For 25 years now, Hosham Dawod, has been leading research on Iraqi tribes. One of his results is that the national states, even the most despotic ones, did not succeed in eliminating tribal relations. Instead they have bound them to their orbit and took away their autonomy and sovereignty. He later wrote on tribes under the blockade of Iraq 1991-2003, trying to establish that the return of tribe does not mean a revival of old structures but a metamorphosis that affected not only internal structure, the production of power, the mechanics of its legitimization, but also the more individual level that constitutes its basis and which became more liberated from ancestral bonds. His research question at that time was how the tribe reproduces its internal solidarity and in what domain this is played on: is it a political one? Or a pragmatic strategy?
After the war and the occupation of Iraq in 2003 the problematic of the tribe was on the table again especially in relation to globalization and the new world order since the formation of an international alliance to wage war in Iraq. There was then a new political context in which the tribe did not only maintain some of its political function but also recreated it.
From this globalized dimension of the tribe (under occupation), he then extended to study the tribe to the Jihadi field, focusing on how its pragmatic structure challenged the globalized new salafi jihadi movement (Zarqawi type) until 2010. In 2004 Hosham Dawod edited a book on the inevitability of the clash between the tribes and the jihadists coming from outside. After the Iraqization of al-Qaida in Iraq and its later transformation into what was known as the Islamic state of Iraq (in 2006, before the new ISIS in 2013), this relation between the local tribal structure and the international globalized jihad or occupation, ceased to be the principal drive; and the new Islamic State of Iraq (then ISIS) reconfigured its politics according to the priority of the local concerns.
This situation had led to a new re-consideration of the tribe in regard of its relation to the jihadi discourse.
THE TALK WILL BE HELD IN ARABIC