The conventional wisdom among most politicians and government experts in the United States is that little or nothing is known about the socio-economic development of Iraq since the Ba'th seized power in 1968. While this is partially true of the period 1990-2003 it certainly is not for the 1970s and the early 1980s as books and articles by al-Khafaji, al-Mahdi, al-Nasrawi, Ockerman and Samano, Sluglett/Farouk-Sluglett, Springborg and many others clearly attest. Basing themselves largely on the notion of a rentier economy, and then, after 1980, of a rentier economy at war (with Iran), they chart the impact of increasing public expenditure on the industrial, agricultural and service sectors, on health/education/welfare, on internal migration and on the development of a 'new class' of crony entrepreneurs with close links to the regime. Also of great analytical importance are the works of Hanna Batatu which posit the existence of a society in the grips of a process of modern development characterized by the emergence of class-like horizontal strata as a result of land reform, rural to urban migration, increased employment in the public sector, the expansion of educational opportunity, and so on.

Where the problems really begin is during the 1980s when, not only was it increasingly difficult to find economic and social data but Saddam Hussein's management of a war economy, and then of a sanctions economy, involved the creation of an increasing number of economic enclaves with very little effort to coordinate relations between them. As a result, Iraq socio-economic trajectory began to diverge more and more from those of the typical third world, post-colonial type apparent before 1980, making them increasingly difficult to understand, and so to analyze, using conventional economic tools. Indeed, it is at least arguable that by the 1990s Iraq no longer possessed anything which could even be called a national economy, if by that we mean a set of interconnected networks, markets and institutions under a single system of economic management.

Here then is the challenge to anyone trying to understand the socio-economic trajectory of modern Iraq, with a period of 'normal' third world development giving way to a much more complex and fragmented picture, the examination of which has been handicapped both by lack of data and of the tool to understand its particular historical path.

What we propose is a workshop which will address the problem under three main heads:

• A reassessment of Iraq's socio-economic trajectory until what al-Nasrawi has called the 'demise of development' in the early 1980s
• An examination of the impact of wars, sanctions and tactics of regime survival from the early 1980s to the Anglo-American invasion of 2003
• An overall picture of the present state of the Iraqi economy/economies under occupation and the possible consequences of a future return to an oil-driven development of the pre-1980 type

Major themes:

• Changes in the land and property regime
• Changing patterns of land-ownership/control, of agricultural practices, etc. in both the irrigated and rain-fed sections
• The structure of industrial production in an oil- and then sanctions-dominated economy
• Demography, migration and public health
• Economic developments in Kurdistan after 1991
• The Iraqi version of 'crony-capitalism'
• The accumulation of non-state economic resources including religious charities and religious giving
• Shi'i and other thinking concerning the socio-economic future of Iraq