The state, sovereignty and strategic decision-making

The monopoly of legitimate force: what does it mean in a federal state?

By Ali Zuweid · Article date: 22 October 2026 · 8 min read

English translation published 31 October 2026. Read the Arabic original.

An Iraqi citizen may encounter a local police officer, a federal force or a regional security agency and assume that multiple institutions necessarily mean multiple sovereignties. Conversely, a call to unify force may be understood as a demand to administer every security matter from Baghdad. Neither interpretation resolves the problem. The Constitution itself combines federal responsibility for national security policy with regional responsibilities for internal security. The issue is to establish when plurality represents a lawful division of work and when it becomes a capacity to disregard the law or issue conflicting instructions. [1]

The distinction cannot be established by the colour of a uniform or an organisation’s name alone. It becomes visible when misconduct prompts a question about who issued an order, when an incident crosses institutional boundaries, or when a citizen seeks to challenge a measure. If these questions lack binding answers, institutional plurality becomes a sovereignty problem even when every organisation has an official title. If the answers are defined and enforceable, distributing responsibilities can improve responsiveness and local knowledge without creating an independent entitlement to use force.

One legal order does not require one organisation

Article 9 of the Constitution prohibits military militias outside the framework of the armed forces and places the armed forces and security services under civilian leadership. Article 110(2) gives federal authorities exclusive responsibility for national security policy and its implementation, including establishing and managing armed forces to protect Iraq’s borders and defend the country. At the same time, Article 121(5) makes a regional government responsible for its administrative requirements, including establishing and organising internal security forces such as police, security forces and regional guards. Reading one provision while disregarding the other produces an incomplete answer. [1]

The monopoly of legitimate force can therefore be understood as confining authorisation to use force, and accountability for it, within the public legal order. It does not mean that one official decides every case or one organisation performs every function. It does mean that no agency may turn its competence into immunity from oversight, and that force must not rest on personal or party loyalties that override legal duties. This is a standard for institutional analysis, not a self-sufficient resolution of the legal disputes surrounding every formation or territory.

Another distinction must be retained: allocating a competence differs from temporarily delegating a task. One body may have an original statutory function while another assists under specified conditions. If the scope, duration and review arrangements for assistance are not recorded, an exception may become permanent and the boundary between maintaining public order and military activity may disappear. More meetings alone cannot solve this. Participants need rules identifying when each institution’s role begins and ends.

Germany: structured plurality and limits on moving between functions

Germany’s arrangements demonstrate that federalism does not require an open-ended plurality of coercive authority. The Basic Law assigns defence to federal armed forces and limits their use outside defence to circumstances expressly authorised by the Constitution. It also preserves substantial responsibilities for the Länder and regulates assistance between authorities in specified situations. These rules combine territorial distribution with restrictions on making military force a routine instrument of domestic administration. [2]

The texts alone do not prove that every German coordination arrangement succeeds or every use of force is lawful. They do, however, provide a design that can be examined: military functions do not automatically replace policing, assistance does not erase the original authority, and exceptional intervention requires a distinct legal basis. For Iraq, the lesson is that institutional differences must not leave citizens facing a gap in responsibility. Expanding a force’s role should explain the deficiency being addressed and why repairing the originally responsible institution is insufficient.

The comparison remains limited by differences in security history and relations between central and regional authorities. German jurisdictional boundaries cannot simply be copied onto the Iraqi text, nor can equal levels of inter-institutional trust be assumed. What can be transferred is an approach to control: define the task, identify authorisation, protect the original competence and establish a body that resolves disputes. The distribution of powers itself must rest on Iraq’s Constitution, relevant legislation and institutional dispute resolution.

Official status does not make every act legitimate

There is an opposite mistake to confusing multiple agencies with multiple sovereignties: assuming that every use of force becomes legitimate because an official body carried it out. The act requires a lawful purpose, proper jurisdiction and respect for rights. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime explains necessity, proportionality and precaution in law enforcement. Force does not become permissible merely because it is available or appears to offer a quicker solution. [3]

This principle changes how the monopoly is assessed. If weapons are institutionally controlled but citizens remain unable to understand a measure’s basis or submit a complaint, one aspect of control may have improved while legitimacy remains incomplete. If an institution treats every investigation as damage to morale, mistakes become less visible and harder to correct. Protecting personnel from arbitrary accusations also matters, which is why accountability requires evidence and fair procedures rather than media trials substituting for investigation.

In practice, security depends on the ability to distinguish. An individual offender is not an entire community; suspicion is not conviction; political disagreement does not justify changing standards of treatment. Predictable enforcement makes cooperation with institutions less risky for citizens. This is an argument about a mechanism for building trust, not a claim to a quantified effect attributable to one measure. Trust does not release institutions from preparedness or investigation. It connects those functions more closely to the society they are supposed to protect.

What can be repaired without multiplying structures?

I propose that Iraq’s review should begin with recurring decisions shared between institutions, rather than a new organisational chart. For each category, the authority responsible for approval, the bodies that must be consulted, the record preserving the legal basis and the route for challenge or investigation should be identifiable. This can proceed incrementally where legal agreement exists, while disputed competences are referred to their constitutional process.

Coordination also requires a minimum of shared definitions and information. Different incident classifications or recording times can produce two accounts of the same occurrence and turn an administrative disagreement into a political dispute. The answer is not to place all citizens’ data in a repository open to every agency. It is to identify the information needed for each function, protect it, and record who accessed it and for what purpose. A common legal order does not require abandoning privacy or controls over information access.

Funding should make the relationship between resources and tasks traceable. It is unhelpful to finance a function twice while remaining unable to identify responsibility for its failure. Reorganisation must also not cause abrupt service interruption or disregard personnel rights. Any merger or transfer of responsibilities requires an assessment of costs and capacity and a plan to preserve necessary functions. Clarifying responsibilities and sharing information may be better than a merger; another case may support the opposite conclusion. Evidence must determine the choice.

In my judgement, real progress begins when no one can use differences between formations or administrative levels to evade the law, and when the state does not invoke unity to erase a legitimate competence or a citizen’s right. In a federal state, the monopoly of legitimate force means that the constitutional order can subject every instrument of force to binding rules while keeping the division of functions workable. A unified final legal authority entails unified legal accountability; it does not require every institution to resemble every other one.

Ali Zuweid — Researcher in strategic affairs and national security