Title: Assessing Iraqi Kurdistan’s Stability: How Patronage Shapes Conflict
Author: Zmkan Ali Saleem and Mac Skelton
Place of publication: U.K
Publisher:LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series | 38
Release date 2020

After years of conflict and a civil war during the 1990s, the post-2003 settlement enshrined an era of shared governance in Iraqi Kurdistan, with each of the two major Kurdish politi-cal parties agreeing to collaborate in a joint regional government. In the years that followed the invasion, the political formula appeared to work, and the region was often lauded for its development and stability. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (#KDP# ) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (#PUK# ) formed unity governments and even went so far as to cam-paign jointly in elections. But recently the arrangement has showed signs of fissures. In April 2020, for the first time since the end of the civil war in 1998, the Kurdish region wit-nessed a military standoff between peshmerga forces controlled by the PUK and the KDP.This report contends that the sources of this volatility are not new. The post-2003 polit-ical order in Iraqi Kurdistan is built upon a two-party patronage system that undercuts any meaningful institutionalisation of a joint administrative and security system. Public employment, access to government contracts, and positions in security forces are medi-ated by party-controlled channels. Because of the extensiveness of the KDP and PUK’s patronage networks, the region is unified only in name. In unpacking the structure of this patronage system, the paper makes the following arguments.[1]