In Print

SAIS

In Print

Q&A with Author

Lisa Blaydes ’98

State of Repression: Iraq Under Saddam Hussein

(Princeton University Press)
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Lisa Blaydes ’98 is a professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Your book relies on documents captured during the invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Which archives proved most useful?

The documents I used most were from the Iraqi Memory Foundation at the Hoover Institution. There are 11 million papers there. It’s the only sort of collection like this for a Middle Eastern autocracy. I also used documents from the now-defunct Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense University—which are transcripts of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet-level meetings—and the Iraqi Secret Police Files at the University of Colorado Boulder. Together, these documents provide a window into a society and a regime struggling for survival. The regime is on the rocks, trying to avoid both coups and popular revolts. In society, people are just struggling to survive.

What other things do these documents tell us about Iraq in this era?

They show what sort of information the regime was interested in collecting. They were always looking for more information to make their society more legible and to better control it. And they faced real constraints.

John Davis Photography

“These documents revealed countless examples of Iraqis trying to find small and large ways to rebel against the system.”

A key concept in State of Repression is a repressive regime’s ability to successfully “read” its people—i.e., the society’s “legibility.” In what ways did Iraq’s “illegibility” play out for Saddam Hussein’s regime?

When they [regime leaders] were in a tough position and unable to figure out who was for them and who was against them, they engaged in forms of group or collective punishment that had tremendous negative implications and created new identities in some parts of society—identities that were separate from what the state wanted them to have.

What struck you most as you researched the book?

These documents revealed countless examples of Iraqis trying to find small and large ways to rebel against the system. There were refusals to identify as a member of the Baath Party and assert their political independence. Iraqis also spread negative rumors that challenged the regime’s monopoly on information. Many of these rumors were quite subversive, pointing a finger of blame at Saddam Hussein or the regime itself.

Iraqis embraced the forms of human agency they had available to them to express their dissatisfaction with a cruel and repressive regime. It was important for me to see that there are political behaviors we can observe, even in the most repressive dictatorships.

— Richard Byrne

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