Peacebuilding and transitional justice are viewed as integral components of statebuilding in post-conflict spaces. This Special Issue critically evaluates statebuilding and peacebuilding in Iraq through macro and micro-level analyses of Iraq's political development following foreign-imposed regime change. In line with the articles in the Special Issue, this introduction critically examines Iraq's post-2003 trajectory as an outcome of the failure of securitized statebuilding and the absence of legitimacy in externally-imposed democratization. It concludes by highlighting the impact of expedient and exogenous statebuilding on transitional justice and post-conflict peacebuilding.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.