Effective Factors on Unrest in Iraq: A Case Study of the Political, Economic and Social Dimensions of the 2019 Protests

Political protests are one of the types of political action.Iraq has witnessed such protests many times after Saddam Hussein. The last of these protests occurred in the fall of 2019. The aim of this study is to identify the cause of political unrest in Iraq and to find an answer to the question of why the recent protests have become anti-regime?

The method used in this study is descriptive-analytical and uses Ted Robert Gurr's relative deprivation theory as a theoretical framework.

According to research findings, Iraq's oil revenue and economic growth over the past years has raised value expectations among young people, who make up 59% of the population, and maketo feel contradiction with their value expectations. Thus, they have experienced a sense of relative deprivation by observing poverty, corruption and unemployment and comparing their country with other regional governments.Therefore, their political actions havetaken the form of violence and protest.

Given that the elimination of the feeling of relative deprivation in citizens requires structural and serious measures, and it is practically impossible to do so in the short term, so; it can be said as long as the necessary economic reforms are not carried out in Iraq and Iraqi citizens don't pursue their political activities in the form of parties and civil movements, the occurrence of violent protests, as in the fall of 2019 in Iraqi cities, will be natural and imaginable.