Protest movements in Iraq in the age of a ‘new civil society’

Since 2015 Iraq has been experiencing an unprecedented movement of popular protests that is mobilising a whole generation of its youth, demanding a radical change of regime. Based on recent fieldwork with women, civil society and youth organisations and networks, I explore the Iraqi protests in the light of new theorisations of contemporary civil society and social movements. What I find is that the notion of madaniyya claimed by Iraqi protesters is not only an expression of a ‘post-Islamist’ political moment but it is structured by the traumatic experience of sectarian violence. For Iraqi youth, the demands for social justice and economic redistribution cannot be separated from the claim for sectarian equality and religious freedom: both demands are experienced as matters of life and death.