Informal labour, social mobilisation and protest in Iraq

Summary (no more than 500 words) During Iraq's recent countrywide protest movement in 2019 (the "October Revolution"), thousands of Iraqis took to the streets to protest the failures of the post-war political economy, including Iraq's ever-growing population of informal labourers who now make up over 60% of the population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis asks what role informal labour played in Iraq's October Revolution and why. The thesis speaks to broader debates surrounding globalisation, precarious work and mobilisation. Western-centric conceptualisations of informal labour. - the so-called "precariat" - suggest that this is a phenomenon associated with late-stage capitalism, I argue that both the existence, and demands, of Iraq's informal labourers cannot be understood without a broader view of Iraq's longer history of uneven integration into the global market and the role played by workers' agency in navigating political-economic transformations.