The generational clash in Iraq is changing. It is no longer tied to the political class’s struggle for power and spoils. While this class is busy managing a transition, a new generation is forming: the post-“October Uprising” generation. The elite seeks to maintain power and wealth through the crony networks, and they associate their significance with electoral performance.
This new generation, like others elsewhere, has not produced a clear leadership. It is inherently non-hierarchical and horizontal. It is composed of small groups that move separately. They await a trigger to bring them together, limiting the authorities’ ability to contain them. This mode of operations also helps them endure, allowing them to resume protests when conditions and wills converge. This is what happened in 2019 with the “October Uprising” generation. It was a reaction to the failure of the post-2003 system and the exposure of its generational crisis.
In 2019, the political system misread social change. It failed to notice that youths had not come of age politically prioritizing privilege and power. At the time, the system was at the height of its powers, with regional and international actors anchoring its stability. Nonetheless, it collided with a youth movement that professed a different collective consciousness, and that believed in different ideas and dynamics. It raised clear demands for change.
In the short term, it sought the fall of the government. In the longer term, it aimed to reconfigure the regime in order to build a real state and end sectarian hegemony. That would have entailed a long process of economic and political reform. The authorities chose confrontation instead of dialogue.
Today, the authorities, under regional and international pressure, are at their weakest. Their future can hinge on a single “tweet,” and ignoring these threats could have significant repercussions for the entire political system. Accepting this reality would undermine their claims to sovereignty, but the authorities remain busy with petty competition and generational struggles. They hide behind crude pragmatism to protect their power and wealth.
At the same time, a new political generation is taking shape, the post-“October Uprising” generation. It draws on the earlier generation and those who took part in the 2019 protests just a few years ago. It competes through horizontal mobilization and movement, instinctively merging political action with collective energy. It has learned from past experiences. If it cannot overthrow the system or force change, it can still exhaust and weaken it.
Current conditions also constrain the system’s repressive capacities, limiting its options for containing this wave. This generation is more flexible, and its flexibility grants it political and social vitality. The other side lacks vigor; as Iraqi journalist Ali al-Saray writes in Asharq Al-Awsat, it follows “realism and fear. The fear is creative, not paralyzing. The ingenuity of fear that turns into patient courage. This is not typical of Iraqi society. We are likely living through a moment of social transformation, and it will manifest itself politically in the near future.”
What al-Saray calls fear can be understood as attention to two things. The first is personal safety, and second, the safety of the project itself. This caution is necessary because of how the authorities operate. At the same time, this generation adapts quickly to changing realities. It can attract supporters and take political initiative. On the ground, this turns into popular mobilization.
The post-2003 regime has not grasped this dilemma. Its misguided approach has pushed it toward confrontation. Meanwhile, political awareness is crystallizing among the post-“October Uprising” generation, which could be described as radical. Iraqi researcher at the French National Institute Hisham Dawood puts it this way: “It is not generational phenomena that produce politics. Rather, politics, at moments of rivalry and acrimony, reinterprets these phenomena. It turns them into tools of conflict, vehicles of ascent, or mechanisms of exclusion.”
Accordingly, a seismic fault line lies between generational displacement within the system and the post-“October Uprising” generation. A major confrontation or a grand settlement may follow. Either could trigger new shifts, and they might be as unexpected as those that came before.
