Shamiran Mako, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School, has co-authored the opening chapter of a new edited volume from Stanford University Press, The Ba’th Party Archives and the Study of Iraqi Politics and History, edited by Samuel Helfont and Lisa Blaydes. Co-authored with Marsin Alshamary and titled “Arrested History: Hierarchized Knowledge Production and Iraq’s Ba’th Party Archives,” the chapter opens the volume by confronting one of its most pressing tensions directly.

The authors trace the history of Ba’thist archival appropriation across the two Gulf Wars and argue that the removal of these records from Iraq has produced what they call “hierarchized knowledge production” — a structural imbalance in which Western-based scholars have enjoyed vast research opportunities, while Iraqi academics and researchers have been effectively excluded from the very history those archives contain. Drawing on interviews with Iraqi scholars across different regions of the country, Mako and Alshamary also push back against a common and dismissive assumption that Iraqi scholars are somehow not ready or equipped to engage with their own past. A claim their research directly refutes.

While grounded in the Iraqi case, the chapter carries implications well beyond it, offering a framework for thinking about archival access, epistemic justice, and the ethics of wartime expropriation in other post-conflict contexts, including Syria. It is a timely and necessary contribution to a volume that takes seriously not just what the Ba’th Party archives have revealed about authoritarian rule, but who gets to decide what that history means, and who has been left out of that conversation altogether.

The book overall brings together leading scholars to assess more than a decade of research using Iraq’s Ba’th Party archives: records that became accessible to Western scholars following the Gulf Wars and have since reshaped scholarly understanding of Saddam Hussein’s regime, authoritarian governance, and state-society relations across the Middle East. Rich in empirical detail and framed by cutting-edge theoretical questions, the book examines how these unique records have challenged prior assumptions about Ba’thist Iraq while raising urgent ethical questions about access, ownership, and the politics of knowledge.

Shamiran Mako is an assistant professor of international relations and political science at the Pardee School of Global Studies. Her scholarship dives deep into the historical and contemporary drivers of inter- and intra-state conflicts that engender weak and fragile states across the Middle East and North Africa region. She is the author of the upcoming book Structuring Exclusion: Institutions, Grievances, and Ethnic State Capture in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2025) and After the Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa, with Valentine Moghadam (Cambridge University Press, 2021). To read more about her work and accomplishments, visit her faculty profile.