Paper 1 - Displacement, Governance, and Post-ISIS Iraq
Ashleigh Whelan
The territorial defeat of ISIS is nearly ten years past, and the Iraqi government has made visible institutional progress seeing as camps for displaced populations and returnees have closed down, border crossings with Syria have reopened, and national authorities have assumed responsibilities that international actors once carried. Yet, the hardest cases have been deferred rather than resolved, and the structural conditions that impede reintegration and threaten long-term stability remain largely intact.
This paper examines those conditions. It distinguishes between four groups whose circumstances are routinely collapsed into a single displacement file - those still in camps in the Kurdistan Region, recent returnees from Syria, the secondarily displaced who appear in no official record, and those who have returned home but remain stigmatised. As such, it argues that policy designed for one is unlikely to serve the whole. It then turns to the barriers that determine whether reintegration succeeds i.e., access to civil documentation, authority exercised by militias and local power brokers over who may return, economic exclusion enforced informally by employers, and rehabilitation programming that ends well before the need does.
The abovementioned barriers are normally treated as humanitarian or service-delivery problems. The paper's argument, on the other hand, is that they function instead as structural exclusions, and that the same conditions sustaining displacement also sustain the residual ISIS presence inside Iraq, which persists less as a territorial threat than as a network able to exploit institutional and geographic gaps. The recommendations that follow address civil administration, local reconciliation, and the governance and economic dimensions of containment, with Iraqi institutions responsible for implementation and international partners supporting where capacity is thin.
The analysis draws on discussions with Iraqi policymakers, security analysts, community organisers, and international experts working on Iraq's stabilisation and long-term recovery.
The second paper in the publication will follow in the coming months.
