This paper will use Khoury and Kostiner’s ‘Introduction’ and Richard Tapper’s chapter in their 1991 edited volume as the point of intellectual departure. It will examine state-society relations during periods of violent crisis, using two case studies of (neo-) colonial occupation as examples. The paper will compare the tribal policies of the British during their formal presence in Iraq (1920-1932) to the approach of the United States (2003-2011). The main focus will be British policy towards Iraqi tribes in the aftermath of the 1920 rebellion and American tribal policy during and after the ‘surge’ of 2007 and the so-called ‘Anbar Awakening’. The paper will begin by examining the ideational foundations of British and American tribal policy. How did military officers and senior civil servants at the centre of policy making understand tribal organisation? What caused a shift in policy both under the British Mandate and American occupation from ‘tribes’, once perceived as a hindrance to state building, playing a central role in cooption and pacification? The paper argues that a reified notion of ‘tribe’ dominated policy making, assigning them a role in delivering collective action and societal quiescence. They were meant to act as a nodal point to ideationally and coercively order rural Iraq. The paper concludes that this was a fundamental misunderstanding of ‘tribes’, Iraqi society and state building. This misperception sprang from an Orientalist discourse that reified tribes, allocating them a great deal more organisational and ideological coherence than they actually had. For British colonial state building this led to ‘tribal shaykhs’ used as interlocutors with rural society, fostering resentment, rebellion and ultimately the profound weakness of the Iraqi state. US policy created a series of weak collaborative elites, who temporarily delivered enough intelligence to pacify Anbar, but were swept away as indigenous state building took over from exogenous occupation. The paper will seek to explain these different outcomes by examining the role ‘tribes’ played in both pacification policies. Research for the paper will be from five major sources; fieldwork notes collected in Baghdad and Anbar in 2007 and 2008, the British colonial archive, books by key individuals involved in Mandate tribal policy, relevant US policy documents that have made it into the public domain and the copious secondary literature produced by those involved in the ‘Anbar Awakening’.