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Drawing on archival material captured from the headquarters of Saddam Hussein´s ruling Ba´th Party in the wake of the 2003 US invasion, Blaydes illuminates the complexities of political life in Iraq, including why certain Iraqis chose to collaborate with the regime while others worked to undermine it. She demonstrates that, despite the Ba´thist regime´s pretensions to political hegemony, its frequent reliance on collective punishment of various groups reinforced and cemented identity divisions. In addition, a series of costly external shocks to the economy--resulting from fluctuations in oil prices and Iraq´s war with Iran- weakened the capacity of the regime to monitor, co-opt, coerce, and control factions of Iraqi society.

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"Using rich and original primary sources, this excellent book looks deeply at the case of Saddam Hussein´s Iraq to develop a new theory of how cooperation and resistance emerge in oppressive political contexts."--Fotini Christia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Lisa Blaydes is associate professor of political science and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak´s Egypt.

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