Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq

by Zainab Saleh

Political Undesirables 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.

200 pages, Paperback

Published December 9, 2025

Reviews

[Lauan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zainab Saleh's latest book is an important contribution to the study of modern Iraq. It deals with the dynamics of citizenship laws, minority politics, and colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule (the last days of the pro British monarchy and later the Baath period). The research in this book combines political, social, and legal history with readings of more recent autobiographical and fiction works by authors of Iraqi origin as well as oral history. Two concepts guide the author's writing: "the right to uproot" & "the right to reclaim". Saleh deals with two separate, but still strangely entangled, historical case studies: (i) the denaturalization of Iraqi Jews and their subsequent collective exodus from Iraq in the 1950s and (ii) the denaturalization and deportation of so-called "Iraqis of Iranian origin" (Arab and Kurdish Shia) in the 1980s. These are communities whose ancestors, during the Ottoman period in Iraq, held Persian rather than Ottoman citizenship. Saleh brilliantly demonstrates how citizenship laws were weaponized by ruling elites in order to uproot and punish whole communities that came to be perceived as a threat to a political project based on an Arab Iraqi nationalism. these laws, Saleh emphasizes, are of colonial origin (British mandate in Iraq), but have been adapted and amended by post-colonial regimes. Next to the historical sketch of those communities' uprooting from Iraq, Saleh engages creatively with autobiographies and other writings by authors from those uprooted communities. For instance, the author discusses »Three Worlds - Memoirs of an Arab-Jew« by Avi Shlaim. In this autobiography, Shlaim recounts the story of his family as well as his own growing up in Iraq as Iraqi Jews until they went into exile in Israel in 1950. Saleh argues, based on her discussion of Shlaim's work and several other authors, that even after their uprooting from their place of origin, exiled Iraqi Jews as well as exiled Arab and Kurdish Shia (in Baathist discourse and legal language collectively called "taba'iyya iraniyya", as to indicate their alleged Iranian origin) exercised their "right to reclaim", that is, to reclaim their Iraqi Identity and develop alternative modes of belonging even after they collectively got stripped of their citizenship. »Political Undesirables« is, to my knowledge, the first academic work that connects the historical experiences of these diverse Iraqi communities. The book really is seminal scholarship and also really accessible for the non-specialist reader. It could have benefited however from pointing to comparative cases, for instance citizenship laws with regards to the Kurds in Syria or Jewish communities in other Arab countries. This would have allowed the author to situate her case studies in a broader regional trend.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Illuminating analysis of citizenship stripping in Iraq from the days of the monarchy onward.

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

citizenship, denaturalization, gender based violence, diaspora