Ansar Jasim is a political scientist. Her research and writing focus on state–society relations, infrastructures, and spatial politics in Iraq, as well as on questions of civil society and food sovereignty in the Middle East. She has published on the politics of infrastructure in Baghdad’s Sadr City, including the article “Infrastructural Power and ‘Numbing’ in Iraq: The Struggle over Sadr City” (Middle East Law and Governance, 2025). She is currently completing her PhD in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin, where she combines ethnographic and archival methods to explore how infrastructures mediate relations between state power and everyday life.

Research Project

State–society relations in Iraq: Understanding spatial politics in a city of revolution(s)

Ansar Jasim´s dissertation investigates how infrastructures shape and are shaped by relations between state power and everyday life in Baghdad’s Sadr City. Based on more than a year of ethnographic and archival research, it explores how planned interventions and local practices interact to produce forms of governance, belonging, and resistance. The project situates Sadr City within broader debates on urban political ecology, subaltern statecraft, and the dialectics of “seeing like a state” and “seeing like a city.” By highlighting everyday practices and struggles, it seeks to tell Iraq’s modern history from below, through the experiences and agency of its inhabitants.