• Medientyp: E-Artikel
  • Titel: SOCIAL BROKERS AND LEFTIST–SADRIST COOPERATION IN IRAQ'S REFORM PROTEST MOVEMENT: BEYOND INSTRUMENTAL ACTION
  • Beteiligte: Robin-D'Cruz, Benedict
  • Erschienen: Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2019
  • Erschienen in: International Journal of Middle East Studies, 51 (2019) 2, Seite 257-280
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • DOI: 10.1017/s0020743819000047
  • ISSN: 0020-7438; 1471-6380
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  • Beschreibung: AbstractThis 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.