Governance Without Legitimacy: The Kurdish Region’s Descent into Stagnation

Governance Without Legitimacy: The Kurdish Region’s Descent into Stagnation

For more than three decades, particularly since 1991, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) has been presented as a semiautonomous polity with its own institutions and an ethnically distinct identity. But beneath that veneer of autonomy lies a more troubling reality.  Corruption has deteriorated the region, and it is not an aberration in the Kurdish political order; it is deeply embedded in its structures. At the same time, economic fragility, poli…