Lustration in Iraq: Regime change as exclusion and control

Abstract

The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent laws of regime change were directed at the ‘purification’ of public sector employment. Such policies based upon removing transgressors from within the previous regime are commonly known as lustration. In Iraq, these were normatively presented as a required process for democracy building and victim recognition. However, in reality, lustration emerged problematically and essentially as a form of counter-insurgency aimed at removing those guilty of war crimes but also those opposed to neo-liberalism, federalism and the erosion of secularism. The misuse of laws of lustration was allied to external design and the relish of the new elite to use public resources to attempt state hegemony. Lustration, thus emerging as one of the few sites in which the new state could control and assert influence even if that led to new grievances and ethno-sectarian resentment.