Othering and the State of Exception: An Agambenian Reading of the Anfal Genocide

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Document Type : Research Paper

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University of Kurdistan

Abstract

The Anfal genocide should be understood as the outcome of a historical, multilayered, and complex discourse rooted in the denial of Kurdish subjectivity and in the ongoing process of othering. This process began decades before the Anfal operations through policies of Arabization and securitization of Kurdish identity, which gradually transformed the Kurds from a political other into an excluded other. To carry out the systematic Anfal massacres, the Ba'ath regime relied on justificatory mechanisms that transformed the Kurdish subject into an inhuman other deprived of rights, recognition, and visibility. The central question of this study is how the Ba'ath regime, operating through rationalized and ostensibly modern structures, reduced the Kurdish subject to a form of bare life. It also examines how mechanisms originally designed to regulate and protect life became instruments of death and exterminatory violence, ultimately culminating in mass graves. Drawing on Agamben’s theoretical framework, this article argues that the Ba'ath regime exposed Kurdish subjects to dehumanization and political exclusion through the suspension of law, the designation of prohibited areas, wartime emergency conditions, forced displacement, and the use of detention camps such as Topzawa and Nugra Salman. These mechanisms stripped Kurds of legal, ethical, and symbolic status prior to physical death and rendered them killable without that act being recognized as a crime under the legal order.

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 12 July 2026

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