This paper will analyze the effects of Iraq’s institutional configuration on communal politics (both ethnic and sectarian) using a historical-institutionalist approach. It utilizes data collected from the British National Archives, the Ba'th Party archives at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. and the Library of Congress. It explores the systemic forces that have defined the state’s identity through its institutional configuration, and analyze how and why critical transformations have reversed authoritarian and exclusionary governance. It attributes this failure in statebuilding to two interlinked processes. First, inappropriate institutional design at the time of state formation and subsequently under the monarchy institutionalized exclusionary and authoritarian politics in order to define and control the nascent state. Second, the imposition of a monolithic national identity under Ba’thist Iraq through the state’s governing institutions produced contention at the societal level amongst Iraq’s diverse ethnic and religious-sectarian groups. This resulted in the inability of the state to foster a national identity that would reconcile the institutional/structural governing apparatus with its diverse society through a binary social contract. Consequently, and as a result of the above, state institutions, as instruments of the state’s governing capacity, have been entwined in Iraq’s communal politics. Thus, while 2003 marked a critical juncture that saw an alteration in the state’s institutional landscape, the reversal of exclusionary politics has meant that the primary drivers of resistance have been replaced by new communal power dynamics in response to preceding governing tactics. Consequently, although the state’s institutional landscape has been markedly altered since the Ba’thist era, the dynamics that fuel national dissonance remain unchanged, resulting in the reproduction of exclusionary and authoritarian politics since 2003.