Theorising uprisings: Iraq’s Thawra Teshreen

This article proposes theorising contemporary uprisings through an analytical lens that considers the discursiveness, spatiality and materiality of protests and protesters, and the ways in which bodies and affects are mobilised. It offers an in-depth analysis of the October 2019 uprising in Iraq, commonly known as Thawra Teshreen, exploring the infrastructural, structural and political dimensions that shaped protesters’ lives and deaths. It shows that protesters put forward their own politics of life and death in the streets, mobilising as people and bodies as infrastructures, and negotiating a new social order that centers the marginalised. It situates protesters’ trajectories and subjectivities in relation to the materiality and structures of the various forces of death that have shaped their experiences, and relates them to the military-oil-capitalist complex tied to postcolonial state-building and empire. The article suggests that in order to understand and theorise contemporary uprisings on a global scale, taking Iraq as a framework expands the theoretical and political imagination about global structures of power and their political, structural, and infrastructural deployment in the everyday, and in the experience of living and dying in the world today.