ABSTRACT
The existence of such a state of affairs in the mid-1970s is somewhat surprising given Iraq's apparently favourable resource-endowment. Since the problem of rural development, in fact any development problem, can be adequately understood only in its historical perspective, we begin by providing a necessarily brief background to the land question in Iraq. However, in an attempt to achieve a coherent view of the situation we propose to identify what we perceive to be three main problem areas: planning, the peasantry and political instability. A major obstacle for planners in Iraq is that on the receiving end of planning decisions is a backward and generally unresponsive peasantry, and it is to a consideration of the significance of this that we now turn. Iraq offers an extremely interesting case study of the process of 'peasantisation', for only during the last hundred years has the transformation from semi-nomadic 'free' tribesmen into sedentary serf-like peasant cultivators taken place.
