Dr. Jessica Watkins

Promoting civil society has been a standard component of post-conflict democratic peacebuilding. In post-2003 Iraq, however, the international coalition's introduction of the muhasasa system (apportionment) inhibited local nongovernmental organizations' ability to hold the government to account and made many NGOs into vehicles of state capture.

This paper considers policing in two diverse districts in Ninawa province: a rundown Sunni tribal neighbourhood in Mosul, and a predominantly Christian town in a multi-ethnic district. Our findings suggest that while police conduct does impact how stakeholders view them, public trust in the police is at least as much a function of who the police are as of what they actually do, underscoring that police professionalism cannot substitute for political legitimacy more broadly.

The paper uses qualitative interview findings to demonstrate on the one hand that seemingly ‘local’ tribal solutions are built into national-level ‘peace strategies’, while on the other, state capture and power politics is infused into the management of apparently parochial disputes.