The Iraqi Archives of the Baath Regime in American Institutions

Abstract

This research aims to study the Iraqi archives held in American institutions from multiple perspectives, including the processes of their transfer, documentation, repatriation, access, and the epistemic issues surrounding them. From the Iraqi people’s uprising against the Baath regime in 1991 until the U.S. invasion in 2003 and thereafter, enormous numbers of Iraqi state documents were transferred to American academic and security institutions, foremost among them the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) at the National Defense University of the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), in addition to the University of Colorado.

The research seeks to examine three main axes: first, the routes through which Iraqi documents were transferred and the nature of the institutions that housed them; second, the use of these documents and the methodologies employed in documenting them; and third, the issues surrounding the archives. The research concludes that the Iraqi archives in American institutions constitute an epistemic, ethical, and political problem, and that addressing the difficulties of actual access for Iraqi researchers remains an urgent issue that has not yet been resolved.