Dr. Sabreen Sattar Jabbar / Researcher
The monopoly of legitimate violence represents the fundamental pillar in political science literature and the sociology of the state for building a stable political entity capable of asserting its sovereignty. In the Iraqi case post-2003, the state-building process faced a structural challenge represented by the “arms dilemma” and the multiplicity of power centers outside official frameworks. This military and social proliferation of arms was not the product of a fleeting moment; rather, it came as a response to a massive security vacuum caused by the undermining of traditional military institutions after the fall of the former regime. This prompted political forces and social components to produce private defensive tools for self-protection in an environment lacking the rule of law.
This complex environment produced three main paradigms of armed legitimacies in Iraq, namely:
- Legal-Constitutional Legitimacy: Represented by the official military and security establishment (the army and police) directly subordinated to the sovereign ministries.
- Resistance (Ideological) Legitimacy: Emerged in the context of resisting the occupation or confronting the terrorist onslaught of the “ISIS” organization, acquiring its existential legitimacy from religious fatwas and popular acceptance.
- Hybrid Legitimacy: Forces that integrate into their identity both official status (government funding and legal cover) and ideological or partisan status (organic loyalty to sectarian or political leaderships).
Over the past two decades, the Iraqi state has suffered from this functional overlap. At many junctures, arms transformed from a tool for protecting national security into a pressure card to tip the scales in internal political competition, preventing the state from reaching the stage of the “Weberian monopoly” (referring to Max Weber) over legitimate violence.
In this context, calls to restrict and disarm weapons were not born of the moment; rather, they remained a continuous and renewed demand with the formation of every government, witnessing initiatives and interactions on three main levels:
- The Governmental Level: Through the efforts of successive governments (Al-Abadi, Al-Kadhimi, and Al-Sudani) to subjugate arms via executive decrees prohibiting factions from political action, even if implementation remained formalistic due to the political influence of these forces within the parliament.
- The Religious Level (The Religious Authority): Represented by its firm stances calling for the imposition of state authority, practically embodied in the “Shrine Mobilization” step, when it separated administratively and operationally from the Popular Mobilization Commission to be more committed to official orders.
- The Level of Faction and Resistance Leaders: This level constitutes the axis of the current transformation. Tracing official documents and statements reveals the division of the scene into two distinct phases: the phase before the call of the “National Shiite Movement,” and the phase after it.
While the pre-initiative phase was characterized by the absence of any voluntary desire to disarm, focusing on establishing the rationale for its retention and manufacturing justifications for its continuation, the post-initiative phase created a clear sorting within the armed scene, dividing it into two currents:
- A Flexible Current: Announced its support for the steps of the Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in enforcing the law and dismantling factional affiliations. This was manifested in practical procedural steps by some factions (such as Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Kata’ib al-Imam Ali, and Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya), through the formation of committees to inventory weapons and vehicles in preparation for their handover, ending partisan armed manifestations, and integrating under the state umbrella, in line with the religious authority’s directives.
- A Hardline (Rejectionist) Current: Represented by the Coordinating Committee for the Islamic Resistance and elite factions. This current views disarmament as a relinquishment of the deterrence doctrine, relying on ideological slogans that consider arms a legitimate and regional necessity not subject to local political bargaining.
This analytical and critical study seeks to deconstruct the dimensions of this dilemma, read the contexts of the “National Shiite Movement’s” initiative, and foresee the trajectories of the clash of armed legitimacies and its impact on the future of Iraqi state-building.
