Cities, Power, and Everyday Order

What a Book on Baghdad Reveals about Cities, Power, and Everyday Life [9 min read]

Most readers here know my work through Iran, geopolitics, and the crisis politics of the Middle East. But before returning to the United States in 2016, after my release as a hostage of the Islamic Republic, I had spent much of my academic career as a political scientist and urbanist. The results of more than twenty years of on-the-ground research in Iran were published in my book Creating Local Democracy in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which places Iran in comparative perspective alongside cases such as China, Indonesia, India, and Pakistan, and examines political decentralization, local governance, and the uneven relationship between reform and democratization. (More on the book, reviews, and presentations here.) My turn here to Baghdad therefore does not mark a departure from that work. It deepens and broadens it.

This urban strand has also appeared in several posts on this Substack, especially under the urbanism tag. Those pieces have often focused on urban politics in New York and Tehran—hence the title Tales of My Two Cities—but the intention was always broader than those two cases alone. What interests me is the comparative study of cities, power, and everyday order across very different political and developmental settings, in what is still too crudely called the Global North and Global South. That phrase is too imprecise for my taste, but that is for another time.

So today I want to post something a little different. This essay grows out of a review I wrote of Contested City: Citizen Advocacy and Survival in Modern Baghdad (2025) by Alissa Walter, a book on modern Baghdad. On one level, it is about urban governance in Iraq. But it is also about a larger question that matters across the region: how ordinary life is organized, how states actually reach society below the level of ideology and headlines, and what happens when administrative order is weak, fragmented, or overpoliticized.

Most writing on Iraq gravitates toward dictatorship, war, sanctions, invasion, sectarianism, and foreign intervention. All of that matters. But this book asks a different question: how was Baghdad actually governed from below? Drawing on extensive archival research, it shifts attention from the state as an abstract, monolithic entity to the neighborhood-level officials and local intermediaries through whom rule was lived on the ground. Its focus is on districts, mukhtars, ration agents, party operatives, and the administrative routines that shaped access to services, punishment, information, and survival. The result is an illuminating account of everyday politics in modern Baghdad and a serious attempt to show how authoritarian power operated through local social worlds rather than simply above them.

That question also bears, indirectly but importantly, on Iran. I have argued repeatedly that Iranian society is more socially modern, more adaptive, and in important respects more ready for democracy than many outside observers assume. Part of the reason the Islamic Republic has proven more resilient than many outsiders expected is that everyday life outside the directly political sphere has often been managed better than in some neighboring states. That does not make the Islamic Republic legitimate. But it does help explain its durability. As I argued in my New Republic essay, “Their Fascism and Ours,” the high degree of Iranian adaptability under stress is reinforced, in part, by the fact that everyday life beyond politics has remained relatively governable.

I say this as someone who now lives in New York and would never trade the political and civic freedoms I have here. But as someone who also lived in Tehran for more than fifteen years, I can say plainly that Tehran is, in many respects, cleaner, better managed, more orderly in its roads and public transport, and often safer in everyday urban life than many parts of New York City—the richest city in the world. None of this legitimizes authoritarian rule. But it does help explain one of its social effects: it can render life under it not just coercive, but in certain domains tolerable.

Looking at Baghdad from below helps illuminate, by contrast, what happens when urban governance is weaker, more fragmented, more politicized, and less capable of organizing everyday life. That is one reason this book matters beyond Iraq.

The book’s real strength lies in the administrative texture it recovers. It shows Baghdad not only as a site of coups, wars, dictatorship, sanctions, invasion, and occupation, but as a city governed through smaller units: districts, neighborhoods, ration offices, petty officials, local fixers, and the narrow bureaucratic channels through which people sought food, housing, signatures, permissions, exemptions, and relief. That is a valuable corrective. Too much writing on Iraq remains trapped either at the level of regime ideology and high politics or, conversely, at the level of geopolitical intervention. This book shows how power was also lived in queues, forms, stamps, ration cards, petitions, and everyday administrative encounters.

Its treatment of food rationing during the sanctions period is especially illuminating. The point is not simply that the Iraqi state distributed food. It is that rationing became one of the main ways the state entered ordinary life, and that this system depended heavily on local intermediaries who registered households, transmitted requests, managed access, and exercised some discretion. In that sense, the book shows well that authoritarian rule does not operate only from above. It is localized, mediated, and socially embedded.

The chapter on petitions is also rich. Here too the author opens a valuable archive. People wrote for housing, food, transfers, medical help, and redress against arbitrary decisions. That matters. It tells us something important about how ordinary Baghdadis understood state responsibility and the narrow channels through which they tried to navigate a coercive order. It also reminds us that even under dictatorship, citizens do not disappear into silence. They adapt, maneuver, plead, improvise, and sometimes manage to extract small forms of relief.

But this is also where my reservations begin.

My central criticism is that the book overstates “citizen advocacy” and understates coercion, hierarchy, and top-down constraint. The author wants to show that Baghdadis were not simply passive objects of state power. That corrective is fair and in part necessary. But the stronger claim—that ordinary Baghdadis were in some meaningful sense advocating for their interests as citizens, and even “shaping their own history”—goes too far.

Much of the evidence presented here points not to citizenship in any strong sense, but to supplication within domination. People living under dictatorship can certainly believe that the state owes them food, aid, medical treatment, or some basic fairness. But that does not mean they are functioning as citizens with meaningful rights. Nor does it mean that petitions should be read as advocacy in the fuller political sense we usually attach to that term. In many cases what we see is dependence, maneuver, rhetorical adaptation, and survival under constraint.

This matters because the language we choose carries theory with it. Terms such as “social contract,” “rights,” and even “justice” are doing a great deal of work in the book, but without enough conceptual clarification. Under a violent authoritarian regime, an expectation of relief or fairness is not the same thing as a right. The phrase “implicit social contract” feels too consensual for a system marked by surveillance, fear, ritualized obedience, and sharp asymmetries of power. In many instances, what the evidence really suggests is not justice but administrative mercy, not citizenship but a bounded and highly unequal field of appeal.

Relatedly, the book needs more political theory, not more theory for its own sake, but more conceptual precision. In particular, it needs a sharper distinction between local governance in authoritarian systems and local governance in liberal-democratic ones. The existence of neighborhood-level institutions, local officials, administrative mediation, and even some discretion does not in itself amount to democratic participation, meaningful citizenship, or bottom-up agency. Authoritarian systems also govern locally. They also rely on subnational institutions. They also produce spaces of mediation and negotiation. But that does not dissolve the asymmetry between ruler and ruled. This is where the book occasionally seems too eager to blur the line between state and society. Of course that line was not absolute. Of course officials were embedded in neighborhoods and local social relations. But it does not follow that the state thereby ceased to be coercive, vertically organized, and profoundly unequal in its relation to society. To say that the state operated through local webs of power is true. To infer from that a strong form of citizen advocacy is less convincing.

I would add a third shortcoming. The book pays too little attention to the private urban marketplace in land, housing, and transportation. This is an unfortunate recurring feature of much contemporary urban scholarship, which often overpoliticizes urban governance and underestimates the distributive force of markets. Except in communist systems where private property is absent, the life chances of ordinary urban residents are shaped not only by the state but also by access to land, rent, housing markets, and mobility. Who can live where, at what cost, with what access to work, services, and safety, is never simply an administrative question. By underplaying this dimension, the book narrows the field of explanation too much and attributes too much causal weight to political mediation alone.

There is also a problem of scale. The book covers a very large historical span, roughly from 1950 to 2011. That sweep allows the author to show continuity across monarchy, republicanism, Baʿthist rule, sanctions, invasion, and occupation. But it also risks flattening major historical differences. The meanings of neighborhood, petitioning, mediation, and urban order changed across these periods. A narrower frame might have allowed for a thicker account of how those forms were transformed by war, sanctions, and regime change.

Still, these criticisms should not obscure the book’s real achievement. It opens an important window onto Baghdad from below. It reminds us that state power is experienced not only in speeches, prisons, and battlefields, but in queues, offices, stamps, ration cards, housing requests, and the thousand small frictions of governed life. And it recovers, with care and seriousness, the constrained intelligence with which ordinary people tried to make life possible under conditions they did not control.

That is also why this book matters beyond Iraq. One of the weaknesses of contemporary commentary on the Middle East is that it remains too event-driven, too centered on crises, leaders, militias, diplomacy, and war. All of that matters. But it misses something essential if it does not also ask how ordinary life is organized, how cities function or fail to function, how administration reaches society, and how people navigate everyday systems of order and disorder.

Looking at Baghdad from below does not answer those questions for Iran. But it sharpens them. And that is one reason reopening this urban strand of my work feels timely.