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Middle East & North Africa
Deindustrialization in the Middle East and North Africa
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Noria Research
Sacred Lands and Secular Tensions: Religious Economy and Agropastoral Conflicts in Southern Chad
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Middle East & North Africa
Unpacking the Political Stakes Behind Baghdad’s New Central Bank Tower
Processes of deindustrialization have set the course for postmodernity. Though its impact varies with geography, it is deindustrialization which defines the conditions of social, political, and economic life across most the world today. This is certainly so in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There, premature deindustrialization bequeaths legacies of grave and enduring salience. In the economic domain, effects are observable in the region’s struggles with job creation, productivity, growth, and macrostability. Socially, they are present in MENA’s extreme levels of inequality. Politically, deindustrialization contributes to democracy’s recurring failures to launch.
This report takes identifying the drivers behind deindustrialization in the MENA as its primary task. Based on months of desk research and an extensive exploration of the historical archive, we trace causality across time and beyond the borders of the region. Findings are many, prominently including the following:
(i) The early onsetting of deindustrialization in the MENA was provoked by the global economy’s drift into stagnation beginning in the late 1960s.
(ii) Due to global issues of overcapacity and falling profit rates, securing the investment needed to nurture competitive manufacturing sectors has been exceedingly difficult.
(iii) Though global dynamics did make opportunities for healthy industrializing scarce, they did not condemn MENA countries to the fates ultimately suffered. Political choices and policy errors also played a role in shaping the course of events. Critical in these regards were modalities of state-capital relations, inadequate policy design, and a series of contingencies derived from the management of natural resource endowments.
(iv) Neoliberalism’s resolution of capitalism’s profitability crisis harmed MENA’s industrial prospects significantly. The deepening of global value chains over the past forty years has been detrimental to capital accumulation. The enforcement of intellectual property claims has obstructed traditional pathways to industrial progress. Furthermore, competitive pressures have forced firms to adopt capital intensive forms of production, limiting industry’s capacity to absorb greater shares of MENA’s workforce.
(v) The corporate welfarism that many MENA governments have institutionalized in hopes of attracting foreign investment in recent decades is fundamentally misguided: The extension of non-conditional benefits to corporate actors serves only to minimize the social and developmental utility of a prospective investment.
Looking ahead, it is plain that deindustrialization will continue weighing heavily on the region’s outlook. For a better future to be realized, local policy officials and members of the international community alike will need reckon with the factors compelling deindustrialization. Materially, this requires rethinking the terms and incentives governing matters of production, trade, and investment.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
So-called “farmer-herder conflicts” dominate the Chadian media landscape to such an extent that they reinforce the perception of their temporal and spatial permanence. In September 2022, the newspaper Le Pays sounded the alarm over the severity of the situation in the South of the country: “Farmers and herders […] are clashing… some villages have been burned down, more than 15 people killed and dozens injured. The situation is alarming”1. Headlines of this kind are common for anyone familiar with current events in this vast Central African country2. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), these “farmer-herder conflicts” alone accounted for 42% of violent incidents reported in the first half of 2024, with a strong concentration in the South, where approximately 77% of the confrontations occurred3. While such conflicts are highly mediatised, they also form part of a much longer historical trajectory.
It is important to emphasise that agropastoral conflicts are by no means a new phenomenon, whether in southern Chad or across the wider Lake Chad Basin. They are embedded in a long history of often fragile coexistence between farmers and herders, marked by constantly shifting balances of power. Recent academic literature broadly agrees that these tensions cannot be reduced to a traditional antagonism; rather, they should be understood as manifestations of deeper transformations in land tenure, access to natural resources, and political authority. Two major positions emerge from recent research. The first interprets this violence as a symptom of a land governance crisis, catalysed by structural factors such as demographic pressure, agricultural extensification, and climate change4. The second – now gaining ground as the dominant framework – seeks to move beyond surface-level analysis and interrogate the historical, political and symbolic logics that underpin these confrontations5, along with their instrumentalisation for the purposes of control or clientelist redistribution6.
This article aligns with the latter perspective, exploring an angle that remains underexamined: the role of the religious economy in the dynamics of rural tensions. By “religious economy”, we refer to all activities involving the production, distribution, and consumption of spiritual goods, which mobilise religious solidarity as a form of both symbolic and material capital. In Chad, this economy is rooted in a “collective interpretive framework” shaped by the memory of past conflicts and institutionalised through mechanisms such as Quranic schools. From this perspective, the religious entrepreneur – exemplified here by the promoters of Quranic schools – is an individual who leverages religious expertise and symbolic capital to shape a socio-economic model. This model involves mediating conflicts, legitimising one\’s position through public acts of peacemaking, mobilising philanthropic support, and transforming religious influence into institutional resources.
Although the promoters of Quranic schools are emblematic of the religious and social dynamics under study, they represent only one category among several actors. The intention is not to portray them as the sole agents of this religious economy. As this article is being written, clashes between farmers and herders continue to stir deep sensitivities in Chad, in a context where religious affiliation remains a delicate issue – often avoided due to its symbolic weight and its potential for conflict. The aim here is therefore not to assign blame, but to offer a different lens through which to understand these conflicts, at a time when classical explanatory models appear increasingly inadequate.
This article demonstrates that the promotion of Arabic-Islamic education has today become a promising sector, actively invested in by religious entrepreneurs who see in it opportunities for social integration and legitimation. These actors play an active role in reshaping social relations linked to agropastoral conflicts by drawing on a religious economy that combines educational practices, pastoral mobility, and land negotiation. The analysis is based on fieldwork conducted between September and December 2023, as part of a doctoral thesis on the financing of Arabic-Islamic education in Chad. Particular attention is given here to a southern province that has been especially affected by agropastoral conflicts, both in terms of their intensity and recurrence. Due to the sensitivity of the topic and the security risks for those involved, the name of the province has been anonymised, as have the identities of the individuals interviewed during the research. This ethical choice aims to preserve the confidentiality of the exchanges while ensuring the sociological rigour of the analysis. The methodological approach combines semi-structured interviews with promoters of Quranic schools, local leaders, agricultural producers, and pastoralists, along with direct observation of the concrete functioning of this religious economy. The collected data show that religious entrepreneurs engage in a complex process of legitimation, seeking to build social recognition through their role as mediators between conflicting groups. In this way, they establish themselves as key intermediaries between nomadic pastoralists and farming communities in the South, in exchange for resources – constituting the core of their economic model.
This mediating role is not without consequences. It generates tensions surrounding land use and fuels competition among local actors. This article thus seeks to shift the analytical lens, showing that violence does not always originate in the fields or along transhumance routes, but rather takes root in imaginaries and regimes of legitimacy. The objective is therefore to move beyond the obvious explanations, to uncover the interplay of actors at the heart of these conflicts and to better understand the social logics underlying rural violence.
The article is structured in three parts. The first section revisits the historical and symbolic foundations of agropastoral conflicts, demonstrating that a structural matrix exists, rooted in the historicity of a Chadian social field shaped by religious, territorial, and political dynamics. The second part explores the emergence of a religious economy, focusing on its actors, their relationships, and interactions. The third section examines the ambivalent effects of this economy on tensions over land access in general, and agropastoral conflicts in particular.
I. Religion, Land and Livestock: A Social Field in Crisis
In Chad, religious identity is far from a purely private matter. It is omnipresent in the public sphere and, as a structuring matrix of the social field, it plays a central role in shaping social relations, access to resources, positions, and spaces. Islam currently holds demographic predominance. According to the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, nearly 58% of Chadians are Muslims, compared to approximately 34% Christians and 4% adherents of so-called traditional religions7. These figures, however, obscure the fluidity of religious affiliation, which in practice varies according to context, alliances, and constraints, and intertwines with ethnic, linguistic, and economic dimensions.
The Chadian social field – whose religious foundations have been highlighted by Jean-Pierre Magnant – has historically formed around a tension between two contrasting relationships to space, mobility, production, and the sacred8. One, associated with the Sahelian North, is rooted in Islam, pastoralism, and trade; the other, the South, is grounded in sedentary agriculture and a form of religiosity, both Christian and traditional, centred on earth-based cults. As early as the precolonial period, the North saw the development of Islamised kingdoms where sultans combined political power with religious legitimacy. There, Islam became not only a faith, but also a legal framework, a form of diplomacy, an economy, and a vehicle for social regulation. As Jean-Claude Zeltner noted, the North did not identify with Central Africa but oriented itself “organically” towards the East, “the Nile Valley, Cairo, Mecca”9. It was also through Islam that a local variant of Arabic spread, which became a language of economic exchange – particularly in the South.
In contrast, while the North viewed land as a space for movement and economic enhancement, the South sacralised it. Among the Sara – the largest ethnic group in the South – land is a site of interaction between the living and invisible forces. Access to land is mediated by land chiefs (chefs de terre), who act as both spiritual and social regulators. Even with the arrival of the first Christian missions, conversion to Christianity did not erase this conception. Agriculture is more than an economic activity; it is a collective, ritual, and political vocation.
In the South, the figure of the nomadic herder is not merely that of a livestock keeper in search of pasture. It embodies a plural identity – economic, religious, linguistic, and regional. The herder does not travel only with his herds; he carries with him an imaginary, a territorial memory, and a social order that give structure to his mobility and meaning to his temporary presence. This mobility often comes into tension with the sedentary logic of ritual agriculture, which is founded on a very different relationship to space and time. As a result, conflicts between herders and farmers go far beyond local contingencies. They reactivate deeper structural and symbolic oppositions embedded in the historical cleavages of the Chadian social field – cleavages that were further reinforced by colonisation.
French colonisation at the beginning of the 20th century, while administratively unifying the North and South, ultimately served to reinforce pre-existing fractures. The South was integrated into the colonial economy as the so-called “useful Chad”, transformed into a centre of cotton production and a land of Francophone elites, fostered by Christian missions and the expansion of schooling. In contrast, the North remained peripheral. It continued to develop Quranic schools and to culturally resist the colonial school system, which was seen as incompatible with Islamic traditions and perceived by the colonial administration as a potential political threat, subject to monitoring and even repression.
After independence in 1960, these asymmetrical dynamics translated into unequal access to the state and its resources. Southern elites quickly took over administrative positions, exposing the fact that the postcolonial Chadian state had emerged from a foundational exclusion of the Muslim North. This exclusion gave rise to a widespread sense of resentment that soon evolved into organised rejection. The regime of François Tombalbaye deepened this divide. Through the establishment of a one-party system in 1964 and the targeted repression of northern militants, southern authority was imposed abruptly, often through abusive measures. In 1965, the Mangalmé uprising against administrative violence in central Chad paved the way for the formation of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FROLINAT), a rebel movement with national ambitions and an Arab-Muslim orientation, laying the foundations for decades of sociopolitical instability, culminating in the civil war of 1979.
The “events of 1979,” as they are commonly referred to in popular discourse, gradually became the structuring matrix of current agropastoral tensions, rooted in political, religious, and territorial divisions. This historical turning point marked not only the end but also the failure of a unified national project. Religious and regional affiliations re-emerged as primary sources of rival identities. Pastoralism became a lever of political power and economic rent, through which relations of domination were exercised. This new configuration gradually eroded the traditional modes of coexistence between farmers and herders, giving rise to relations of mistrust and competition. Religious and symbolic cleavages, once primarily cultural, were converted into instruments of identity-based mobilisation, becoming inseparable from agropastoral dynamics.
Thus emerged a latent but structural conflictuality, further exacerbated from the 1990s onward by the instrumentalisation of territorial control and herd mobility in pursuit of power. Even today, this architecture of conflict endures. Tensions between farmers and herders are the manifestation of a historical system in which land, livestock, and religious, geographic, and linguistic affiliations are entangled, structuring contemporary violence. This interpretive framework helps explain why agropastoral clashes cannot be reduced to isolated local incidents but are instead deeply rooted in a long-standing geopolitical logic.
II. Religious Economy in Practice
In Chad, a country officially secular, students at Quranic schools – traditional institutions of Arabic-Islamic education – remain largely marginalised by public policy and excluded from formal employment opportunities. Lacking integration into conventional employment pathways, many former students, who have become Islamic scholars to a greater or lesser extent, are now self-employed. Since the 1990s, this educational space has gradually been transformed into a genuine arena for socio-economic integration. Former students now find in the promotion of Quranic schools a form of religious entrepreneurship that articulates religious capital with economic rationality. This economy mobilises the memory of the “events of 1979” to legitimise their role as unique actors in national reconciliation. In a sense, these religious entrepreneurs shape pastoral dynamics in the South, where land resources – although more abundant than in the North – remain difficult to access due to intensified competition driven by both climate change and demographic pressure.
Memory of War and the Market for Reconciliation
To establish their legitimacy, religious entrepreneurs invest in a strategic positioning based on their role as social mediators and agents of peace, local development, and national dialogue. They rely on narratives of collective resilience and demonstrate their capacity to mobilise both symbolic and material resources in order to consolidate their presence in the public sphere.
One founder of a Quranic school, referring to the 1979 crisis and the divisions it caused, described it as “a dangerous illness that destroys everything, wherever it settles”i. He added that “if my school had existed before 1979, perhaps we could have avoided the divisions that continue to tear us apart”. He presents his Quranic school as a space for communal living that brings together Chadians “from Aouzou to Sido”, the country’s northernmost and southernmost points. The school is presented as a bastion of “living together” (vivre ensemble), where more than twenty ethnic groups from both the North and South coexistii. Like other cheikhs who promote Quranic schools, he cultivates the image of an inclusive, tolerant, and hospitable Islam. His discourse explicitly opposes what he calls a “counterfeit Islam” – a distorted, hierarchical version of the faith that perpetuates the social fractures inherited from the crisis of the 1970s.
This posture – at once pacifying, critical, and reconciliatory – functions as a strategic resource for these religious entrepreneurs. It enables them to assume the role of intermediaries able to transcend religious and territorial divides. Another Quranic school leader, for instance, stated that his means allowed him to intervene “up to 100 kilometres from here” to resolve intra-Muslim conflicts before the state was even informediii. This visible effectiveness reflects a strong anchoring in local dynamics, where they act as pragmatic agents of peacemaking. By transforming the memory of conflict into a unifying narrative, these cheikhs reinforce their legitimacy in the public space. They are also deeply involved in the organisation of the National Peace Days, initiated by the authorities in 2011 as part of a broader national reconciliation project. Their active participation in these events institutionalises their role in sociopolitical mediation and strengthens their position as key actors in managing and preventing local conflicts.
At once spiritual guides and educational entrepreneurs, the founders of Quranic schools also build their legitimacy on asceticism, humility, and collective achievement. They emphasise the modest origins of their schools, highlighting their establishment in remote, infrastructure-poor areas as evidence of faith and perseverance. The initial absence of comfort is framed as proof of sincerity. Such narratives establish symbolic distinction. Schools that started “with nothing at all, with only the shade of a mango tree as shelter”iv are perceived as more legitimate.
In addition, they engage their congregations in a form of social marketing. The story of success becomes a resource to attract new supporters. One parent explained: “When wealthy people come and leave their children in a school deep in the bush, it enhances the image of Islam”v. Through this register of justification, the promoters build a space of religious prescription whose benefits are also economic.
All the symbolic capital thus accumulated is converted into material capital. This is evident in the regular flow of donations – both modest and substantial – received by these educational entrepreneurs: mats, food supplies, religious texts, motorbikes, fuel, and even the contact lists of high-ranking officials in the public administration. One cheikh, founder of a Quranic school, reported that in 2010, President Idriss Déby visited his school, praised his commitment to peaceful coexistence, and pledged his support. This presidential recognition granted him reinforced moral authority, which proved essential to his capacity to mobilise resources. In the aftermath, the school received financial backing, notably for the construction of a perimeter wall funded by a senior figure in the ruling party, a Christian from the South. Costing several tens of millions of CFA francs (more than €15,000), this wall stands as a concrete symbol of the school’s public legitimisation and its integration into politico-religious redistribution circuits.
In short, the most influential cheikhs at the local level become privileged interlocutors for political elites seeking visibility. They participate in the legitimisation of political power, revealing a deep entanglement between religious and political spheres – what may be seen as a form of co-construction.
Territories of Peace and Politics of Land
Religious entrepreneurs invest so fervently in the promotion of peace and intercommunal coexistence because it lies at the heart of a material economy rooted in a relationship between actor and system – one that enables access to both tangible and intangible resources. From this perspective, the peace they preach is not merely a moral imperative but also a tool of economic accumulation. By mobilising the religious discourse of reconciliation, they embed their actions within a moral economy that transforms solidarity into a lever for influence and the consolidation of acquired positions. Southern Chad lies at the core of this strategy.
Perceived as both a place of refuge and a breadbasket rich in natural resources, the South has, since the 1990s, become a privileged anchor point for religious entrepreneurs seeking material autonomy. The establishment of the largest Quranic school in the country within this region illustrates a broader movement of territorial appropriation for educational, economic, and symbolic purposes. The choice of location is not incidental: the school is situated in a village on the right bank of a perennial river, in an ecosystem marked by fertile soil, abundant pastureland, and reliable water reserves. This favourable ecological setting rekindles a longstanding tradition of attraction to southern territories – already noted by French explorer Casimir Maistre in 1902, who described in his notebooks a “land where water is never scarce, and where, even in the absence of flowing rivers, animals can always find small ponds”10. This village has thus become a resource territory, chosen to host an expanding religious economy built on the ability to mobilise, redistribute, and secure wealth.
By strengthening their local foothold, religious entrepreneurs establish themselves in the South by constructing a dynamic community economy. In doing so, they transform Quranic schools into real-life “open sesame” mechanisms, granting access to southern lands in a context of intensifying land competition. Herders, traders, and farmers affiliate themselves with these institutions to gain access to land, water, and local social networks. In areas where such institutions are established, local residents describe the students as “great farmers who have come to teach the natives new ways of working the land”vi. One Quranic school founder explains: “In our school, all are brothers, for Allah says that all Muslims are brothers”vii, thereby sacralising social relations and conferring upon them religious legitimacy. Through this discourse, he establishes a gift economy in which contributing is equated with believing, and generosity becomes performative. The logic corresponds to one of ritualized gift giving – a configuration in which solidarity is translated into symbolic recognition and social capital. In practical terms, wealth circulates in various forms: a merchant entrusts his herd to “a brother”, profits are shared, and reinvested into other sectors such as trade or mechanised farmingviii. As in Senegalese Mouridism, this religious economy weaves together spirituality, labour, and prosperity11.
However, religious entrepreneurs do not merely accumulate: they also invest in securing their institutions’ positions through targeted redistribution mechanisms. One Quranic school has initiated a microfinance system reportedly operating “24 hours a day, 7 days a week”ix, offering interest-free loans to local farmers. This mechanism eases economic constraints, especially during the agricultural season. Giving becomes a calculated act – a means of asserting symbolic dominance through a moral economy12. It is as though the goal were to penetrate social imaginaries and neutralise, through carefully timed offerings, any latent mistrust. These entrepreneurs remain highly attuned to opportunities for public visibility as legitimate actors, often participating in the enthronement ceremonies of chefs de terre, during which they present gifts, boubous, cattle and ensure their physical presence is noted. Among other outcomes, these entrepreneurs consolidate local alliances and transform solidarity into a tool for regulation. These relational practices, which shape interactions between local cheikhs and customary authorities, contrast sharply with the often-circulated image of a conquering Islam hostile to traditional religions or Christianity13. On the contrary, they illustrate a form of pragmatic and peaceful coexistence between Islam and other local faiths.
III. Quranic Schools: Actors of a Divisive Peace?
The emergence of Quranic schools’ founders as local mediators must be understood within a broader context of legitimacy crisis affecting public institutions and their regulatory capacities. In this weakened space, these religious figures appear as credible alternatives, drawing upon their authority as moral leaders endowed with the capacity to arbitrate agropastoral and land-related conflicts. However, this posture conceals a shift in the function of these institutions.
While they do contribute to the resolution of local disputes, their role is also evolving in ways that feed into the very dynamics of conflict they claim to address. In other words, the religious economy that underpins the business model of these religious entrepreneurs may simultaneously reproduce or even exacerbate the same tensions it seeks to resolve. By attracting nomadic herders in search of pasture, Quranic schools are increasingly transformed into incubators for the sedentarisation of pastoralists. Over time, these schools have become hubs of settlement for transhumant herders, around which infrastructure develops – such as mechanical boreholes and electrified dwellings – surrounded by the thatched-roof homes of local farming communities. These signs of sedentarisation, absent just a decade ago, now fuel frustration among farmers, who perceive them as a form of encroachment under the guise of religion. Often supported by local administrative authorities, Quranic schools are granted facilitated access to land and authorisations to establish additional schools based on the same model14,15,16. The involvement of administrative figures – frequently local elites who have embraced Islam – fuels the perception that the state, whether consciously or not, is enabling the expansion of Islamic structures into regions historically dominated by Christian or animist populations. For many farmers, this presence is interpreted as a form of religious entrenchment, economic colonisation, and land dispossession.
From 2022 onwards, this latent conflict took on more radical overtones. In one southern province, violent clashes between herders and farmers led to the creation of a “crisis committee” composed of urban elites and university students, which publicly accused Quranic schools of harbouring weapons and acting as support bases for violent herders17. Widely circulated on social media, this narrative adopted the tone of an existential threat: the Quranic school was no longer merely a religious institution but had become a potentially destabilising actor. This polarisation has also seeped into the educational spaces. Students, depending on their family and regional backgrounds, reproduce the same divisions. Some identify with the farmers, others with the herders – calling into question the very ideal of religious unity that the schools promote on a daily basis. In this sense, the Quranic school becomes a microcosm of national tensions, structured by dynamics of class, ethnicity, territory, and geographic belonging. Rather than overcoming these divisions, it often reproduces them – sometimes even amplifying them through internal rivalries over access to resources and recognition.
A similar tone resonates in Christian places of worship. In one province, a bishop – speaking with the caution required of his role as spiritual leader of the “Family of God Church” – delivered a sermon filled with compassion for farmers, the majority of whom are Christian. He proclaimed that “blood has been shed on our land,” that “innocents have died,” and that “the farmers’ fields” had been ravaged18. Though he did not directly name Quranic schools, his sermon evoked them through accusatory spiritual language. His speech reproduced key identity markers of sedentary communities – farming, land, Christianity – and reflected a veiled yet clear stance within the public debate. In doing so, it reinforced the idea of growing religious polarisation surrounding agropastoral conflict.
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Understanding agropastoral conflicts in southern Chad requires moving beyond simplistic interpretations that reduce these antagonisms to a clash between “peanut fields” and “cattle hooves”. The sociological approach adopted here has sought to interrogate the categories of “herder” and “farmer”, which are often essentialised, by showing how they are socially constructed – shaped by power relations, religious and geographic affiliations, migration dynamics, and contrasting economic logics. By mobilising the concept of the religious economy, this article has argued that these conflicts are not solely about livestock mobility, but rather about the strategies of actors situated at the intersection of religious, political, and economic registers. Religious entrepreneurship is one – though not the only – factor in this complex configuration.
More broadly, these confrontations cannot be reduced to binary oppositions: farmer vs. herder, sedentary vs. nomadic, Muslim vs. Christian, North vs. South. Instead, they reflect differentiated – and at times competing – concerns linked to survival within rural contexts undergoing profound transformation, marked by heightened competition for scarce resources. Rather than clarifying the nature of these conflicts, such binary framings often intensify them, by assigning collective blame that fails to account for the diversity of individual trajectories and strategic positioning. The violence that now afflicts entire regions of Chad underscores, in reverse, the urgency for the state to reclaim its role as a regulating force in the face of rural transformation.
1 Le Pays « Conflits éleveurs-agriculteurs dans le Lac Iro : plus d’une quinzaine de morts et une vingtaine de blessés », Journal Le Pays, https://www.lepaystchad.com/25128/, 2022.
2 Alwihda Info, « Tchad : Un affrontement entre agriculteurs et éleveurs à Nya-Pendé fait un mort et plusieurs blessés », Alwihda Info – Actualités TCHAD, Afrique, International https://www.alwihdainfo.com/Tchad-Un-affrontement-entre-agriculteurs-et-eleveurs-a-Nya-Pende-fait-un-mort-et-plusieurs-blesses_a133493.html, 2024.
3 OCHA, « Tchad : Aperçu des conflits inter/intracommunautaires », https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/chad/tchad-apercu-des-conflits-interintracommunautaires-juillet-2024, 2024.
4 JACQUEMOT, Pierre, « Les États et la « gestion apaisée » du pastoralisme. Afrique contemporaine », 274, 2022, 147–155.
5 LEFORT-RIEU, Claire, « Du conflit d’usages au prisme communautaire : penser les conflits agropastoraux et leurs réponses à l’est du Cameroun (régions de l’Adamaoua et de l’Est) », Afrique contemporaine, 274, 2022, 51–69.
6 MBA, Jean-Émile, & NOUFFEUSSIE, Leopold Ngueuta, « Conflits intercommunautaires au Cameroun : une rationalisation néo-causale au prisme des interférences intra et extraterritoriales », Afrique contemporaine 274, 2022, 97–121
7 U.S. Department of State. 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom. https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-report-on-international-religious-freedom/ (2023).
8 MAGNANT, Jean-Pierre, « Du grand prêtre au roi : les origines religieuses des Etats anciens du Tchad », in Jean-Pierre CHRETIEN (dir), L’invention religieuse en Afrique : histoire et religion en Afrique noire, Paris : Karthala, 1993, 159–178.
9 ZELTNER, Jean-Claude, Histoire des Arabes sur les rives du lac Tchad, Paris : Karthala, 2002.
10 MAISTRE, Casimir, La Région Du Bahr-Sara, Montpellier : Imprimerie centrale du midi, 1902.
11 DUMONT, Fernand, La pensée religieuse d’Amadou Bamba, Dakar : Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1975.
12 ELA, Jean-Marc, Travail et Entreprise En Afrique : Les Fondements Sociaux de la Réussite Économique, Paris : Karthala, 2006.
13 LADIBA, Gondeu, L’émergence des organisations islamiques au Tchad : Enjeux, acteurs et territoires, Paris : L’Harmattan, 2011.
14 Attestation d’attribution de terrain à une école coranique, 2013.
15 Correspondance du chef de canton aux conseillers islamiques et hommes de bonne volonté pour le développement de l’islam dans le monde, 2015.
16 Communiqué de presse du Comité de crise relatif à l’attaque des terroristes dans le Département, 2022.
17 Conseil supérieur des Affaires islamiques, Autorisation de fonctionner à une école coranique, 2015
18 Vatican News, « Tchad : l’évêque de Sarh appelle à la justice suite au conflit dans le département du Lac-Iro », https://www.vaticannews.va/fr/afrique/news/2022-09/tchad-l-eveque-de-sarh-appelle-a-la-justice-suite-au-conflit-da.html, 2022.
i Interview with the founder of a Quranic school, September 2023.
ii Ibid.
iii Interview with a Quranic school founder, November 2023.
iv Interview with a Quranic school founder, October 2023.
v Interview with the director of a Quranic school, September 2023.
vi Interview with a village chief, November 2023.
vii Interview with a Quranic school student, November 2023.
viii Interview with a student-turned-entrepreneur living in a Quranic school, October 2023.
ix Interview with a local farmer.
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Sacred Lands and Secular Tensions: Religious Economy and Agropastoral Conflicts in Southern Chad’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘sacred-lands-and-secular-tensions-religious-economy-and-agropastoral-conflicts-in-southern-chad’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-07-17 08:49:54’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-07-17 08:49:54’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/?p=32355’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )Introduction
Since the American invasion of 2003, discussions surrounding Iraq’s economic development have frequently centered on the reform of the financial sector. To this end (and following sanctions that “may well lay claim to be the worst humanitarian catastrophe ever imposed in the name of global governance”1), the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) issued multiple Washington Consensus-inspired diktats within the 100 binding orders that were meant to transform Iraq’s political economy. These measures were carried into Iraq’s 2005 constitution,2 rendering capital market development, liberalization, and compliance with International Financial Institutions\’ (IFI) recommendations into the compass guiding Iraq\’s economic trajectory.
In a context where finance has been conceived as a conduit for Iraq’s awaited prosperity,3 the new 170-meters-high Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) tower stands as both a totem and mechanism of an impending national resurgence. Looming atop the skyline, the 90,000-square-meter structure itself, a modern-day ziggurat imagined by Zaha Hadid, offers material testament to Iraq’s current developmental priorities.4 Construction began in 2018—delayed by Iraq’s violent 2010s, the nadir of which was reached with the war against ISIS—and is scheduled to be completed shortly. In official discourses, the tower symbolizes a new day dawning: its glass and rebar project growth, stability, and renewal. For some, the tower also augurs Baghdad’s nascent financialization: The city’s elevation as an investment hub at the center of the projected Iraq Development Road. All of this is in keeping with regional trends—both architectural and economic. The CBI tower will join an archipelago of high-profile buildings designed by the late “Queen of the desert” in the Middle East and North Africa region, buildings that all in their own way testify to Arab states’ growing power, capital, and social designs.5
Beneath the narrative surrounding the CBI tower is a reality marked by competing actors and agendas and structured according to contradictions inherent to Iraq’s political economy. This article probes these underlying dynamics by focusing on the intricate relationships between capital, developmental investments, and Iraq’s “state partisan oligopoly”.6 In unwinding some of what is at play in the CBI’s monetary and investment policies and in contemporary fiscal initiatives, a sightline into Iraq’s nascent financialization is profered.
A political economy of post-ISIS Iraq
Iraq’s political field crystallized following the defeat of ISIS in 2017. This event reopened “a new round of critical state reinforcement in Iraq”,7 mobilising variegated public and private actors to deepen their involvement in national affairs. This had significant effects on the country’s economic prospects and geography of power. Concerning the latter, Baghdad progressively reasserted its position as the dominant fulcrum of Iraq’s political economy, a shift consolidated by its 2017 military campaign against Kurdish forces. Concurrently, numerous armed groups’ executives underwent a process of “notabilization”.8
Notabilization entailed pursuit of strategies to secure revenues entrenched in state rent distribution. Beyond laying claim to oil wealth, those participating in the process worked to position themselves within the state’s investment circuits and to acquire stakes within the country’s consumption-driven economy (real estate, retail, imports, etc.). Real estate speculation, both commercial and residential, emerged as especially important. Visible in the proliferation of large-scale construction projects, particularly public-private partnerships (PPP) and state-backed housing developments, profits derived from the transformation of Baghdad’s built environment brought new and old elites together into a novel class formation.
Indeed, Baghdad’s changing skyline serves as a spatial map, revealing the socio-economic effects of power and capital accumulation strategies in the post-ISIS environment. Amidst macroeconomic fragility, clientelism, and deficits in foreign investments, the city’s built environment shows where influence truly lies. As a corporate interlocutor explained to me in the beginning of 2025: “One shouldn’t look at the public ministry or institution behind a project. What matters is the individual; it tells you everything, and it’s not difficult to understand then what is going on and what is at stake”. Whether directly affiliated with the “state partisan oligopoly” or not, individuals and companies are still making “big money in Iraq”,9 and in so doing, acquiring major holdings of political capital as well.
Fiscal troubles further consolidate Iraq’s emergent elite
Since the oil boom of the 1970s and Saddam Hussein’s consolidation of power in 1979, the political economy of Iraq has been increasingly tethered to the vagaries of energy markets. Macroeconomic conditions and the state’s fiscal health have long since swayed with price movements on the world’s largest commodities exchanges. Moreover, due to a host of dynamics attendant to commodity dependence and war, non-extractive sectors have underdeveloped over time, amplifying the economy\’s vulnerability. For a sense of scale, oil in 2023 accounted for 39% of Iraq’s GDP and 91% of government expenditures.10
At first glance, the recent drop in oil prices in April 2025 to less than US$65/bbl—driven by higher OPEC+ output under Saudi leadership and weakening global demand amid US tariff-related uncertainty—would therefore seem to point to trouble.11 With the IMF projecting the Iraqi economy to shrink by 1.5% in 2025, the expectation might be fiscal contraction and elite instability.
But this would overlook the role that debt has come to play in fastening the top ranks and buttressing the popular foundations of Iraq’s contemporary political economy: Debt financing (especially during the Covid shock) has allowed Iraq’s political governors to maintain if not grow public payrolls and other systems of patronage regardless of oil earnings. And attendant to this development, those actors able to extend lines of credit to the state—namely, financial institutions, (under the guidance of the CBI) and individuals with substantial liquid wealth—have acquired growing prominence.
Central banking: between technocracy and power
Sitting 500m west of the Babylon Rotana Hotel and its corporate venues, the Central Bank of Iraq tower overlooks a dried-out Tigris riverbank.12 Under Prime Minister al-Sudani’s investment policies, the site has undergone intensive construction. With the tower at its heart, the neighborhood is set to become a nod of Baghdad’s rising financial networks.13
Since 2003, Iraq’s monetary policy—despite turbulence and political constraints—has been steered by and through the CBI, which has steadily worked to expand its authority and influence over monetary policy and economic governance. The Coalition Provisional Authority established the bank as a legally independent institution under Law No. 56 (2004). As we will see, legal independence never implied operational independence. Regardless, despite facing political turmoil, as a general rule, those in charge of the bank have followed a core mandate that could be reduced to “Solidity, Stability and Sustainability”.14 Materially, this implied the maintenance of currency and price stability through inflation targeting and reserve accumulation. A key part of the CBI’s efforts was the dollar auction window, which was used to control the money supply and dollar liquidity.
With time, the CBI, like many other central banks around the world, expanded its interventions in a number of directions. Cognizant of the country’s vulnerability to energy market volatility, the CBI developed refinancing facilities for state and commercial banks, allowing the latter to sustain lending capacity in the face of liquidity crunches. More recently, the CBI has also stepped up its regulatory reach. The need to do so was made apparent in 2023, when the US Treasury censored fourteen Iraqi banks over non-compliance with Iran-targeted sanctions (Another five Iraqi banks were censored in 2025).15 By dint of the Treasury’s actions, the Iraqi banks in question were prevented from conducting cross-border dollar transactions. With exclusion from dollar-based financial markets posing a systemic threat to the country’s financial system, the CBI took the task of bringing all parties up to speed with compliance seriously. Likewise, it has used its regulatory authorities to demand that domestic banks meet the paid-up capital requirements necessary for their being reconnected to the SWIFT network. In terms of knock-on effects, this second regulatory initiative is certain to precipitate greater financial market concentration: Having set capital requirement thresholds of 400 billion Iraqi dinar, smaller banks will have no choice but to accept merger and acquisition bids.
Beneath the surface, the CBI’s history reveals struggle and contentiousness. This is apparent even in developments related to the construction of its new tower facility. The project to construct a new home for the central bank was launched in February 2012 when Sinan al-Shabibi—former director of the CBI and leading technocratic figure of the post 2003 Iraq—signed a deal with Zaha Hadid and her London based architecture company. The deal was agreed after several months of tensions between Shabibi and former Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. The tensions stemmed from al Maliki’s desire to go around the constitution in order to entrench government control, that is to say cabinet control, over the CBI. Al-Shabibi actively resisted this, viewing the CBI as a technocratic instrument designed to implement monetary policies inspired by IFI recommendations. In the end, however, the Prime Minister won out. Nine months after the deal was signed with Zaha Hadid, al Maliki replaced al Shabibi and other high-ranked officials of the CBI.
Thereafter, CBI control remained a major and hotly contested political prize to capture. Current CBI director Ali Mohsen al-Alaq has held court for the preponderance of the post-2012 period, his reign interrupted only by a brief interlude from 2020 to 2023 when Mustafa Ghalib Mukheef, considered an ally of Muqtada al-Sadr, took the reins. Al-Alaq’s longevity derives from the support he has retained within the Coordination Framework, but also from his capacity to manage the Americans. In many ways, his personal story is instructive.
After earning his diploma in the University of Baghdad, al-Alaq pursued a career in finance that took him to the Gulf and Canada. After the American invasion of 2003, he quickly carved out roles within the upper reaches of the state apparatus. Initially taking a post at the Ministry of Oil, al-Alaq was appointed chairman of the Joint Anti-Corruption Council in 2006. There, he worked in collaboration with US officials while also working as Secretary General for the Council of Ministers under Maliki’s government. The skills developed in engaging these two constituencies—American officialdom and local power brokers—proved of great use when al-Alaq moved to the central bank. In enforcing financial sanctions, handling fraud monitoring, and delivering price stability, the central banker won a number of allies in Washington. In enabling expansionary fiscal policies via deficit financing and juicing local credit markets (in the latter case, by establishing refinancing facilities and lowering the benchmark interest rate from 7,5% to 5%), al-Alaq kept relevant stakeholders happy at home, too. Likewise, recent moves toward directing credit allocation have served to secure buy-in from the major power brokers of post-ISIS Iraq.
The CBI’s growing “developmental” role
Pretenses toward developmentalism notwithstanding, recent CBI interventions in credit markets have largely been undertaken with an eye on the built environment. Critical here were two lending initiatives—combined capitalized at eight trillion Iraqi dinar in 2015—notionally meant to support non-oil sectors. The first provided subsidized loans through commercial banks to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) “engaged in manufacturing, agriculture, and other high-growth sectors”16. In actuality, though, 83% of the allocated credit wound up concentrating in the residential real estate sector, with just 9% making its way to industry (and but 1% to agriculturalists). The second provided subsidized credit to state-owned commercial banks with an eye on boosting lending to the real (i.e. productive) economy. As breakdown of the CBI’s financial flows as of 2023 reveal, however, a large majority of the liquidity injected wound up again designated for real estate: Of the 12,6 trillion dinars allocated in 2023 through this program, 96% went to the state-owned Real Estate Bank and Iraqi Housing Fund, with 3% accruing to the Industrial Bank and less than 1% to the Agricultural Bank and Al Rasheed Bank17.
By often fostering luxury-oriented real estate speculation, the CBI’s activist turn has produced material, social, and political effects. At the highest level of abstraction, the CBI’s policies have helped turn Baghdad’s built environment into a device for capital accumulation and transnational coalition-building. This process has been expedited by the profits available in real estate development. The latter is not only be attributed to the CBI, of course. Other high-level state investments and public-private partnerships have pushed in this direction as well.18 So too have domestic and regional politics19, cheap labour costs—fueled by youth unemployment amid demographic pressure—and a weak regulatory environment. The need of Iraq’s elites for a store of wealth—for a place where sizable holdings of surplus capital could be deployed and appreciated—has clearly factored in the spiking profit rates available in property development as well, as have internal migrations and tourism development in Baghdad. But in directing credit in the manner it has, the CBI has nevertheless played an outsized role in supercharging the construction of high-end residential apartment complexes across Baghdad’s sprawl.20
Profit and Power in Baghdad’s Construction Boom
An interlocutor interviewed in early 2025, a Baghdad-based businessman, recounted quite clearly how real estate investment has come to the forefront of Iraq’s political economy: “It’s quite simple, I’ll tell you. The absence of stringent regulations lets us generate profits impossible abroad. That is why many Iraqi elites—those that don’t know how to work outside of Iraq, those reliant on political and local networks of solidarity and influence from which they benefit here, those that don’t know how to do business abroad—have constantly failed to develop ventures overseas. They eventually return here to seek new capital accumulation. Also, they want to to replicate lifestyles experienced abroad. [Do you think about the Gulf model?] The Gulf, certainly. Their aim is to preserve and secure that elite lifestyle here in Baghdad. You know, it’s not something you want to lose when it contrasts so much with the hardships you experienced in the past.” Expectantly, foreign parties, whether companies or financiers, have taken note of the profits that can be had in post-ISIS Iraq. Overseeing the planned makeover of the symbolic Turkish Restaurant of Tahrir’s square, for instance, is Italy’s GKSD Holding. The building redesign, of which GKSD Holding is part, epitomizes well the political economy of contemporary Iraq and finance’s rising role therein, as the project is to transform the building into a modern luxurious private hospital complex. The airport refurbishment also speaks of this trend.21 There, state and private banks have signaled Iraq’s standing as gateway for Chinese, Turkish, Iranian, Western and Arab investors and economic partners. The main lounge, a space of socialisation and a hub for business networking, was funded by the International Development Bank, a major Iraqi commercial bank, whose group ZK Holding is based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The social space—reserved for travelers of significant means alone— suggests Iraq may, through its new development turn, wind up embedded within circuits of accumulation dominated by GCC monarchies.
Conclusion: Baghdad’s emerging financialisation
The new Central Bank of Iraq tower stands not just as a symbol of progress and as a hub for finance development in the country, but as the embodiment of Iraq’s enduring underlying political struggles and aspirations. Indeed, the reality is that the CBI functions less as a technocratic institution than as an intermediary of power, one balancing US and IFI expectations against the demands of local power brokers.
Materially, the CBI’s policies have disproportionately amplified speculative investments in urban real estate. This distributional pattern reinforces a state-backed capital allocation model that sustains accumulation for elites at the expense of economic diversification. It speaks, moreover, to a recalibration of Iraqi rentierism. Empowered and emboldened, the CBI is now at the heart of efforts to streamline accumulation, stabilize political power, absorb fiscal socks, and manage dissent.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
1Michelle Woodward, ‘The Enduring Lessons of the Iraq Sanctions’, MERIP, 15 June 2020.
2Irene Costantini, ‘Statebuilding and Foreign Direct Investment: The Case of Post-2003 Iraq’, International Peacekeeping, 20.3 (2013), pp. 263–79 (p. 266.); Yousef K. Baker, ‘Global Capitalism and Iraq: The Making of a Neoliberal State’, International Review of Modern Sociology, 40.2 (2014), pp. 121–48.
3“There was widespread hope that the Central Bank and Iraq’s financial institutions would spearhead a transformation, one rooted in modern banking laws, institutional independence, and integration with global standards. […]. [Since ] Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani came to power in late 2022, a new reform narrative has emerged, prioritizing financial and economic overhaul. In this context, the Central Bank was tasked with playing an instrumental role in restoring macroeconomic balance and institutional credibility.” in “Reforming Iraq’s Financial System: The role of the Central Bank”, Middle East Research Institute (MERI), Erbil, 2025.
4Saleh Mahood Salman, CBI\’s director general of administration, says that the tower is “an “architectural statement about the bank\’s role in the Iraqi economy.” ‘Iraq’s $772m Central Bank HQ Project on Track’, Trade Arabia, 12 May 2019 and the governor of the CBI, Ali Mushen Al-Allaq assert that the “banking sector reform [is their] top priority” Chloe Domat, ‘Pursuing Reform: Q&A With Iraq’s Central Bank Governor Ali Muhsen Al-Allaq’, Global Finance Magazine, 10 October 2024.
5These buildings, like the Beeah group headquarters in Sharjah or the Grand Théâtre of Rabat, weave a map of burgeoning offers that her office started receiving from various “Arab power brokers” on the eave of the Arab spring. Joseph Giovannini, ‘Architect Zaha Hadid’s Dreams Rise in the Desert’, Vanity Fair, 19 November 2021.
6Robin Beaumont, ‘Irak, l’État captif’, Questions internationales, 103104.2 (2020), pp. 104–09.
7Renad Mansour, Iraq After the Fall of ISIS: The Struggle for the State – Kalam (Chatham House, 4 July 2017), p. 33.
8Robin Beaumont, ‘L’Irak, ou la Résistance « désaxée »’, Orient XXI, 6 January 2025.
9Pete W. Moore, ‘Making Big Money on Iraq’, Middle East Report, no. 252 (2009), pp. 22–29.
10See “Table 1. Iraq: Selected Economic and Financial Indicators, 2020–29” in Iraq: 2024 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Iraq, IMF Country Report (International Monetary Fund), p. 24.
11World Bank Group, “Reemerging Pressures – Iraq’s Recovery at Risk”, Iraq Economic Monitor, 2023, p. 12.
12‘Twilight of the Tigris: Iraq’s Mighty River Drying up’, Arab News, 20 September 2022.
13One can note that the main contractor handling its construction is the Azebaijan-based company DAAX Construction. The company began as a 50-50 joint venture with the UAE’s DIA Holding FZCO and has worked on large PPP projects in Azerbaijan, Turkey and Kurdistan Region of Iraq. DAAX is also a member of the Iraq Britain Business Council, a key institution that brings together firms shaping the expanding Iraqi private business landscape and networks.
14“Rising from the sloping banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad, the design for the headquarters of the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) conveys the core values at the heart of the institution: Solidity, Stability and Sustainability.”. “Central Bank of Iraq” – Architecture – Zaha Hadid Architects, 2012.
15David S. Cloud, ‘WSJ News Exclusive | U.S. Bans 14 Iraqi Banks in Crackdown on Iran Dollar Trade’, Wall Street Journal, 19 July 2023; Maha El Dahan, Ahmed Rasheed, ‘Exclusive: Five Iraqi Banks to Be Banned from US Dollar Transactions’, Reuters, 16 February 2025.
16Central Bank of Iraq, The National Strategy for Bank Lending in Iraq, 2023, pp. 23-24.
17Central Bank of Iraq, Annual Economic Report, 2023, pp 52-53.
18Projects being built by Modon Real Estate Development—a subsidiary of Dubai’s Al Handal International Group (HIG)–testifies well to this development. Today, Modon’s activities span from the Gulf and Turkey to Japan. In Baghdad, it has enjoyed the spoils of PPP projects like the $6,5 billion Medinat al Mustaqbal (City of the Future), where Bloom Holding a company of the Abu Dhabi based investment company National Holding is also staked.
19Beaumont, ‘L’Irak, ou la Résistance « désaxée »’.
20“In his interview, Mr. Hardan praised the pioneering role of government agencies and institutions in supporting and encouraging investments in overcoming difficulties, most notably The Central Bank of Iraq, National Investment Commission and Baghdad Investment Commission.” “Modon” awarded best real estate developer in Iraq”, Al Handal, 2022.
21‘IFC Signs PPP Agreement to Modernize Baghdad Airport, Ushering in New Era of Public-Private Cooperation’, International Finance Corporation, 2023.
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