This article employs a postcolonial historical sociological approach to studying state formation in Iraq between 1914–24. In doing so, it synthesises insights from the ‘historical’ and ‘imperial’ turns in International Relations (IR), to understand the state as a processual and relational entity shaped by the imperial relations through which it emerged. Drawing on the case of Iraq, this article demonstrates how British imperial relations (‘international’) interlaced with anti-colonial struggles (‘domestic’) to foster a historically specific pattern of Iraqi state formation. In making these claims, this article contributes to bridging IR's analytical divide between ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ spaces, while undermining IR's universalist assumptions about the ‘spread’ of the state from Europe to the Arab world. Rather, this article demonstrates that the imperial encounter was constitutive of the type of state that emerged, thereby highlighting the agency of anti-colonial struggles in producing historically specific patterns of state domination.

中文翻译：

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作为帝国遭遇的结果的国家形成：以伊拉克为例

本文采用后殖民历史社会学方法来研究 1914-24 年间伊拉克的国家形成。在这样做的过程中，它综合了国际关系（IR）中“历史”和“帝国”转向的见解，将国家理解为一个过程和关系实体，由其产生的帝国关系所塑造。本文以伊拉克为例，展示了英国帝国关系（“国际”）如何与反殖民斗争（“国内”）交织在一起，以形成一种历史上特定的伊拉克国家形成模式。在提出这些主张时，本文有助于弥合国际关系在“国际”和“国内”空间之间的分析鸿沟，同时破坏国际关系关于国家从欧洲“传播”到阿拉伯世界的普遍主义假设。相当，