408 Resisting Publics
e way in which Iraqis have been able to circumvent physical vio-On
lence is through the Internet. A dramatic expansion of the public sphere
after 2003 can be found in the rise and spread of the blog. Of course, com-
puter usage was severely restricted under the Ba‘thist regime. However,
once Iraqis, especially those living in urban areas, obtained access to the
Internet, either through their own computers or through the large num-
ber of Internet cafés established after 2003, they began to create a wide
range of blogs in both Arabic and English. Iraqi bloggers have become an
important source of information about politics, government corruption,
human rights (including women and children’s rights as well as those of
refugees and displaced persons), artistic trends, the United States occupa-
tion, and the abuses of Islam by radical Islamists. Although these blogs
have generated anger in government and sectarian circles, they have been
impossible to shut down.^43
The state and the public sphere
Despite the strides made in the development of an Iraqi public sphere and
a larger civil society, stimulated by the pre-Ba‘thist nationalist movement,
neither a well developed civil society nor public sphere can by themselves
assure the development of a tolerant, participatory and democratic soci-
ety. This point underscores the problems inherent in a conceptual per-
spective that only focuses on one dimension of society, in this instance the
public sphere and the closely related notion of civil society, without taking
other components of the political system into account.
olitically, the core problem of modern Iraq has been the institu-P
tional weakness of the state. Consequently, the vibrant civil society and
public sphere, which developed under the aegis of the Iraqi nationalist
movement, have never benefitted from an institutional framework that
would allow them to translate their contributions into sustainable politi-
cal practices. The lack of institutional development has meant that the
participatory and tolerant qualities that characterized politics at the mass
level in Iraq have not engendered positive change at the level of the state.
Instead the state has either been characterized by weak and venal elite
coalitions that Iraqis referred to as the “merchants of politics” [tujjār