Order Out of Chaos

David Patel's fascinating inquiry into how Iraqis rebuilt order after the US invasion and the collapse of Saddam's state

It’s the return of my nominally weekly book review essay!

David Siddhartha Patel, Order Out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq (Cornell University Press, 2023)

In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and, in short order, toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. In the aftermath, American forces failed to establish order as a massive wave of looting decimated government buildings. Much literature has focused on the security and political aspects of the American failure to plan or implement the continuity of state institutions following regime change, the effects of the subsequent decisions to disband the Iraqi army and deBaathify official institutions, and the descent into civil war and insurgency. There have been a lot of books written on those topics, of widely varying quality, and I’ll be reviewing some of the new ones in the coming weeks. David Siddhartha Patel’s Order Out of Chaos stands out for asking very different questions about the aftermath of the US invasion and generating unique answers through a clever combination of methods.

In his keenly observed and astutely theorized new book, Patel explores how Iraqis in one city managed to coordinate to restore state services such as garbage collection in the absence of a state. That narrow lens, in turn, opens a window into much larger theoretical questions of the origins of political order and the mechanisms which enable or frustrate political cooperation under anarchy. And it sheds fascinating light onto enduring questions of Iraqi politics such as the sources of the political authority of the Shi’a religious establishment, the nature of Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s influence, and the divergent trajectories of Sunni and Shi’a areas of Iraq.

Patel’s book is based on ethnographic observation in the southern city of Basra in the months following the U.S. invasion. Rather than taking up residence in the Green Zone in Baghdad under US military protection, Patel lived in Basra for several months, until the security situation became too risky, where he experienced and shared the confusion of local citizens about what was happening around him. His focus on Basra helpfully decenters the Baghdad-centric focus of so much of the research and analysis of Iraq’s trajectory, which is understandable but which has potentially distorting effects on understanding of the rest of the country. He also decenters the US-centric perspective which has dominated much of the academic, think tank and popular commentary on the country, with the US almost as invisible from his analysis following the invasion as it was on the ground in Basra. A key test of his work would be how it resonates with that of Iraqi scholars and journalists in that regard, and their reading of the effects of uncertainty and state collapse; I’ll be looking at some of their contributions soon.

One of Patel’s key observations is that Iraq should not be considered a failed state in the sense of much of that literature. This was not a case of the steady, slow erosion of state capacity ending in the collapse of order and disappearance of state institutions. On the contrary, the Iraqi state in early 2003 was very strong, and indeed had been expanding and intensifying its dominant presence in the half-decade following the establishment of the Oil for Food program. It was precisely that strength, and the omnipresence of stateness, which made the sudden collapse of the state following the American invasion so shocking and disorienting. Iraqis experienced state failure extremely quickly. In that context, Patel points to the central importance of the looting which stripped clean government buildings as both a testament to and a driver of the recognition of the profound, sudden disappearance of the state.

Patel’s approach has methodological and theoretical implications which become apparent as he sets out to understand how Iraqis navigated the sudden, existential uncertainty into which the US invasion and Iraqi state collapse pushed them. He makes a strong case throughout the book for the value of combining ethnography with rational choice perspectives. As he explains in his podcast conversation with me (listen here), keen ethnographic observation should be seen as essential for applying rational choice theory rather than as a rival approach: understanding how individuals perceive the nature of the game that’s being played is a critical step for modeling their strategic choices. That’s a welcome methodological bridge between traditions that, at least back in the glory days of the rationalist-constructivist wars, had often been rather mutually hostile within political science.

That bridge delivers results when it comes to Patel’s core question: how did Iraqis in Basra restore social order and some key services following the sudden collapse of the state? Patel makes a key distinction here, drawing on the rational choice literature, between cooperation and coordination games. Most analysis in the rational choice tradition focuses on cooperation games, he notes, situations where people have to decide how to navigate divergent preferences and consequentially different outcomes. Coordination games, where there’s no real difference between outcomes as long as agreement is reached, tend to get neglected. But coordination games can be tricky as well, in situations of profound uncertainty, unevenly flowing information, and deep distrust. It’s all fine and good to say “everyone should just agree to drive on the left side of the road”; but how are you supposed to know if all the other drivers you might encounter have agreed to that rule? Are you willing to risk your life on the assumption, or the hope, that they have heard of the rule and are going to follow it?

Patel locates the Iraqi solution to such coordination games in mosques, a social institution where most Iraqis - or, at least, Iraqi Shi’ite sin Basra - can reasonably expect others in their community to visit each Friday. The emergence of open Friday sermons may have been a post-Saddam phenomenon, but they quickly became ubiquitous. What’s more, the preachers in those sermons mostly followed the same religious authority — in this case, the networks of Ayatollah Ali Sistani. That meant that Sistani’s office could reliably transmit the same message at the same time to virtually everybody — and, critically, everyone else could reasonably assume that to be the case. If Friday sermons told everyone to put their trash out for collection on Wednesday, for instance, everyone could reasonably anticipate that everyone else had gotten the same message. And that allowed them to converge around that focal point, coordinating their behavior in the absence of any political authority or enforcement mechanism. Critically, he emphasizes that this does not imply any underlying religiosity or attribute any unique force to Shi’a institutions: the mechanism operating here is information and common knowledge, with mosques the carrier rather than cause.

Patel demonstrates that this mechanism actually operated through not only his ethnographic observations, but also through a clever GIS mapping exercise of mosques which allows him to demonstrate the relationship between compliance with such messages and the geographical distribution of mosques. Too many mosques in one area, or mosques controlled by different clerical networks, could spread confusing or discordant messages; too few could mean that the messages aren’t received. Patel’s mapping exercise and data analysis allows him to show that compliance with messages was indeed more reliable where mosques are distributed efficiently geographically and distributing a single, common message in the Friday sermons.

That only worked on issues where there were no real distributional implications of the outcome, though. It doesn’t really matter what day trash gets collected, as long as everyone does it on the same day. But more contentious issues quickly reveal the limits of Sistan’is authority and of the coordination mechanism of Friday sermons. When Sistani called for Shi’ites to not retaliate against Sunnis following jihadist attacks on their mosques, he was mostly ignored. Stepping back to observe the larger picture, Patel argues that Sistani tended to issue only fatwas or guidance which he knew would be obeyed because the costs were low, thus conserving his authority and sustaining the social convention of his own influence. That’s a really interesting reading of the nature of Sistani’s influence, and one which helps to explain a lot of puzzles about when he could and couldn’t exert his influence: yes in national elections where voters simply needed to converge on a common list, for instance, but much less so in local elections with multiple competitive Shi’a candidates.

Patel also digs in to the puzzle of why Sunni mosques failed to replicate the coordination successes of Shi’a mosques, emphasizing the existence of multiple competing religious authorities and the geographic dispersion of mosques and their attendance. He also shows why other potential coordination mechanisms, such as tribes or the mass media, largely failed to provide compelling alternatives. Not everyone will be satisfied with Patel’s information-centric, rationalist reading of the influence of Shi’a religious authorities in Iraq. But all social scientists studying not only Iraqi but also stateless political orders more broadly will have to grapple with his argument and its implications. Order Out of Chaos is a creatively designed, methodologically clever, and sharply written contribution to the literature which should be widely read across the discipline.