State-Making, Nation-Building and the Military: Iraq, 1941-1958
Khaled Salih
Göteborg University
Nation-building, a central theme of nationalism, has been viewed by politicians, administrators and activists as a highly desirable, if not an imperative, goal over the last two centuries. As an academic topic it has attracted the attention of a large number of historians and social scientists for several decades. At times, nation-building was believed to be an easy and automatic process, following universal patterns which originated in the West. Despite time, place, historical and cultural conditions, it appeared that both old and new states had to undergo the Western processes of nation-building and could be analysed in the same terms. Nation-building is conceived and discussed within the perimeters of particular given states. However, over the last few decades political scientists, sociologists and historians have held lengthy discussions on ‘the withering away of the state’, ‘bringing the state back in’, ‘the return of the state’, ‘the limits of the state’, ‘political power beyond the state’, ‘the problem of the state’, ‘the difficulty of ... | 
