This study addresses how the UK and the Swedish Iraqi diaspora mobilised towards state-building in Iraq following the 2003 US led intervention. It explores why some diaspora mobilised towards state-building processes through institution-building and governance while others through civil society. While the literature has explored diasporic development and peace-building, it has not systematically addressed diaspora mobilisation for state-building. Neither has it paid sufficient attention to the factors that shape diasporic political choices in intervention and conflict settings. My thesis contributes to this body of literature and argues that an overlooked dimension of state-building, is that of civil society. State-building involves top-down approaches of institution-building but also bottom-up approaches of participatory politics that encourage democratic practices. I thus develop a new two-category operationalization of state-building to capture the interventions and transnational fields of different diaspora groups and individuals. My findings show that during different time periods, three factors have shaped the mobilisation of the UK and Swedish Iraqi diaspora towards state-building; diaspora profiles, hostland foreign policies towards the homeland and links to homeland political parties in Iraq. Theoretically these findings demonstrate that diaspora's socio-economic profiles and networks are key to understanding the type of politics that diaspora can engage in. Meanwhile, hostland foreign policies can shape diasporic interventions by creating different relationships with homelands and thus different opportunities for engagement. Furthermore, in divided societies, diaspora connected to homeland political parties, or represented by them, are more likely to be involved in the apparatus of the state, where as those excluded are more likely to engage outside the structures of power through civil society. Finally, my study demonstrates that temporal vii dimensions are crucial for understanding, which factors mattered, when and why. Empirically, this thesis also contributes original knowledge about the UK and Swedish Iraqi diaspora. It sheds new light into the myriad ways that diaspora in these two countries have been attempting to rebuild the country after the 2003 intervention by illustrating their efforts and experiences, and how it has informed their current relationship to Iraq.

This study is essentially a critique of how the three dominant paradigms of explanatory international relations theory - (neo-)realism, liberalism, and systemic constructivism - conceive of, analytically deal with, and explain ethnic conflict and sovereignty. By deconstructing their approaches to ethnic identity formation in general and ethnic conflict in particular it argues that all three paradigms, in their epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies through reification and by analytically equating ethnic groups with states, tend to essentialise and substantialise the ethnic lines of division and strategic essentialisms of ethnic and ethno-nationalist elites they set out to describe, and, all too often, even write them into existence. Particular attention, both at the theoretical and empirical level, will be given to the three explanatory frameworks explanatory IR has contributed to the study of ethnic conflict: the 'ethnic security dilemma', the 'ethnic alliance model', and, drawing on other disciplines, instrumentalist approaches. The deconstruction of these three frameworks will form the bulk of the theoretical section, and will subsequently be shown in the case study to be ontologically untenable or at least to fail to adequately explain the complex dynamics of ethnic identity formation in ethnic conflict. By making these essentialist presumptions, motives, and practices explicit this study makes a unique contribution not only to the immediate issues it addresses but also to the wider debate on the nature of IR as a discipline. As a final point, drawing on constitutive theory and by conceiving of the behaviour and motives of protagonists of ethnic conflict as expressions of a fluid, open-ended, and situational matrix of identities and interests without sequential hierarchies of dependent and independent variables, the study attempts to offer an alternative, constitutive reading of ethnic and nationalist identity to the discourses of explanatory IR. These themes that are further developed in the empirical section where, explanatory IRA's narratives of ethnic group solidarity, ethno-nationalism, and national self-determination are examined and deconstructed by way of the case study of the relations between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Iraqi Kurdish ethno-nationalist parties in the wider context of the political status of the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq. With this ambition this study makes an original empirical contribution by scrutinising these relations in a depth unique to the literature.