Nationalism as sovereignty? Renegotiating state-citizen relations through counterhegemonic discourse in the Iraqi Tishreen revolution

Nationalist mobilization is mostly associated with ethnic and territorial grievances. However, studies in recent uprisings, such as the SWANA revolutions of 2011 and 2019, found that nationalist discourse prominently featured in social movements’ repertoires of contention. A widely understood signifier, nationalism was reappropriated by movements to build consensus on ideas of popular sovereignty and direct democracy. The Iraqi Tishreen revolution (2019–20) is especially interesting in this respect because the movement leveraged contested and stratified discourses around the nation (watan) and civic identities in a transformed and contentious framing. The present research investigates the discursive re-appropriation of nationalism by the Tishreen movement, drawing from interviews with former activists and documentary sources. Exploring activists’ retrospective considerations on the role of nationalism and collective identities in the revolution, this article discusses how Tishreen creatively engaged with pre-existing discourses around collective identities to resignify Iraqi nationalism as a social justice project. While contentious nationalism is often associated with state-formation processes or regime transitions, some models frame it as a politics of contention oriented towards renegotiating the boundaries of the public sphere and state-citizen relations. The trajectories of 21st-century uprisings in SWANA and beyond indicate that even within consolidated states, civic social movements employ a strategy of re-signifying nationalism to transform governance systems. Therefore, expanding theoretical models for the study of nationalist contention will be increasingly relevant to understanding the dynamics of civic uprisings.