Iraq in the 1980s offered no room for social or political critique, let alone protest. The ruling Ba’th party, under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, eliminated all opposition through censorship, coercion and cooptation. At the same time, the war with Iran, which would last for nearly the entire decade, gave Saddam Hussein’s government an even stronger weapon with which to order society, politics and culture into the image that it desired. Political discourse as well as intellectual and cultural production from Iraq at the time reflect this. In this context, Arabic language newspapers and journals operating outside Iraq rose to importance as spaces where exiled Iraqi intellectuals and artists were able to write more freely, although many were still fearful for their lives and tempered their criticism of the Iraqi state or avoided writing about Iraq altogether. The quarterly journal al-Badil (The Alternative), however, published in exile by the Association of Iraqi Democratic Writers, Journalists and Artists )Ra?bit?at al-Kutta?b wa-al-S?uh?ufi?yi?n wa-al-Fanna?ni?n al-Di?muqra?t?i?yi?n al-?Ira?qi?yi?n) emerged as an exception to this rule. Throughout the 1980s, the journal took a hard line against the Iraqi Ba’thist regime, protesting its political oppression, its mass abuse of human rights and opposing its cooption of the cultural sphere for “Saddam’s Qadisiyya” against Iran. Yet, the journal’s concerns also went beyond the borders of Iraq. Through its social and political critique, to its fiction, poetry, translations and featured artworks, al-Badil articulated political and aesthetic positions that were pan-Arab and, at times, even internationalist in perspective. From the very first issues, the journal’s articles were written by writers from a number of Arab countries and addressed the many crises that the political left in the Arab world were facing at the time, connecting war and dictatorship in Iraq with, among other issues, the Lebanese Civil War, Palestinian statelessness and Egypt’s political pivot after its peace treaty with Israel and the Camp David Accords. Today, the journal’s table of contents reads like a ‘who’s who’ of late twentieth and early twenty-first Arab intellectuals with articles from the likes of Fadil al-'Azzawi, Faysal Darraj, Youmna al-‘Eid, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury and Saadi Youssef among others. In this way, the journal emerged as space for conversations and exchange between leftist writers, intellectuals and artists from across the Arab world at a time when they were facing unprecedented threats against their very existence in their home countries.