ABSTRACT
Critically drawing on scholarship advancing the limited statehood framework, this chapter explores the Iraqi case and its post-2014 governance configurations. More specifically, in 2014, the country experienced a threefold challenge to its statehood. Conflicts concerned political authority, territory and/or policy-making involving the government of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Islamic State. Accordingly, such triple-pole conflict triggered three types of governance configurations: from above (IMF), from beside (KRI) and from below (the Islamic State). Finally, after showing how each of these represents a challenge to the hierarchical steering capacity of the Iraqi government, we discuss the strengths and limitations of the limited statehood framework.
