political system, but to bolster his own political power within the dominant Shia apportionment of the Iraqi state. A shift from a Shia-centric to Sadr-centric governance strategy accelerated after the movement’s 2021 election victory, further destabilizing Iraq’s already fragmented politics.
Century International , 2022
Shia Islamist parties have dominated Iraq’s post-2003 electoral politics and have taken a control... more Shia Islamist parties have dominated Iraq’s post-2003 electoral politics and have taken a controlling share of the country’s political system. Among these factions, the Sadrist Movement—led by the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr—appears particularly adept at mobilizing an electoral base and sustaining it over multiple election cycles. Most recently, the Sadrists emerged as the largest single party from Iraq’s October 2021 elections. The Sadrists in Basra collected more seats in 2021 than all the movement’s Shia Islamist rivals combined.1 This contrasts with trends in the wider region, where— despite the so-called “Islamist electoral edge”—Islamists have frequently failed to sustain electoral popularity or translate initial electoral success into enduring political hegemony.
Carnegie Middle East Centre, 2022
On August 29, 2022, Qom-based Grand Ayatollah Kazem Husseini al-Haaeri announced his resignation ... more On August 29, 2022, Qom-based Grand Ayatollah Kazem Husseini al-Haaeri announced his resignation as a marjaa taqlid, a religious authority and source of emulation in the Shia community. He encouraged his emulators (muqallidin) to switch their allegiance to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He also used his address to launch a scathing attack against Muqtada al-Sadr, the populist cleric and leader of Iraq’s Sadrist movement. Haaeri insinuated that Sadr lacked scholarly credentials and had deviated from the approach of the movement’s two great martyrs, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, Muqtada al-Sadr’s own father.
Chatham House, 2022
Following their shock victory in the 2021 elections, the Sadrists claimed they were poised to pus... more Following their shock victory in the 2021 elections, the Sadrists claimed they were poised to push Iraq towards a new type of politics. But after nine months of failing to form a government, their leader, populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has seemingly given up and withdrawn from the government formation process. Instead, he called for mass protests, sent his followers to invade and occupy parliament, and demanded another election. In response, his opponents, Nouri al-Maliki and the Iran-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces, sent loyalists to Baghdad's Green Zone, risking conflict between the two heavily armed sides. Although it is still unlikely this will lead to a Shia civil war, there are increasing concerns about the lengths Sadr is willing go to. As one policymaker asked the authors, 'can one man hold an entire country hostage?'
The Washington Post - TMC, 2022
Rallying anti-establishment protests strengthened Muqtada al-Sadr’s hand in the past. It might no... more Rallying anti-establishment protests strengthened Muqtada al-Sadr’s hand in the past. It might not work now.
Foreign Policy , 2022
Iraq’s most recent election promised change but ended up entrenching the establishment.
Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 2019
Cet article s’interesse a la participation a la sphere publique du mouvement sadriste en Irak. Il... more Cet article s’interesse a la participation a la sphere publique du mouvement sadriste en Irak. Il expose la facon dont l’articulation entre la sphere publique comme espace particulier de l’activite sociale, et les pratiques sociales des sadristes « ordinaires » et de leurs leaders politiques et religieux, a faconne un processus de secularisation des pratiques politiques du mouvement. Dans le meme temps, ce processus de secularisation continue d’etre freine par l’usage messianique que font les sadristes de l’autorite religieuse, et par leur manque de professionnalisation politique. La contestation de ce processus s’insere dans une lutte ideologique plus large entre les niveaux militant et clerical du mouvement. L’article lie cette lutte a une differenciation structurelle interne qui voit le mouvement sadriste partage sur des lignes sectorielles de plus en plus clivantes. Cette division contribue a consolider l’heterogeneite ideologique du mouvement, qui reflete une distinction dans les vocations des acteurs engages dans diverses formes de militantisme politique et celles des acteurs dont les pratiques relevent d’abord du champ religieux.
This thesis explores the formation of the leftist-Sadrist alliance that won Iraq's May 2018 natio... more This thesis explores the formation of the leftist-Sadrist alliance that won Iraq's May 2018 national elections. It argues that this cross-ideological social movement coalition was neither a case of two groups always primed for cooperation because of their shared social bases and political perspectives; nor was it merely an instrumental coalition negotiated between a narrow range of political elites. Rather, the alliance points to transformations in both the social and ideological structures of the two movements, and in the social contexts in which their strategic politics has been formed. This thesis uses a practice-based approach inspired by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to unpack these transformations. It uncovers forms of social struggle on cultural terrain, popular politics, intra-movement cleavages and systemic social crises and their effects in transforming the political strategies of these social movements. The outcome of this research is a new understanding of Iraq's secularleftist politics and the Sadr movement. These groups are shown to be both more ideologically heterogeneous, and their strategic politics more internally contested, than has hitherto been recognised.
London School of Economics, Conflict Research Programme, 2021
Southeast Iraq has witnessed considerable protest violence in recent years. Yet the nature of thi... more Southeast Iraq has witnessed considerable protest violence in recent years. Yet the nature of this violence, and its effects in shaping protest dynamics, have varied considerably between provinces, and when comparing different phases of mobilisation over time. Consequently, frequently cited macro-level factors (e.g., a breakdown in the elite-citizen social contract, uneven socio-economic development, poor public services, widespread corruption etc.) provide only a partial explanation of violent dynamics and cannot account for temporal and geographic disparities. By contrast, this paper presents a granular and groundlevel view of protest violence by drawing on a combination of protest event analysis and interview data. This is used to show how broader structural conditions and national-level politics intersect with more localised structures to produce distinct social logics that govern the application of protest violence, and its effects, in specific localities. The paper’s key finding is that effective intervention to alter violent dynamics around protests in Iraq depends on access to local and diffuse forms of power. Consequently, it is only elite political actors with reach into these local domains who regulate violent dynamics.
The Foreign Police Research Institute, 2020
Iraq’s Sadrist movement, led by populist Shi’i cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has been at the heart of I... more Iraq’s Sadrist movement, led by populist Shi’i cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has been at the heart of Iraqi politics
since 2003. The movement’s political strategies have shifted dramatically during this time, encompassing
militant insurgency, sectarian violence, electoral politics, and reform-oriented street protests. Consequently,
despite their prominence, the Sadrists’ shifting positions mean they remain one of the most complex and
frequently misunderstood movements in Iraq. This is further compounded by the near total absence of
engagement between the Sadrists and Western, particularly American, governments. As Sadr has changed
his movement’s politics again, this time toward a counter-protest stance, U.S. policymakers are once more
grappling with the dilemmas posed by a movement that is both powerful and obscure.
LSE Middle East Centre , 2020
The past month has seen a surge in protests in Iraq’s southernmost provinces. Most of this protes... more The past month has seen a surge in protests in Iraq’s southernmost provinces. Most of this protest activity has focused on economic issues and anger over faltering electricity and water supply. By contrast, the revolutionary protest politics of October 2019, led in the south primarily by student groups, appears to be faltering in its efforts to kickstart the movement.
LSE Middle East Centre, 2020
On 19 August, Riham Yacoub was executed by gunmen in central Basra. Riham was 30 years old; a gra... more On 19 August, Riham Yacoub was executed by gunmen in central Basra. Riham was 30 years old; a graduate in sports science who ran a women’s health and fitness centre in Basra. Since her death, Riham has frequently been described as one of Basra’s leading protest activists. A video has even circulated widely on social media claiming to show Riham leading protesters in chants during recent demonstrations in the province. However, this video is fake. The women it shows is not Riham and the protest is not in Basra. In reality, Riham was not a protest leader nor a political activist. She had withdrawn from participation in the protests after 2018, and she was never a leading protest organiser prior to this. So why was she assassinated?
Chatham House, 2020
The populist cleric has repositioned himself in Iraqi politics multiple times, but his recent shi... more The populist cleric has repositioned himself in Iraqi politics multiple times, but his recent shift against youth-led protesters may signal his decline as an autonomous political force.
Chatham House, 2019
The Basra Blueprint and the Future of Protest in Iraq Chatham House
Musings on Iraq, 2018
The results of the 2018 parliamentary elections in Iraq were a shock to many. Seemingly out of no... more The results of the 2018 parliamentary elections in Iraq were a shock to many. Seemingly out of nowhere the Sairoon list made of the Sadrists and the Iraqi Communist Party won the most seats. To have an Islamist religious figure align with a secular leftist was another twist. The two actually aligned several years beforehand during the annual protests that hit the country. To help explain Sairoon and its victory is University of Edinburgh PhD student Benedict Robin. He can be followed on Twitter @Benrobinz.
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Academic by Dr Benedict Robin-D'Cruz
Papers by Dr Benedict Robin-D'Cruz
since 2003. The movement’s political strategies have shifted dramatically during this time, encompassing
militant insurgency, sectarian violence, electoral politics, and reform-oriented street protests. Consequently,
despite their prominence, the Sadrists’ shifting positions mean they remain one of the most complex and
frequently misunderstood movements in Iraq. This is further compounded by the near total absence of
engagement between the Sadrists and Western, particularly American, governments. As Sadr has changed
his movement’s politics again, this time toward a counter-protest stance, U.S. policymakers are once more
grappling with the dilemmas posed by a movement that is both powerful and obscure.
since 2003. The movement’s political strategies have shifted dramatically during this time, encompassing
militant insurgency, sectarian violence, electoral politics, and reform-oriented street protests. Consequently,
despite their prominence, the Sadrists’ shifting positions mean they remain one of the most complex and
frequently misunderstood movements in Iraq. This is further compounded by the near total absence of
engagement between the Sadrists and Western, particularly American, governments. As Sadr has changed
his movement’s politics again, this time toward a counter-protest stance, U.S. policymakers are once more
grappling with the dilemmas posed by a movement that is both powerful and obscure.
Much has been written since the shock election result reflecting on Muqtada’s supposed transformation from ‘fiery cleric’ to political reformer who may now hold the key to Iraq’s future. Some have gone so far as to argue that the Islamist leader is now championing a ‘secular-oriented’ politics. This positive coverage tends to gloss over the profound scepticism about the reforming potential of the Sadrist–ICP alliance within Iraqi secular civil society. Nor does it dwell on the internal divisions and fragmentation of Iraq’s secular political scene that developed, in part, as a direct consequence of the Sadrist convergence.