The majority of contemporary scholarship on Iraqi politics focuses on issues such as: the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Iraqi government; the obstinacy and ineptitude of many elements of Iraq’s political elite; the systemic corruption that is hollowing out the coffers of the state; the moribund bureaucracy that are struggling to deliver basic services and; of course, the deep-seated divisions within and between those that represent Iraq’s three main ethno-religious blocks: the Shia Arabs, the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds.

While each of these is certainly valid and important, most studies of contemporary Iraqi politics have failed to appreciate the informal political networks and the hidden geographies of power that have stood as bulwarks against foreign occupation, ethno-religious sectarianism and violence, and rising authoritarianism in this deeply troubled state. Given this context, this paper focuses on the specific case of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), Iraq’s largest and most powerful independent workers union, as an interesting example of informal power in Iraq that may well pose one of the greatest challenges to rising authoritarianism there.
Dr Benjamin Isakhan is Australian Research Council Discovery (DECRA) Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Citizenship and Globalization, and Convenor of the Australian Middle East Research Forum at Deakin University. Previously, Dr Isakhan was Research Fellow at the Centre for Dialogue at La Trobe University and Research Fellow for the Islamic Research Unit at Griffith University. He has also been Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago (US) and at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University (UK). Dr Isakhan is the author of Democracy in Iraq: History, Politics and Discourse (Ashgate, 2012); and editor of The Secret History of Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 [2011]), The Arab Revolutions in Context: Civil Society and Democracy in a Changing Middle East (Melbourne University Press, 2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy (Edinburgh University Press & Columbia University Press, 2012).