Checkpoints, competing ‘sovereignties’, and everyday life in Iraq

Abstract

Iraq is home to a patchwork of competing sovereignties with their own security actors, all of which routinely use checkpoints in the provision of ‘security’. However, as this article demonstrates, checkpoints predominantly function to assert authority over space. Utilising 262 interviews with those forced to move through checkpoints in Nineveh, Iraq, and through the development of an analytical framework that focuses on the ‘theft of time’ and the ‘stolen dignity’, this article examines the everyday strain that checkpoints exert on people's lives. It asks what the control of space by the multiplicity of competing ‘sovereignties’ means for those who must live in and in between these spaces. In doing so the article demonstrates how the impacts of creating borders reverberate way beyond the checkpoint itself, the inequalities it creates and reproduces, and the varied types of loss it fashions.