ABSTRACT
In recent years, scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the role of material artefacts in political life.1 Materials are no longer the passive and stable foundation on which politics takes place; on the contrary, they play a lively and often unpredictable role in political disputes (Barry 2013:1-2). In this chapter, following these scholars, I have attempted to analyse the material change with the proliferation of modern high-rise buildings in the city and its impact on the popular understanding of politics. Throughout my ethnographic fieldwork carried out between November 2014 and July 2015 in Erbil, I focused on the physical characteristics of new modern high-rise buildings and a series of narratives that surrounded them. As a result, I came to the conclusion that these buildings, together with images on billboards, magazines, the Internet, and TV have come to animate political debate and provoke passionate discussions among ordinary citizens in the city regarding the Kurdish state.
