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Always there, supportive and challenging, she had greatly helped me to go through the difficulties and constant interrogations while I was writing this thesis. I am also very grateful to Jens Rydgren for his precious advices and encouragement. I want to thank the Department of Sociology and all my colleagues here. It was a privilege to work among such bright and friendly group of people. Many of them provided support, insights and help when I needed it. Outside Sweden, I owe a to different academic friends, Nicolas, Tarek, Nicos, Walid, a debt of gratitude. I also need to give a special thanks to Yeshica and Dharshani. Dur- ing these years as a Phd candidate, I had the chance to participate in the Berlin Summer School and the Prague NRVSS, both seminars were crucial for the elaboration of this thesis. Of course, I would have not succeeded to complete this work without the warming presence and the thoughts of those I love, my family and my friends wherever they are. Finally, this thesis would not exist at all without certain people. Nahla, without whom nothing would have happened. And the dozens of Iraqis who helped me, who welcomed me in their house and who accepted, for hours on end, to speak about their beloved country, Iraq. This dissertation is dedicated to them. Introduction After having invaded Iraq in 2003 and destroyed the Ba'athist dictatorship, the United States (US) Administration undertook the complete refounding of Iraq as a nation and a state. The initial steps of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was the eradication of the old regime’s security apparatus as well as an important part of the remaining structures of the Iraqi State. Since then, this nation-building endeavour has been based on a consociational, fed- eral constitution promoting an ethno-sectarian power sharing or muhasasah, and the attempt to transform what was once a centralised national state into a comprehensive, maybe idealised, market-driven democracy. The American occupation of Iraq and the attempt to remake Iraq has turned into a nightmare. For more than a decade now, Iraq has been engulfed in general, multiform violence that between 2005-2007 culminated into an ethno-sectarian civil war and episodes of ethno-sectarian cleansing in the main cities of the country. The ebb and flow of the violence has resulted in hundreds of thousands of victims and millions of refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). At the same time, the reconstruction of the state never delivered the predicted outcomes, and the country remains marred with endemic corruption, eco- nomic crises, lack of basic public services, a fragmented state and sectarian militia. Hence, it is not surprising that Iraq never left the top ten list of the most fragile states in the world since the beginning of such compilations in 2005 (Fragile State Index 2015). Even worse, the violent explosion of ethno- sectarian conflict that started in Iraq during the American occupation has reached important areas of the Middle East. Iraq is now part of multiple wars and regional conflicts that go all the way from Aden in Yemen to Diyarbakir in Turkey. As such, the year 2014 saw Iraq losing about a third of its territory within the Al Anbar, Ninawa, Salah ed Din and Kirkuk provinces to the pro- claimed Sunni caliphate of the Islamic State that now stretches over Syria and Iraq. In fact, one could summarise the plight of the country in two sentences: In 2015, the Al Abadi government conducted a rambling alliance of Shi'a militia, Sunni tribal fighters and what remained of the state security apparatus to battle its way back to the lost provinces in the central and northern regions. Meanwhile, the south of the country and Baghdad, the capital, were shaken all summer long by street protests held by Iraqi citizens enraged by the abject corruption among the religious and political elites, the complete impotence of the state and the continuous electricity shortages. Certainly, the last 35 years of Iraqi history are particularly sad to look into, and it is quite difficult to make sense of the terrible extent of pain and destruc- tion that the Iraqi society has had to endure until now. From 1979 to 2003, the Iraqi people had to live under the Saddam dictatorship, one of the bloodiest regimes of the region. They had to endure the Iraq-Iran war, the longest con- ventional war of the 20th century, from 1980 to 1988. Soon after, in 1991 they faced a US-led international coalition during the First Gulf War, which was immediately followed by the terrible crushing of the Sha'aban Intifada by the Saddam regime. The Iraqi people were then punished by one of the most se- vere, destructive and longest international embargoes from 1991 to 2003, which put a devastating strain on Iraqi society. Finally, they plunged into the last hellish decade of invasion, occupation and civil war. Within the last thirty- five years, Iraqis have never experienced more than three years of peace. If anything should surprise us, it should be the capacity for resilience displayed by an Iraqi society that has more or less held together during all these years. Yet, considering the developments of the last decade, one cannot help but wonder if and when this capacity