Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practices of denaturalization and expulsion of citizens have been mobilized by ruling elites to curb political opposition. Iraqi politicians, under both monarchical and republican rule, routinely employed the rhetoric of threats to national security, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens they deemed politically undesirable.

Using archival documents, ethnographic research, and literary and autobiographical works, Zainab Saleh shows how citizenship laws can serve as a mechanism to discipline the population. As she argues, these laws enforce commitment to the state's political order and normative values and eliminate dissenting citizens through charges of betrayal of the homeland. Citizenship in Iraq, thus, has functioned as a privilege closely linked to loyalty to the state, rather than as a right enjoyed unconditionally. With the rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism all over the world, this book offers a timely examination of how citizenship can become a tool to silence opposition and produce precarity through denaturalization.

Zainab Saleh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford, 2020).

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in this episode:

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 296-298 (on the concept of “the right to have rights”).
Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians. A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Zainab Saleh, Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford University Press, 2020).
Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (OneWorld, 2024).
Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017), 4 (on “emotional belonging”).

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