Main description:

Iraq was once the leading hub of scientific and medical training in the Middle East. Since the British Mandate, Iraqi governments had invested in cultivating Iraq's medical doctors as agents of statecraft and fostered connections to scientists abroad. Since the 1990s, thousands of Iraqi doctors have left the country in search of security and careers abroad. Ungovernable Life describes the rise and fall of Iraqi "mandatory medicine"and of the destruction of Iraq itself. Trained as a doctor in Baghdad, Omar Dewachi illustrates how imperial modes of governance, from the British Mandate to the U.S. interventions, have been contested, maintained, and unraveled through medicine and healthcare. Tracing the role of doctors as agents of state-making, he challenges common allegations about Iraq's political unruliness and ungovernability, bringing forth a deeper understanding of how medicine and power shape life and how decades of war and sanctions dismember projects of state-making."