Abstract

"Normative Co-optation and Debt Relief for Post-Invasion Iraq"

Connor O'Brien, University of Cambridge (cpo36@cam.ac.uk)

This paper analyses the 2004 Iraq Paris Club debt relief agreement. Existing scholarship has framed the agreement as ‘political’, a mere epiphenomenon of great power politics, the result of extraordinary international legal measures, a missed opportunity for the adoption of the doctrine of odious debt, or even indicative of “a longer-term shift” towards mainstreaming “long-dormant ideas about illegitimate or odious debt”. Apart from framing legitimacy-based argumentation as peripheral or mere “humanitarian gloss”, this literature has largely ignored or minimized the influence of civil society advocacy on the agreement. Conversely, I argue that Paris Club creditors – led by the US with the encouragement of prospective oil investors – engaged in normative co-optation by expanding the scope, remit, and eligibility criteria for debt relief through the creation and deployment of the ‘Evian Approach’ to accommodate debt cancellation for Iraq. However, as I explain, this approach constituted the modification of existing Paris Club debt relief procedures, rather than the activist push for the adoption of a new odious debt norm. As a result, Paris Club creditors simultaneously increased the legitimacy of the agreement – by co-opting the normative case for debt relief to deflect from its impact on the US war and reconstruction effort – while also defusing civil society pressure to adopt the doctrine of odious debt.