On 25 September 2017, I spent the day at work listening to the Kurdish news in the background while being interrupted by phone calls from family and friends. What had seemed impossible was actually happening. After years of promises by both the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)1 and the Iraqi state, a Kurdish independence referendum was being held.2 One of the students I had met during my fieldwork in the city of Silêmanî told me that they would not be voting that day. People held mixed opinions about the referendum. Some went to lengths to vote, while others believed the referendum to be a spectacle, merely a false promise made by the then KRG president Masoud Barzani.3 Perhaps it was an empty undertaking indeed; in the morning, my parents sent me pictures of their index fingers soaked in ink. As their voting ballot papers had not been distributed in time, they, as part of the Kurdish diaspora, had been required to vote through the online system run on the KRG website. Nevertheless, they still went to the trouble of visiting their local polling station to dip their fingers in the ink pots. During the 2005 Iraqi elections, people proudly showed their inked fingers as a sign that they had voted. After decades of Ba'ath dictatorship, it was a sign of democracy and freedom.4
The day was met with both excitement and suspicion. What would actually happen after the referendum? The result was as expected – 92 per cent of the population in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) had voted in favour of independence – but any satisfaction or hope this raised was quickly quelled. The Iraqi government declared the independence referendum illegal on the grounds that it was held without their approval; they argued that it would lead to too much instability in a country already in crisis. This decision was followed by the Iraqi imposition of sanctions against Iraqi Kurdistan. International flights to airports in the cities of Hêwler (Erbil) and Silêmanî were halted, governmental and foreign affairs meetings were moved to Baghdad, and the regions that were protected from DAESH5 by the Peshmerga forces (the Kurdish military), such as the city of Kirkuk, were taken over by the Iraqi army. Arab and Turkmen families rejoiced, while thousands of Kurdish families fled the city for other places of the Kurdistan region. Like a parent punishing a child, a message was sent to the Kurdish government that it had overstepped the boundaries of its sovereignty.
The referendum and its aftermath have been talked about as a diversionary tactic intended to distract attention from the lack of economic and political performance of the Kurdistan Regional Government (Noori 2018; O'Driscoll and Baser 2019; Sumer and Joseph 2018). However, how people in Iraqi Kurdistan themselves view the KRG's progression remains understudied. Drawing on anthropological scholarship focused on affect and imagination as an entry point to understanding state and politics (Aretxaga 2003, 2005; Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Jansen 2014; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Obeid 2015; Stewart 2020), this article aims to explore – through encounters with bureaucracies – how people in Iraqi Kurdistan develop affective dispositions towards the two states that govern them: the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi state. It relies on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the city of Silêmanî during multitude visits spanning a decade (from 2014 to 2024).
In the past few decades, the KRG has enforced its legitimacy as a regional state in Iraq through its own parliament, cabinet, president and military. The Kurdish state maintains a visible presence through its bureaucracy, expansive public sector, security forces, and party-controlled media outlets. This includes managing its own bureaucratic practices, such as handling a separate civil salary and benefits payroll and giving out separate governmental documents, such as drivers’ licences and residency cards for foreigners. Bureaucracies have been explored as ‘an expression of a contract between citizens and officials that aim[s] to generate a utopian order’ (Bear and Mathur 2015: 18; Billaud and Cowan 2020). Indeed, for a long time the Kurdish government bureaucracy nurtured such desires for Kurdish independence and modernisation. Unlike during Ba'ath times, bureaucratic offices since the 1990s have had Kurdish employees, who received their instructions from Kurdish officials and wrote in the Kurdish language.
Bureaucracy is, however, not only about structuring social life, rationality or utopian ideals. As discussed by Matthew Hull (2012a), Michael Herzfeld (1992), and others, bureaucracy can obfuscate accountability and social relations. Interactions with Kurdish or Iraqi authorities also involve corrupt practices and clientelism. Additionally, the continuation of political frictions between the political systems of the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Iraqi state further create discrepancies and confusion about different state regulations and bureaucratic practices. This article looks at how two parallel bureaucracies generate different affects towards both the Kurdish and Iraqi state by exploring Iraqi Kurds’ imaginings of the state and the anticipatory and affective process that emerges through social and bureaucratic practices (Sansone and Bonanno 2025). I argue that these affects have shifted over the past decade. While in the late 2000s and early 2010s Iraqi Kurds viewed the KRG as a promising entity, the failure of the Kurdish government to secure economic stability and practice good governance has left Kurdish citizens disillusioned. Their view towards the central Iraqi government now includes hope for a strong state that fulfils its duties to citizens. However, for Kurds, this also means confronting the prospect of their minority social rights being subjected once again to Iraqi oppression.
While the Kurdistan Regional Government has often been studied through the lens of bureaucratic corruption, this article examines how bureaucracies generate affects towards the state (Hull 2012a, 2012b; Navaro-Yashin 2007). Looking at bureaucracy and bureaucratic documents provides a unique lens through which to analyse the relationship between Kurds in Iraq and the two states they must navigate. In the first part of the article, I provide a brief overview of the historical context and the theoretical tenets underlying it. I will then argue that one way in which citizens and civil servants view the Kurdish government while engaging with bureaucracy is as a ‘mock state’: a boasting state that is not to be taken seriously as a governing body as it is ‘fake’. People's conception of a mock state here is a cultural mechanism for managing disillusionment with the regional state while maintaining desire for a state yet to be. In the second part of the article, I describe how bureaucratic processes, such as the digitisation of the bureaucratic system, documents and the civil servant payroll, trigger new affects towards the Kurdish and Iraqi states among civil servants. To navigate this predicament, Kurds position themselves as ‘just bureaucrats’. This reasoning, I argue, reveals how the perceived lack of fair governance compels people to navigate an additional (Iraqi) bureaucracy to secure their livelihoods. Being ‘just bureaucrats’ refers not only to the fact that most Kurds work in the public sector, but also to how they feel they cannot benefit from or change the workings of the bureaucracy on which they depend heavily on for their daily livelihoods. I do not mean to suggest that a strong Iraqi state exists or that Kurds actively pursue practices to enforce or include themselves in the Iraqi state. Rather, I explore how affects towards the KRG and the Iraqi state have changed over time and how this shift signifies the continued hope for inclusion in a functioning state that remains out of reach.
At the Margin of the State
The Kurdish people, an ethnic group of approximately 30–40 million,6 occupy a position beyond merely being at the margins of the state (Das and Poole 2004) as a minority group. Beyond their limited access to infrastructural and governmental provisions, Kurdish populations are geographically dispersed across the border regions of multiple nation states (Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria), former empires, and throughout the global diaspora. Kurds have enduring group categories, even when moving across borders (Barth 1969), and have multiple ways of understanding their shared identity and belonging as well as their statelessness (Belge 2011; Bozarslan 2014, Černy 2017; Eliassi 2015; Kardaş and Yesiltaş 2017; Natali 2004; Tekdemir 2018). Kurds have experienced a violent history of suppression in all four countries and continue to do so in Iran, Syria and Turkey. In Iraqi Kurdistan specifically, the height of Kurdish suppression and uprisings in Iraq was intertwined with the brutal Ba'ath regime spanning from the period of the 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s.
Bureaucracy has been described as a way of managing a group of people through administrative control and the construction of subjects, objects and socialities (Das 2006; Gupta 2012; Hull 2012a; Scott 1998; Weber 1978 in Hull 2012a). Iraqi bureaucracy in the Ba'ath period manifested itself as one of repression, with methodological processes and routinised documentation aimed at the subjugation of Kurds, including Arabisation, displacement, erasure, use of chemical weapons and genocide. All of these accumulated in the Anfal campaigns of the 1980s, a directed governmental attempt to eradicate Kurds from their native lands and suppress national rebellion (van Bruinessen 1992, 2000; Hiltermann 2007; Human Rights Watch 1995; Leezenberg 2005).
After the Gulf War, a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan was established, giving more freedom for self-rule. With the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government in 1992, two political parties gained hold, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), led by the Barzani and Talabani family. It was not until after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 that a sectarian political system was established that pursued a political divide between the main sectarian groups, mainly Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds. The Kurds enforced their parliamentary choices of the pre-2003 era and gained regional independence, making the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) a legally recognised autonomous government in 2005. Kurdish officials also hold positions in the Iraqi central government, fulfilling the sectarian power share. The KRG manages the public sector in Iraqi Kurdistan and holds diplomatic relations with other states. Moreover, Kurdish governmental practices are aimed both at maintaining the support of the people and the Kurdish nationalist cause, and also at engaging with the realpolitik of partnering with the US and striking oil trade deals with the Turkish government, actions which often contradict Kurdish nationalist interests.
As of today, two large issues remain unresolved in the current power sharing system between the KRG and Iraq. The first relates to the constitutional demand that the Iraqi central government hold an independence referendum before the end of 2007 to consolidate whether the population of certain areas7 should be included in an independent Kurdistan. Neither a census nor a referendum have yet been implemented by the Baghdad government. The second issue relates to ownership of the oil and gas sector within Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdish government says it upholds its right to ownership of oil exports following the 2005 constitution. Vague rulings, however, led to Baghdad withholding the profits from this sector from the national budget allocation to the KRG, leading the Kurdish government to start its own oil export. Frictions surrounding oil exports are an ongoing issue between the two governments. Furthermore, the 2022 Kurdistan Regional Government elections have been delayed, with the result that the Baghdad central government deemed the current Kurdish rule as illegitimate (Daher 2023). New elections were held on the 20 October 2024 which resulted in a new power share between the two existing ruling parties and gains for the opposition party New Generation.
Boundaries of Bureaucracy
While scholars have long debated how neoliberal regimes and globalisation would lead to the disappearance of the nation state (Truillot 2001), the state still holds a powerful social imaginary, such as political desires, identification or fear (Aretxaga 2003: 393). Even if state institutions are increasingly fragmented and ruled by almost independent bureaucracies, they still represent a site of affective and imaginative investments for many people. In this context, looking at bureaucracy and bureaucratic documents, as mediators between people and the state, can help us trace how and where these investments happen (Hull 2012a). They offer modes of governance through which people are made legible, visible and thus governable (Das 2006; Gupta 2012; Street 2012). People's political imaginations are intrinsically tied to the affective realm (Aretxaga 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2007), as both the content and materiality of documents shape affective responses. The information they contain, their aesthetic qualities, their absence, and bureaucratic control over their validity generate affects ranging from fear and insecurity to aspirations and desires (Aretxaga 2005; Das 2015; Das and Poole 2004; Kelly 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2007; Riles 2006). These affective dimensions of documents can shift and evolve over time (Holloway et al. 2018). Documents thus possess a crucial temporal dimension: they can anticipate and shape social action, put people's lives on hold (Bonanno 2025; Moradi 2025), or alter temporal dispositions towards the state (Sansone 2025).
Drawing on Michelle Obeid's (2010: 332) analysis of marginality in Middle Eastern states, citizens living on borders experience the state through an ambivalent tension between desire and contempt. Through her concept of ‘states of aspiration’, Obeid reveals how people seek incorporation into the state as a marker of normalcy (Obeid 2015: 436; also see Hermez 2012; Jansen 2014). Similar to the borderlands of Lebanon (Obeid 2010), people in Iraqi Kurdistan see their predicament as lacking in real Kurdish national sovereignty, despite the acclaimed powers of the Kurdish Regional Government. Looking at the relational continuum between the state and citizens (Thelen et al. 2017), both Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government remain contested, while the imagination of the state as an embodiment of sovereignty persists (Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Obeid 2010). In distinguishing between imagination (a capacity) and imagining (an active process) (Crapanzano 2004), we can apprehend how imagining the state is an affective, bodily and embodied process made up of not merely images of the state but also actively shaped through the affective relationships between people and the state. This can be done by looking at social and material practices, such as engagements with bureaucracies and bureaucratic documents (Sansone and Bonanno 2025; Sneath et al. 2009).
I connect the ‘state as a relational setting’ (Chatterjee 2004) in the Iraqi Kurdish context to how political shifts and the economic crisis there in 2015 led to the withdrawal of the Iraqi state from provisioning Iraqi citizens and the Kurdish government. This has had a domino effect and the KRG has likewise withdrawn from provisioning citizens by moving away from a large public sector towards privatisation and clientelism. The dual sentiment of yearning for an improved state while harbouring contempt for those that emerged after 2003 continues to persist. As the joke in Iraq goes: ‘Before we had one dictator, now we have many little Saddams everywhere’.
Hull (2012b) also points to the importance not only of paper-mediated documents, but how electronic forms of documents and bureaucratic operations create new ideas about modernisation. In the Kurdish case, it is important to look at how governmental bureaucracy is bound to the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan. For Kurdish citizens, this means that civil servants or registrations and many bureaucratic processes cannot be accessed or changed outside of the borders of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This situation shapes the predicament of citizens who, despite their hopes for a more benevolent Kurdish state, remain tethered to Iraq for their national citizenship while being simultaneously bound to Kurdish governmental structures – effectively barring them from accessing Iraqi bureaucratic benefits. At the same time bureaucracies create affective and emotional entanglements in the making of the state by both users and bureaucrats themselves (Andreetta et al. 2022; Sansone and Bonanno 2025). In this context, examining bureaucracies and documents reveals how aspirations and affects towards the state manifest when Kurdish citizens and civil servants in Iraq must navigate their relationship with two competing state entities.
A Mock State
Everyday traffic patterns in the city of Silêmanî provide a revealing ethnographic window into the lived experience of autonomy under Kurdistan's regional governance. One morning I turned into a one-way street to stop at a shop and buy phone credit. As I turned right into the street, a taxi drove towards me and blocked my way. I stopped and opened the window as the car passed me on the right side.
‘It's a one-way street!’ I said.
The guy replied, ‘Fishaya! (It's a mockery, a joke!)’, as he looked forward, not making eye contact.
Fisha, meaning showing off or something that is not to be taken seriously, was a common expression in Silêmanî that people used to express their predicament. Fisha is an elastic word that can mean several things, depending on the context. Fisha kirden (to make fisha) is an exaggeration, with the aim of appearing or sounding more important or attractive: a fishaker (someone who makes fisha) brags and shows off. Fishaya (it is fisha) pertains to something being not real or not to be taken seriously, of no cause for concern. Often, infrastructural defects, bureaucratic encounters or other situations relating to the Kurdish government and the public sector were understood as being fisha in this sense. In this way, the Kurdish state was labelled fisha, a ‘mock state’, in conversations and daily interactions.
Related to what Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012: 5) has called the ‘make-believe space’, a concept through which Turkish Cypriots have understood their government as a ‘made-up state’, the ‘mock state’ of the KRG is similar in terms of the fabrication of both material practices and political imagination. However, fisha also holds another connotation, that of boasting of being better than one actually is. Unlike the unrecognised Turkish–Cypriot state, the Kurdistan Regional Government is a recognised autonomous region within a nation state that aspires to full independence. It is given space to partly exercise this right (and overexert its functioning) towards a horizon of independence that is never given by the Iraqi state. People in Iraqi Kurdistan thus critique the KRG not only as a joke, but also in terms of how it oversells what it actually is.
People were just getting used to a high standard of living. Everyone could go to school, obtain degrees, expect to be hired by the government to work in a public office in the mornings, and have a second job in the afternoon or evening. People were buying houses through payment schemes, doing up the interior of their houses, and going on holidays to Turkey, Dubai and Malaysia. It was not something you could do before this decade. Kurdistan was starting to open up to the world, when all of a sudden now it is taken away again.
I nodded. ‘Do you ever think about going back to Europe?’ I asked.
‘Not yet, I want to wait and see. We are used to qaza ew qadir (chaos) here, this is just another thing in our path.’
We were then joined by a colleague of Benaz ghan, kak Araz, who had walked into the cafe. As he introduced himself and joined the conversation, he lit a cigarette: ‘Let me tell you what I think. Don't believe what other people tell you here; they are fake. In fact, Silêmanî itself is fake, a façade, just like Hollywood. Now we even have the same sign on our mountain’.9
Benaz ghan shrugged off his comments: ‘Don't be so harsh. The situation is bad, but at least we have our own government. Do you want to be ruled by Baghdad again?’
‘Hikûmetî Herêmî Kurdistan (the KRG)?’ kak Araz replied. ‘They are fake too. We don't have a real government, do we?’
State legitimacy may be ambiguous or contested (Navaro-Yashin 2012; Wilson and McConnell 2015). Certainly, during my fieldwork, discourses in daily life turned to how Iraqi Kurdistan's sovereignty is continuously contested, and how the Kurdish state invokes the language of statehood to appeal to supporters within a ‘failed petro-state’ (Iraq). Stef Jansen (2014) offers the analytical distinction between statehood (what the state is or should be) and statecraft (what the state does or should do) to avoid the slippage between people's concerns about what the state in Bosnia and Herzegovina was doing, and what the state should be or look like. In Silêmanî, opinions about the Kurdish government's statecraft were often posited and contested in terms of public provisions, infrastructure and security. From 2015 onwards, budget cuts in the public sector have forced different groups of civil servants, such as teachers and health care workers, to take to the streets and start boycotts that have led to school and university closures. As in the performance of ‘mock labour’ for the state (Rajković 2018), where people mock themselves over being part of a dysfunctional system, the issue of what the state should be in terms of Kurdish statehood was criticised through the conceptualisation of a mock state, in which people act as fake citizens within a fake state.
On the other hand, people in Iraqi Kurdistan are pushed to look for the ‘ideal face of the state’ to ensure their livelihoods (Obeid 2010: 337), holding both the desire for public office and apathy towards the state (Navaro-Yashin 2006, 2007). Where the state is absent, people engage with the benevolent face of the state in multiple ways that will provide opportunities and development (Obeid 2010). As Benaz ghan said, it was better to endure the chaos of the KRG that will possibly pass. People's comments revealed how they viewed the state as fisha, yet they accepted its continuation. Working within the chaos of the Kurdistan Regional Government was better than the alternative: being ruled by Baghdad again.
The state has been discussed as something out of reach, a magical entity in South America (Taussig 1997), a fantasy in Northern Cyprus (Navaro-Yashin 2012), a desire for a functional state as part of the yearning for a normal life in Sarajevo (Jansen 2014) or something to aspire to despite its perceived failure in the Middle East (Obeid 2015). The concept of a mock state extends beyond theories of failed or shadow states (Nordstrom 2000; Reno 2000) as it reveals not only disenchantment with the state, as observed in Lebanon (Kosmatopoulos 2011; Obeid 2015), but also embodies simultaneous aspirations for an idealised yet unattainable functioning state. While the Kurdish regional state is ridiculed as fake, as it is not living up to its claim of achieving maturity or independence, enduring the mock state allows for some remaining potential towards Kurdish self-rule or sovereignty. People's conception of a mock state is thus a powerful cultural mechanism for managing the disappointments while maintaining desire for something other yet to be. In the coming paragraphs, I will outline how these sentiments partly shifted after the economic crisis in 2015 and the referendum of 2017.
Just Bureaucrats
In 2016, I happened to be seated next to Dr Serdar, a researcher and politician in an opposition political party, during the lunch of the Silêmanî Forum, an annual symposium on current Kurdish political affairs. As we introduced ourselves and discussed the lack of political transparency, he told me: ‘Herêmî Kurdistan (the Kurdish government) is a mafia’.
I had a laugh, looking over to the other tables where many members of the KRG parliament and cabinet were seated. ‘No, I don't think they are a mafia’, I said. ‘Mafia would mean they are an organised crime organisation. They are not organised here. What do you think of that?’
He laughed and replied, ‘Well, in the end, we are just bureaucrats!’
Bureaucracy is a channel through which the Iraqi state and the Kurdish regional state are in contact with citizens and different relations of political power are put in place. Dr Serdar's accusations of corrupt practices had a simple premise: that a bloated bureaucracy and widespread corruption were contributing to the crisis and the failure of not becoming an independent state. This state of not-yet-ness (cf. Sansone and Bonanno 2025) generated deeply conflicting experiences of and affects towards the Kurdish state, even though the alternative – the Iraqi state – itself struggled with democratic deficits, governmental failures, and corruption.10 For example, after the 2018 parliamentary elections, a fire broke out at a warehouse where ballots that were needed for a recount of the votes were stored. A targeted sabotage according to some. And in 2023 a large corruption scandal erupted in Baghdad, where criminals were able to obtain $2.5 billion from Iraq's state bank. Efforts to bring those behind the theft to justice failed, and the spoils are thought to have been shared among the Iraqi elite (Economist 2023).
Another aspect was that by being ‘just’ bureaucrats, one could neither operate outside of the existing bureaucracies nor change them if they were not operating fairly. An important aspect of the bureaucratic system in Iraqi Kurdistan is how it is ruled. The KRG is the largest employer, with about 1.2 million people registered as civil servants (though according to the registers in Baghdad, they amount to only around 600,000). Civil service jobs have been a way for the Kurdish government to consolidate a patron–client system. For example, through the bin diwar (‘behind-the-wall’) – ghost bureaucrats are registered on the government payroll who have never actually performed any work. It is common knowledge that some people – probably associated with the ruling parties – had received this status. Michiel Leezenberg (2006, 2013, 2015) sees the institutionalisation of patron–client relations within the political parties in the government as the reason why these parties have managed to get away with going against the wishes of the population for so long. Some (powerful) people clearly benefit from this system and do not want to see it changed.
In the decades before the early 2000s, when the Kurdish government was not recognised internationally, it was fully dependent on foreign aid; today, it is still dependent on the Iraqi government and foreign institutions such as the UN to provide food and building materials. More generally, Omar Dewachi (2017) argues through a postcolonial lens that the ungovernability of Iraq is related to global processes of disordered power that have been created and shaped by the enmeshment of the Iraqi state under British colonial rule, and more recently the US invasion and warfare. The state-sponsored private sector in Iraq grew in the 1970s and 1980s, providing the majority of urban employment (Sluglett and Sluglett 2001). One example of this is how government dependence in Iraqi Kurdistan extends itself even today to both public services, such as centralised food programmes, and a functioning private sector (Leezenberg 2013, 2015). Today, there is still no real distinction between the public and private sectors within the KRI. Clientelism appears in the private sector and places people in a position of job insecurity with limited opportunities for growth if they venture outside of the public sector.
Despite recurring public demands for good governance in Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq – notably during the 2011 Middle Eastern uprisings and the October 2018 protests – security forces have consistently responded with violent repression, frequently resulting in civilian casualties. Protesting against unpaid and lowered salaries trickles down to many aspects of people's lives. Protest continues to this day; prolonged teachers’ strikes in Iraqi Kurdistan have repeatedly disrupted education, forcing schools to close for months at a time over the past year. This is also evident in the long queues in front of the payroll offices that pensioners have to join every month. Often the already low-level payments are reduced even more to reflect the government's cash budget for the month. On the first days of distribution, the queues become chaotic, and people have even died after being trampled by the crowds. Elderly citizens often send their children to collect their pensions on their behalf, in fear of a long wait for a low-level payment or worse. The process is seen as denigrating by many and has resulted in multiple demonstrations which have similarly been repressed by the police. At one of the first demonstrations back in 2015, a notable video was circulated in the news picturing an older man screaming at the police: ‘Your salary is beautiful, gawad (pimp)!’ The police, who are also civil servants and thus also suffer from receiving incomplete salaries, were accused of being sell-outs by continuing to work for the state for free. Being ‘just’ bureaucrats thus points to people's continuing dependence on corrupt bureaucracies that persists despite protest against it for the past decade.
Between Two Parallel Bureaucracies
One day at the beginning of my fieldwork in the city of Silêmanî from 2015 to 2016, I was stopped in my car while trying to enter the city shasty (literally meaning sixty, alluding to the sixty-metre width) ring road. The traffic police would often hold checks at the entry points of the ring road in the late morning. The officer stopped me and asked for my driver's licence and registration. I handed him the car registration, my Dutch driver's licence and my international driver's licence. I had gotten the international licence, a paper document containing many pages with translations of the licence in different languages, specifically to take with me for fieldwork. International drivers’ licences are listed by country and, in this case, I had checked if Iraq was on the list. The officer looked at the international licence and smirked, ‘dada (Miss), this licence is not accepted here’.
‘But it says it is for Iraq as well. Look, there is the translation’, I said, pointing to the Arabic and English written pages.
‘It is written in Arabic, but I cannot read Arabic’, he replied.
‘Well, neither do I. What should we do now?’ I asked. We both laughed.
The officer replied, ‘Hich nakre, fishaya (There's nothing to be done, it's a joke/a mockery). I'll let you go for now, but go to the traffic police office and get a translation into Kurdish for the next time’.
Interestingly, even though the officer expressed the mockery of the situation, he still demanded the translation, which I understood to be a governmental ruling. On the one hand, needing translations of international documents for Kurdish purposes is viewed with apathy and disbelief in the state system (as per the fisha reaction by the civil servant). On the other hand, the practicality of needing a translation of a driver's licence points to the issue of separate languages and bureaucracies that do not acknowledge internationally set standards based on national governments.
The rulings around the driver's licence were rather unclear because when I was checked by the traffic police the next times they insisted on me having a local driver's licence. I always responded I would obtain one as soon as possible and this sufficed every time. Similar to other contexts, such as in Benin (Andreetta 2020) and Bolivia (Ellison 2017), the value of a piece of paper is shown. Despite people's misgivings about the state apparatus, a mimicking ‘legal’ document, though temporarily, can solve the problem (Gupta 2006). The traffic police responses in Silêmanî appeared arbitrary, reflecting individual officers’ improvisations rather than standardised protocols. As scholars have observed in contexts from Greece (Herzfeld 1992) and Malawi (Hendriks 2022), such bureaucratic improvisations depend heavily on public servants’ personal relationships with both the state apparatus and citizens, as well as their affective investment in their roles. Such practices reveal how state authority is simultaneously affirmed and undermined through daily bureaucratic interactions (Valdivieso 2025).
In navigating life under Kurdish governance – or what people liked to call fisha, a mock state – people found themselves caught between nationalist aspirations and the practical realities of a system built on dependence and patronage. The independence referendum called in 2017 can also be seen in this light. Bureaucracy here is important, not only because it consolidates power or hope for a Kurdish independence, but also because most people in Iraqi Kurdistan depend heavily on the improvised workings of this bureaucracy for their daily livelihoods, despite the criticisms they might have of both governments. The mock state and bureaucracy are supposed to consolidate – and are experienced at doing so – the necessary power to push for Kurdish independence, while at the same time they must actually provide for many people's livelihoods and, most importantly, for civil servants themselves.
Take the sentiment of kak Azad, a Kurdish border control officer whom I talked to in early 2024. After the 2017 referendum, his superiors from the Kurdish government were replaced by security forces from the Iraqi central government while he remained on the Kurdish payroll. He explained how this hardly affected his daily work, apart from sharing information with and getting security checks from the Iraqi government. More importantly, the entry stamp system into Iraqi Kurdistan had not changed. In fact, in 2022 the entry stamps for Iraqi Kurdistan, written in Arabic and Kurdish, had added the ‘KRI’ to the English translation, where it now said ‘Kurdistan Region’ next to ‘Republic of Iraq’. When asked whether he considered himself a civil servant of the Kurdish Regional Government or Iraq – the former providing partial salary, the latter demanding accountability – kak Azad responded with characteristic ambivalence: ‘You can say both as well as neither.’ While he was one of few civil servants that were ruled by Iraqi management, his response nevertheless captured a common sentiment. Both governments ruled, but neither represented people in Iraqi Kurdistan fully. Both came with their own disillusionment of good governance; the KRG favouring clientelism and withholding certain bureaucratic procedures and the Baghdad government ignoring minority rights in their practices and discourses.
Manual and Electronic Systems
Here the governmental departments that give out the salaries are under the rule of the political parties. People have to wait and queue up to receive their money in cash. Even if you could receive your salary or pension in your bank account, people do not trust the banks. Nobody uses bankcards for fear they will not give out money from your account. Therefore, it is safer to get your salary in cash instead of demanding an electronic bank payment (which is not possible), even though it means we receive less than other Iraqi civil servants.
Baghdad pays out all civil servants electronically into their bank accounts. It is not possible for us to transfer our registration to the Baghdad registry and receive ours 100 per cent because of the mismatch between herem (the KRG) and Baghdad. Trust me, if this was possible, everyone would change their registration across the border to Kirkuk, the first person being myself!
The modernist programme for shaping and organising social life entails regimes of managing paper documents (Hull 2012b), through which bureaucratic objects are enacted in everyday life (Mol 2002). The process of digitisation could help bureaucratic archives and registries to work more efficiently. In the case of Iraq, it also means that in a country where civil registration is organised to uphold sectarian and regional lines, as in Lebanon (Mikdashi 2022), information is more easily transferable between different regions. This is where people, places and bureaucratic objects converge (Mol 2002), revealing different state affects. Suspicion of corrupt practices connects the desire for bureaucratic rationality and fairness with desires for Kurdish autonomy in Iraq. Although digital systems were viewed with distrust, this sentiment appeared primarily linked to the Kurdish government's use of an analogue system for securing government salaries, despite its vulnerability to corruption. The mistrust towards the Iraqi state took a different form, where banking systems were perceived as less corrupt for ordinary citizens but more susceptible to high-level corruption, as evidenced by cases of Iraqi state bank theft.
These type of affects towards Iraqi governance extended to daily discourses about the Iraqi government being preferred over the KRG. As mentioned earlier, people did not actively pursue practices to enforce or include themselves in the Iraqi state. But their desire for a functioning bureaucracy did change their affect towards the Iraqi state, signifying the continued hope for inclusion in a functioning state that remained out of reach. One example through which these issues come to light is the Iraqi ID card. In the past few years, the old laminated paper A5-sized ID cards were replaced by biometric credit card-sized IDs. In the process, registration offices in Iraq were also digitised. In essence, this would finally mean that every Iraqi citizen could be identified and could make use of every governmental bureaucratic office in the country. The cards were implemented in Iraq relatively quickly, but Iraqi Kurdistan was the last place to change over to the new system.
For some, the introduction of the new biometric ID cards and digitisation signalled a step into modernity. As one of the clerks in the registration office I visited for my own renewal explained: ‘Better to apply for the new card soon. With this digital registration you can access your registration in the whole of Iraq.’ On the other hand, both paper and digital systems elicited fear of corrupt state practices. The digitisation of the civil registry facilitated the wider reach of bureaucracy into people's lives. Personal documents must be obtained from the municipality of one's family registration, which is determined by patrilineal descent in the civil status registry (nufus). This registration is permanent and cannot be transferred – neither out of Iraqi Kurdistan nor by Iraqis moving into the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). However, the digitisation of ID cards represented a potential first step towards accessing ‘fair’ Iraqi governance. Being ‘just’ bureaucrats points out to people's continuing dependence on corrupt bureaucracies that persists despite protest against it for the past decade. This has led to the common sentiment among Kurds that neither the KRG nor the Baghdad government represents them fairly. The former because of clientelism and corrupt bureaucracies, the latter because of their lack of protecting minority rights and obstruction of Kurdish self-rule. Despite the awareness of high-level corruption of Iraqi state banking systems, Kurdish citizens expressed preference for this system over the Kurdish (corrupt) analogue and electronic systems, as they believed it was less risky for individual citizens and would ensure that they would receive their full salaries while also benefitting from the better functioning Iraqi governance.
In other contexts, state affects that do not result in direct actions to achieve or change it have been theorised by scholars through the use of fatalism. Fatalism provides people with a degree of relief from existential angst in situations where they lack agency. People express this in forms of indifference already decided by fate or religion (Callahan 2017), environmental disaster linked by political disaster (Schäfers 2016) or by economic forces beyond one's control (Taussig 1997). Similarly, the shifted affects towards the Kurdish and Iraqi state can be understood as a type of fatalism in that people were anticipating the limits of the Kurdish self-rule and the inevitability of the Iraqi nation state taking over one day or another. Simply enduring the Kurdish mock state without change was hereby relieved, as it did not matter if the KRG was not functioning according to people's expectations, it would see its end ‘naturally’ anyway.
Being ‘just’ bureaucrats, without the agency to change bureaucratic processes and ruling, has led to the common sentiment among Kurds that neither the KRG nor the Baghdad government represents them fairly.
Conclusion: The Limits of Power Sharing
This article has looked at how bureaucracies evoke shifting affects towards the state in a context of two governments. Kurds in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq have fallen between the proverbial two chairs. On the one hand, the Kurdistan Regional Government has promised them a hopeful future of self-rule that nevertheless seems increasingly unachievable. Here, the KRG is seen through the prism of a ‘mock state’: one that boasts about its performance but in reality is perceived as lacking in its governance. The mock state provides a vernacular to acknowledge the state's shortcomings and manage disillusionment while at the same time retaining space for the potential of a functioning Kurdish state, even if it seems out of reach. On the other hand, the Baghdad government is seen as a strong state. Although it neither allows for full Kurdish self-rule nor guarantees Kurdish minority inclusion into Iraq, it is imagined as an inevitable path to better governance.13 Within this system, bureaucracy operates as a form of governance which is mediated by procedures that are opaque and caught between desires for good governance and Kurdish self-rule. Being ‘just’ bureaucrats here refers not only to the bureaucratic procedures that most people in the KRI depend on for their salaries and pensions, but also how despite their efforts they are not able to change it as they are merely bureaucrats without state power. Seeking inclusion in Iraqi bureaucracy however represents an aspiration for fair governance on the everyday level.
It is through bureaucracies that we can see the state's presence in the gaps between desires towards the state and the harsh reality of their unmet expectations (cf. Sansone and Bonanno 2025). In this context, aspirations for a working central Iraqi government have become part of daily discourse. Politically, people speculate that it might only be a matter of time before more power is taken away from the Kurdish parties and Iraqi Kurdistan is brought into the Baghdad administration. In fact, while writing this article, the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court ruled that all Kurdish government oil revenues have to be handed over to the Baghdad government. Upon receiving these revenues, the government in Baghdad will be obligated to pay the salaries of KRG civil servants (The New Arab 2024). While it is unclear how this ruling will proceed in practice, the central government's message is unambiguous: Kurdish access to the centralised payroll system depends on the KRG relinquishing its primary revenue source. The KRG counters by citing the 2005 agreement, established under US influence, which permitted Kurdish participation in a unified Iraq conditional upon KRG's right to independent oil exports. This arrangement remains contentious, as evidenced in online discourse between Iraqi citizens: Arab participants typically advocate for a unified Iraq, while Kurdish voices emphasise the necessity of autonomous governance (Iraqi Bantz 2024).
After decades of state suppression from Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government nurtures imaginations for a better future for Kurds that is not yet present. However, by looking at imaginings of the state and its bureaucracies as an anticipatory process, recent changes in the Iraqi bureaucracy, including digitisation of the registry and banking systems, have prompted new affects towards the Iraqi state among Kurds. Feeling neither supported by the Kurdish government to modernise nor included by Baghdad to make use of the improvements of a working bureaucracy, this situation has led to shifted affects towards the two states to which Kurds have to position themselves.
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Letizia Bonanno, Rosa Sansone, Ahmad Moradi and Diego Valdivieso for providing feedback on earlier drafts. I am grateful for the comments made by the three anonymous reviewers and the journal's editor. Most of all, I would like to thank my interlocutors for their insights and Amsha Tamo for our discussions.
Notes
The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is an autonomous region in Iraq, under the ruling body of the Kurdistan Regional Government. The KRG is run by a two-party coalition of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which is challenged by smaller opposition parties. Its population is estimated to be about 6.5 million (the total Iraqi population is 43.5 million). The KRG can be seen as a distinct entity, as no other such autonomous regional structures exist in Iraq.
Kurds are an ethnic minority in northern Iraq. After the fall of the Ba'ath party in Iraq, Kurdish political parties agreed on cooperating with the Iraqi central government on the condition, among others, that the Iraqi state held an independence referendum before the end of 2007 to decide whether the population of certain areas should be included into an independent Kurdistan (see also footnote 7). With no such referendum being held by the deadline, the then KRG president decided to call out a referendum.
The independence referendum was initially boycotted by other political parties in an effort to delay the referendum, as advised by Baghdad, the US and the UN. However, Masoud Barzani of the KDP continued to push for the referendum in what some say was his final act for Kurdish self-determination towards the end of his leadership.
The 2005 Iraqi elections are considered the first democratic elections since the rule of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party. To prevent double voting, voters were requested to dip one finger into an ink pot after voting.
DAESH is the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [al Dawlah al-Islameyah fi Iraq wal-Sham].
As official censuses in the countries Kurds live in are often incomplete or have excluded Kurds as a distinct ethnic group, no exact data is known. The KRG has a population of 6.5 million (see footnote 1). Turkey holds the biggest Kurdish population.
These include the provinces Hêwler (Erbil), Dohuk, Silêmanî, Halabja and Kirkuk.
All names in the article are pseudonyms. The formal address for older women (ghan) is used after the first name and for the formal address for miss (xatu or dada) and mister (kak) before the first name.
In the previous year, the city municipality built a Silêmanî sign: the letters ‘SLEMANI’ spelled out on the Azmir mountain, next to a map of the greater Kurdistan region in the colours of the Kurdish flag.
Iraq is ranked 154 out of 180 countries in Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index. See https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023 (accessed 3 January 2025).
Some government agencies that had changed to a digital banking system have also returned to a cash payroll, either due to individual managers’ decisions or pressure from staff to circumvent high cash withdrawal fees from state banks. A similar distrust of private banks exists; people fear lack of access to their money and are limited to small withdrawal amounts.
The amounts are approximate calculations between minimum wages. This excludes the fact that yearly salary indexation and promotions have been halted in the KRG, but not in the rest of Iraq. In the past years, KRG salaries have been given out unpredictably. For example, in some years, salaries decreased by 25–50 per cent and in recent years only nine (full) salaries out of twelve months were given out.
This also applies to the political division in the central government and the neglect of the rights of other ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq, such as Assyrians, Christians, Mandaean Chaldeans, Turkmen, Jews and Yezidis, among others.
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