Security and Intelligence in Iraq at the British Imperial Frontier

Sam Dunham, Yale University

Using archival data from the British-Turkish border dispute in the Iraq Mandate, this paper illustrates how inter-imperial border contestation and subversion shapes security and intelligence-gathering institutions. The literature on state capacity and state formation in the bellicist tradition, going back to Tilly (1990), links military contestation between states to the development of state capacity. More recent work, however, complicates this approach by demonstrating the geographic variation in conflict’s effects, highlighting how contestation between international rivals shapes state and institutional capacity in border regions differently than in other areas. Using archival data from the UK National Archives, this paper shows how border contestation between the British Empire and Turkey drove British construction of information capacity and security institutions, such as the police and local levies, in contested areas, without increasing British administrative control over these areas. It relies in part on the Air Control Dataset, a new geocoded event dataset documenting British uses of force in the Iraq Mandate.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 208. Empire and Imperialism in Theory and History