The Roots of the Sadrist Movement: Muhammad al-Sadr, Religious Authority, and Sociopolitical Practice

Based on Ba'th Party archival records, interviews, and secondary sources, this article aims to reconstruct and contextualize the story of Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the Shi'i cleric who led a grassroots religious movement in the 1990s that still plays a major role in Iraq. The article argues that the Sadrist movement and its project of social Islamization were a result of Sadr's enlistment of grassroots support to challenge his rivals in the Shi'i religious field during a leadership vacuum amid the decline of the clerical establishment's influence.

The Failed Ba'thification of Iraqi Kurdistan: The Ideological and Organizational Strategies of the Ba'th Party in Northern Iraq, 1968–2003

Drawing on internal party documents, this article analyzes the history of Ba'thification efforts in Iraqi Kurdistan. Despite a growing literature on the Ba'th Party's ruling strategy, the often-overlooked Arabization of Kurdish communities constituted a significant ideological component of Ba'thification. From an organizational perspective, the cultivation of internal intelligence networks was used to compensate for the challenges associated with robust party recruitment in northern Iraq's Kurdish-majority governorates and among Kurdish communities in mixed areas.