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In modern Iraq, processes of state formation and national integration have been consistently affected by a number of ethnic issues and concerns. This became particularly evident in the decade after the country became independent from British Mandatory control in 1932. First, in the immediate postcolonial period ethnicity became central to the development of Iraqi national and international politics. Second, ethnic specificity emerged as a major factor in the shaping of postcolonial Iraqi society, despite the continuous attempts at enforcing a new national identity on the part of a still fragile state. This article discusses the important role played by ethnicity during the first stages of Iraqi national development by focusing on the impact of conscription on the Yazidi Kurds of Jabal Sinjar.

In this path-breaking and multi-layered account of one of the least explored societies in the Middle East, Nelida Fuccaro examines the political and social life of the Gulf city and its coastline, as exemplified by Manama in Bahrain. Written as an ethnography of space, politics and community, it addresses the changing relationship between urban development, politics and society before and after the discovery of oil. By using a variety of local sources and oral histories, Fuccaro questions the role played by the British Empire and oil in state-making. Instead, she draws attention to urban residents, elites and institutions as active participants in state and nation building. She also examines how the city has continued to provide a source of political, social and sectarian identity since the early nineteenth century, challenging the view that the advent of oil and modernity represented a radical break in the urban past of the region.

Fuccaro’s article explores new geographies of leisure and consumption that emerged in Manama and in Bahrain’s oil camps in the first decades of oil development. New forms of public communication such as the press, printed materials, and cinema are used to explore urban spaces, actors, and social contexts of leisure and consumption as the unique by-product of oil. On the one hand, the focus is on the images and messages popularized by these new media and on the emergence and influence of an advertising and public relations market. On the other, a variety of actors are analyzed as the producers and recipients of these messages and images: Manama’s young people and the city’s entrepreneurs, the public relations strategists of the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) and the Bahrain government, the expatriate housewives, and the indigenous oil workers. The article begins with a discussion of Manama’s youth culture in the 1950s as epitomized by the cinema and the youth club. It then opens the discussion to the broader landscape of Bahrain’s capital city as the center of a new world of commodities and services. Manama’s urban life is then contrasted to that of opulent and secluded Awali, the company town built by BAPCO in 1937, in order to illustrate how Awali’s lifestyle was experienced, represented, and perceived by its expatriate population, foreign visitors, and Bahrainis. The last section of the article analyzes the role of BAPCO in popularizing new urban and suburban consumer and leisure cultures since the early 1950s through magazines, cinema, and propaganda materials.