Manufacturing Sovereignty

This book delves into the legal and labour history of Hashemite, Iraq to explore the role international law and its institutions played in Iraq''s state formation. Focusing on this specific time and place in international legal history, it shows how Iraq was a laboratory for experimentation with the concept of sovereignty. One direct result of this was the development of the doctrine of semi-peripheral sovereignty. This study traces how this doctrine impacts on the everyday lives of working class Iraqis by looking at its influence on imperial law, land law, the transnational law of oil concessions and pipeline agreements, criminal law and emergency law. It takes case studies including the production and trade of the oil fields in Kirkuk, railways in Baghdad and Basra, looking at how workers organized themselves. This unique approach shows in a very real way how international law was the force for key employment practice developments in an emerging nation state.>

Préface
This book is a unique analysis of international law and employment law to show how an international doctrine can shape labour practices in an emerging nation state.

Auteur
Ali Hammoudi is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Contenu

1. The Semi-Colonial Uses of Positivist Duality in Law
2. A Brief History of the 1936 Labour Law & The Formative Years of the Early Iraqi Working-Class Movement
3. The Making of Semi-peripheral Sovereignty in International Law
4. The Oil Workers' Struggle Against the Legal Spatiality of Imperialism in the Iraqi Oil Frontier
5. The Railway & Port Workers' Struggle Against the Semi-Colonial Legality of the Iraqi State
6. The 'Magical Weapon' of Permanent Emergency A Technique in the Semi-Colonial Governance of Iraq
7. The Defeat of the 'Covenant of the Slave': al-Wathba as an Anti-Colonial Conjuncture Against International Law