Since the democratic elections held across Iraq in 2005 and 2010 much attention has understandably been paid to the new Iraqi government. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that much of Iraq’s political elite are practising the type of governance referred to in the literature on other Arab states alternatively as ‘liberalised autocracy’ (Brumberg, 2002), ‘semi-authoritarianism’ (Ottaway, 2003) or ‘pluralised authoritarianism’ (Posusney & Angrist, 2005). That is to say, that the Iraqi government actually utilises (and controls) nominally democratic mechanisms such as elections, media freedoms, political opposition and civil society as part of their strategy to retain power. This is perhaps best demonstrated via the nine month political stalemate that followed the March 2010 elections and PM Maliki’s refusal to step down despite having narrowly lost the election. Not surprisingly, the Iraqi people have become increasingly disillusioned and critical of their political leaders – hence the mass protests that have swept across Iraq in the context of the popular Arab Revolutions of 2010-11. However, these latest Iraqi protests are only the most recent and overt sign of the hidden geographies that are agitating towards democracy in this deeply troubled and increasingly authoritarian state. Since the invasion of 2003, a complex array of political, religious and ethno-sectarian factions have formed civil society movements; uncensored news has been consumed across the nation; ordinary citizens have taken to the streets to protest key government decisions; and various local councils have been formed, deliberating on key decisions facing their immediate communities (Davis, 2004, 2007). Given this context, this chapter focuses on the specific case of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), Iraq’s largest and most powerful independent workers union. The IFOU has repeatedly taken the Iraqi government to task over their poor pay and the dangerous nature of their work, as well as the government’s initial kowtowing to US plans to privatise the entire Iraqi oil sector. To do this, the IFOU have utilised a variety of very democratic mechanisms including peaceful strikes and protests, media campaigns and political lobbying. Such moves have met with mixed results in Baghdad – at times the central government has pandered to the requests of IFOU, but it has also gone as far as issuing arrest warrants for its senior members. The IFOU therefore serve as an interesting example of public power in Iraq and may well pose one of the greatest challenges to rising authoritarianism there.

In the past two decades media, academic, and policy circles in Egypt have seen a rather public debate over official statistics, a departure for what is historically a very secretive sector. Meanwhile, issues of reform and “capacity building” in official statistics have assumed an unprecedented prominence at major international organizations (e.g. World Bank, IMF, UN), both in general and in their relations with Egypt. My paper examines official statistics in Egypt, focusing on the last two decades. I argue that contemporary Egyptian debates over statistical policy are shaped by historical patterns of statebuilding in Egypt and cannot be reduced to policy prescriptions presented by international organizations. I first trace the history of Egyptian official statistics since the 1950s, arguing that major economic policy shifts have led to new parallel bureaucracies producing official statistics. Thus the nominally official statistical agency CAPMAS shares the field with several other data-producing bureaucracies in a de-facto decentralized system, contrary to CAPMAS’s founding mandate in 1964 to be the exclusive data authority in Egypt. Different agencies often release contradictory figures for the same indicators, further fueling public debate. I then turn to the two most prominent contemporary statistical agencies in Egypt, namely CAPMAS and the more recently founded IDSC, housed in the Cabinet presidency office. Both CAPMAS and IDSC have orchestrated competing projects to reform the statistical sector under their own auspices, which I chart in detail. Moreover, I argue that Egypt’s various statistical agencies have each deployed resources from international organizations to bolster their own position in this domestic debate, resulting in competing reform initiatives rather than the integration of the statistical sector as international organizations intend. My work shows that statebuilding patterns and inter-bureaucratic conflict are critical to understanding the trajectory of Egyptian official statistics. I conclude with a look to the post-Mubarak future, expecting the above dynamics to continue and even to intensify as Egypt negotiates with the IMF and other international organizations, which will likely put pressure on Egypt for statistical reform. My research also raises methodological and epistemological questions by reading qualitiative and area-specific forms of knowledge against the universalizing assumptions of the international template for globally comparable data. The argument is developed with evidence gathered over a year of fieldwork in Egypt including interviews with officials and experts, and print sources including the Egyptian National Archives, Egyptian newspaper archives, policy documents, official publications, and Egyptian academic literature.