ABSTRACT
During 2007, Iraq’s civil war reached its apex, with thousands of civilians being killed weekly, highly organized rebel militias controlling huge swaths of territory, and the national army unable to secure control of Baghdad itself. The civil war had taken on a decidedly sectarian nature, with civilians being targeted for death or displacement based on their religious or ethnic affiliations; recruitment into militias occurred along similarly ethnosectarian lines. As for partition’s effectiveness, this remains fiercely debated. Despite two decades of research on the topic, with dozens of books, policy papers, and academic articles, there is no consensus on whether partition works. Debates over partition did not originally focus on ending ethnosectarian civil wars. Throughout history, there are endless examples of territories being bought, transferred, conquered, and redrawn, all without significant attention to the role of regional identities.
