‘The Golden Age’ or ‘the Dark Time of the Plots’: Iraq and Syria in the 1950s | Matthieu Rey

1946. The last French soldier left Syria. A few months before, Tawfiq al-Suweidi, the Iraqi Prime Minister, introduced a set of laws to protect constitutional freedoms and legalize political parties. In both post-Ottoman countries, Iraq and Syria, the 1940s and 1950s were marked by a contradictory political legacy. On the one hand, parliaments ruled, political parties flourished, and civil society gained traction through public debate. On the other, emergency laws blocked debate, or the military interfered. These two main images reveal the challenges both countries faced at independence and echo their attempts to establish sovereignty truly. These difficulties – who had the right of citizenship, how to develop the country, how to regulate executive and legislative power – reflected the dilemma of being independent, an issue that still prevails nowadays.

Former director of the Contemporary Studies Department at IFPO in Beirut, fluent in Arabic, Matthieu Rey is currently a senior researcher at CNRS-EHESS and a fellow researcher at the Wits History Workshop in Johannesburg. Based in Damascus between 2009 and 2013, he first studied the period of independence in Syria and Iraq, examining the use of parliament as a site of power. Since then, he has worked for the last 15 years in and on the Middle East, with multiple fieldwork projects in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. More recently, he managed the Contemporary Department of IFPO in Beirut between 2021 and 2025, leading a team of researchers in social sciences, political science, and anthropology. He has also contributed to scholarship on Southern Africa as a member of Wits University since 2018 and has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and Zambia. His work has focused mostly on state-building, policymaking, and the advent of political orders in South Western Asia and Southern Africa from the beginning of the 19th century. He published an Histoire de la Syrie. XIX-XXIe siècles (2018), When the Parliaments Ruled in the Middle East. Iraq and Syria, 1946-1963 (2021) and more recently Histoire de la Syrie contemporaine (2026). He also wrote on political transition, elections, borders and borderlands, and opportunities for archives and oral history.