Following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the expansion of militias became one of the most significant forms of organized violence in the country, a phenomenon that cannot be adequately understood through purely political or security-based explanations. This article aims to analyze the mechanisms of violent subject formation among Iraqi militias and to examine the role of discourse, fantasy, and the symbolic order in the reproduction of militia violence. Adopting a qualitative and interdisciplinary approach, the study draws on psychoanalytic discourse analysis within a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework and an interpretive hermeneutic approach.



The findings demonstrate that militia violence in Iraq is not merely an instrumental act but constitutes part of the process through which the militia subject is formed. Within this process, the representation of the threatening Other, martyrdom-centered rituals, and the articulation of religious fantasies contribute to the reproduction of the subject’s psychic coherence under conditions of the disintegration of the symbolic order. From this perspective, violence acquires a symbolic and compensatory function, becoming a source of meaning, identity, and belonging.



The article concludes that without intervention in the psycho-discursive dimensions of violence and the reconstruction of unifying signifiers, institutional and security-based efforts to contain militias are likely to remain ineffective. Accordingly, the article argues that the reconstruction of Iraq’s political order should proceed simultaneously with the reconfiguration of national discourses and the psychological repair of collective trauma.