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“People without a state also must live”: Kurds’ experiences of citizenship in the Middle East and the Netherlands

Nannie Sköld

Sociology: Migration and Ethnic Studies First Supervisor: Dr. Debby Gerritsen Second Supervisor: Dr. Sonja Fransen

UvA ID Number: 11239484 Word count: 23,822

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements...3

Summary of Research...4

Introduction...7

Theory...9

Dominant Conceptualisation of Statelessness...9

Statelessness and International State System...9

Conceptualising Citizenship...11

Citizenship in Light of Ethnicity and Nationality...13

Citizenship in the Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran...16

Problematising the State as an Emancipatory Actor and Citizenship as a Blanket Solution...23

Citizenship as a Political Tool...24

Methodology...29

Overview of Research Method...29

Phenomenology and Abductive Research Strategy...29

Interviews...30

Sampling...34

Reflexivity...34

Ethics...35

Findings and Interpretation...37

Introduction...37

Citizenship: Security and Protection...37

Citizenship: A Risk...40

Citizenship: An Enabler...42

Citizenship: A Certificate to “Exist in the Given World”...44

Citizenship: Representing the Idea of the Nation...46

The Role of the State and Citizenship in addressing Exclusion...50

Citizenship: A Tool of Assimilation and Oppression...56

Conclusion...61

Areas for Improvement...63

References...64

Annexes...71

Consent Form: English...71

Consent Form: Dutch...72

Confidentiality Agreement: Interpreter...73

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Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the participants who have participated in and engaged with the research project for their involvement as well as for countless

recommendations for literature, news articles and podcasts. Additionally, I would like to thank the interpreters and translators who have helped to make this research possible. Thank you also to Sardar Fatah Amin, Montium and KSVN’s (Koerdische studentenvereniging Nederland) Kurmancî language course.

I would also like to extend a thank you to Gizem for the pilot interview and for her valuable insights and friendship. Furthermore, I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Debby Gerritsen and Dr Sonja Fransen. I would also like to thank Dr Barzoo Eliassi for support, encouragement and reading recommendations.

Thank you to the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion – Laura van Waas, Amal de Chickera and the rest of the team – for your inspirational work and for your support and generosity.

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Summary of Research

From the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, Kurds have been divided into subpopulations governed by select states in the Middle East recognised as sovereign through the international state system. Within Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran – the four sovereign Middle Eastern nation-states of concern in this paper – Kurds have been subjected to violent forms of oppression as inhabitants of these states, including forced displacement, torture, the destruction of villages and genocide (Goner & Rebello, 2017, pp. 34, 41; Natali, 2005; Radpey, 2016; Vali, 1998). The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which Kurds in the Netherlands experience and construct meaning around the role of citizenship in relation to historical and ongoing processes of exclusion and oppression of Kurds.

Within the hegemonic modern state system, citizenship has become a fundamental requirement for access to rights and for recognition of one’s existence within the current world order. It is in light of this fundamental requirement for citizenship, coupled with the assumption of universality within citizenship, that citizenship acquisition has come to be considered a solution for addressing statelessness within the dominant discourse on

statelessness. It ought here to be noted that this dominant discourse primarily concerns de jure stateless persons, rather than stateless people – understood as members of a stateless nation (Gabiam, 2015, p. 486; McGee, 2014, p. 172). However, understanding statelessness to be a fallacy of the international state system, within which states have the sovereign right to determine who to recognise as a citizen and who to exclude, the state system also creates statelessness through recognising certain entities as sovereign states with a legitimacy to govern whilst designating others as illegitimate (Bloom, 2017; Bloom, Tonkiss, & Cole, 2017; Eliassi, 2016b; Gabiam, 2015). The role of citizenship in addressing the exclusion and oppression of Kurds must therefore be situated within the historical context of Kurdistan being considered for recognition as a sovereign state in the early 1920s, but ultimately being denied this recognition (Radpey, 2016, p. 480; Tas, 2016, pp. 469-70).

Importantly, the concept of Kurdistan as a stateless nation does not necessarily imply that Kurds consider the establishment of a Kurdish sovereign state to be the ideal solution to addressing the historical and ongoing oppression of Kurds. Through exploring the narratives of Kurds in the Netherlands, the breadth of ways in which citizenship and statehood are experienced and conceptualised are presented and analysed to allow for a phenomenological understanding of citizenship in relation to the inclusion and exclusion of Kurds. Crucially, the

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research participants’ narratives illustrate how citizenship is not perceived as a universal social phenomenon. Rather, the content of citizenship and the legitimacy with which the possession of citizenship is regarded by other citizens is greatly differentiated among different individuals and groups within any one particular citizenship regime. In particular, the nation-state-specific relation between the status of Kurds as a minority group and the dominant conceptualisation of the national community is understood to be integral to the extent to which Kurds are considered to be included or excluded within the nation-state.

Within the Netherlands, the concept of citizenship is thought to be increasingly culturalised – shifting from being a status recognised through formal legal status to one dependent on the citizen’s degree of assimilation to dominant Dutch norms and values (Schinkel & van Houdt, 2010, p. 704). Furthermore, racialised hierarchies within the Dutch national community contributes to the continuous challenging of the legitimacy of minority citizens’ inclusion and access to rights. Thus, whereas the access and content of the rights of minority citizens might not technically differ from citizens recognised as “native”, these racialised lines of exclusion render minority citizens’ recognition as full citizens impossible (Slootman & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 62; Tamimi Arab, 2012). However, it is crucial to note that out of the five nation-states of concern in this paper, the Netherlands was the only state that research participants associated with security and protection, although several participants highlighted ongoing differentiation between Dutch citizens.

The status of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran must be situated within the nation-states’ respective historical and political contexts in order to begin to understand the role of citizenship in relation to the inclusion and exclusion of Kurds. Within each of these four states, the dominant idea of the national community is conceptualised in heavily ethno-nationalist terms, within which Kurds are perceived as a minority group against which the majority group defines itself (Eliassi, 2016b, p. 1405). Through imagining the nation-state as ethnically singular, the presence of minority groups and assertions of minorities’ cultural identities come to be perceived by the majority group as a deficit and a threat to the purity of the nation (Appadurai, 2006, p. 53). As Arjun Appadurai (2006, p. 53) argues, it is the majority group’s perception of the nation and itself as being threatened by the existence of minority groups that go on to “unleash the urge to purify” and thereby risks oppression. Thus, it is the perception of Kurds and Kurdishness as a threat coupled with the state’s legitimised authority to govern over the population on its territory that creates the foundations upon

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which citizenship can be understood as a political tool of oppression against Kurds within Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Through considering statelessness and citizenship within their appropriate political context and identifying the actors involved and the interests of these actors, both statelessness and citizenship can be understood to be functioning as political tools and, in some cases, as tools of oppression. Within the context of the international state system and its norm of state sovereignty, states have the right to determine who to recognise as a citizen and who to exclude whilst also bearing the role as protector of rights (Hayden, 2008, pp. 252-3). As human rights increasingly (and counterintuitively) depend on an individual’s status as a citizen, individuals become increasingly reliant upon state recognition as a citizen in order to access fundamental rights (Hayden, 2008, p. 252). It is within this context that citizenship can be understood to function as a political tool as it allows states to (threaten to) deny citizenship or denationalise particular individuals or groups, as well as serve to legitimise acts of

oppression against citizens who are subjects of the state citizenship regime in question. The aim here is by no means to undermine the oppression of de jure stateless individuals, but rather to emphasise the severity of the exclusion and rightlessness that comes with de jure statelessness and thereby the extent to which individuals possessing citizenship are dependent upon the state of which they are recognised as citizens.

It is through recognising the state as a political actor and citizenship as a tool that can be used to serve the state’s own political interests that the idea of citizenship acquisition as a solution to statelessness becomes deeply problematic. By incorporating Foucault’s (1982) analytics of power and governmentality, the ways in which states utilise their mandate to govern in order to pursue the subjugation of their Kurdish citizens to oppression, its underlying assumptions based within the modern state system can be scrutinised and challenged. Governmentality is used as a conceptual tool to bring to light the politics

embedded within overreliance on formal citizenship as a solution to address statelessness and exclusion. Through acknowledging the state as a political actor whose particular interests are facilitated through its citizenship regime, it becomes crucial to also recognise Kurds as political actors for whom citizenship acquisition can undermine collective interests.

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Introduction

Kurdistan is considered to be the world’s largest nation without a state. Approximately 30 million Kurds are spread throughout the Middle East and – through its diaspora population – Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Americas and elsewhere (Radpey, 2016, p. 470; Vali, 1998, 83). Following the disunion of the Ottoman Empire, Kurdistan was briefly considered for recognition as a sovereign state, but this was never actualised. Instead, Britain, France and Russia divided the Kurdish population between the newly recognised states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran1, within which Kurds came to constitute minority groups (Radpey, 2016, p.

480). In the decades that have followed, Kurds have been victims of oppression and violence and continue to be regarded as inferior to citizens of the nation-states’ respective majority groups (Eliassi, 2016a; Goner & Rebello, 2017; Phillips, 2015).

This paper seeks to explore the exclusion of Kurds through the lens of citizenship and statelessness. It will look at the role citizenship plays in the creation and maintenance of exclusion and ask the question of what role citizenship can play in addressing this ongoing exclusion. The aim is not to compare the Kurdish regions of concern (Kurdistan-Turkey, Kurdistan-Syria, Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Kurdistan-Iran), but instead to provide a rich and nuanced understanding of the breadth of individuals’ experiences of citizenship.

Literature on statelessness predominantly focuses on de jure statelessness and frames the issue as a problem of lack of citizenship, whereby citizenship acquisition is framed as the solution to statelessness. This paper starts from a different theoretical background and seeks to challenge some of the assumptions that have come to dominate the discourse on

statelessness.

Drawing on dominant literature on de jure statelessness, this paper acknowledges the paramount importance of legal citizenship status for the ability to access rights and

recognition and to live a full life. Based on this understanding, it is recognised that individuals are heavily dependent on states for such recognition. The paper here deviates from the

dominant discourse on statelessness by assuming both the state and its inhabitants to be political actors with particular interests. Through understanding citizenship and statelessness

1 Although the areas in the Middle East with a historic Kurdish-majority population include Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia (Radpey, 2016, p. 470), this paper will focus on the Kurdish regions situated within, and under the national jurisdictions of, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. This is due to that the majority of Kurds in the Middle East are inhabitants of these four states as well as that Kurds within these four nation-states have received more consistent academic focus than Kurds elsewhere in the region (Eliassi, 2016b; Hassanpour, Skutnabb-Kangas & Chyet, 1996; Karlsson, 2017; Tas, 2016).

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to be political, and by coupling this with individuals’ dependency on states for recognition as citizens, the notion of citizenship as a political tool will be developed.

This paper will start by exploring the role of states and citizenship within the modern state system in order to explore the hegemonic framework through which states are

considered to be emancipatory actors and citizenship is assumed to be a blanket solution to statelessness. These assumptions will then be broken down by taking a closer look at how legalistic notions of citizenship are intimately tied up with racialised, ethnicised and nationalist ideals. The role of citizenship in relation to ongoing processes of inclusion and exclusion will be looked at and discussed in light of both (macro-level) dominant global frameworks and (micro-level) individual lived experiences. Whereas it is necessary to

consider state-level theory in order to understand the hegemonic modern state system through which individuals are rendered heavily dependent on the state, individual narratives are crucial for providing a nuanced understanding of how this is experienced in relation to historical and ongoing processes of exclusion. Thus, the aim of juxtaposing state-level theory with participants’ micro-level narratives is to explore individuals’ structural dependency on the state in relation to the role of citizenship within individuals’ visions for inclusion.

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Theory Dominant Conceptualisation of Statelessness

Overwhelmingly, statelessness is a concept understood in terms of its legal definition as per the 1954 Convention on Statelessness. The dominant framework surrounding

statelessness is largely determined by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and non-governmental organisations such as the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) and the European Network on Statelessness (ENS), and adheres to the 1954 Convention’s definition (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2014a; Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion [ISI], 2014; European Network on Statelessness [ENS], 2014). Accordingly, a stateless person is defined as someone who is, “not recognized as a national by any state under the operation of its law” and is thereby considered de jure stateless (UN General Assembly, 1954). In line with this legalistic understanding, citizenship acquisition and changes to states’ citizenship law are heralded as the solutions to statelessness (UNHCR, 2014a; ISI, 2014; ENS, 2014).

This dominant legalistic conceptualisation of statelessness has been criticised for having an extensively restrictive legal focus and for overlooking broader systemic processes underlying statelessness (Bloom, Tonkiss & Cole, 2017; Hayden, 2008, p. 249; Kingston, 2017; Tas, 2016). Lindsey Kingston (2017, p. 28) argues that UNHCR’s “I Belong” campaign – the organisation’s main campaign addressing statelessness – tends to “flatten” the issue of statelessness, reducing it to a question of citizenship acquisition. The campaign is thereby criticised to overlook the complexity of marginalisation and the range of steps, of which citizenship acquisition is merely one, necessary to ensure individuals’ full rights protection (Kingston, 2017, p. 17). Furthermore, Kingston (2017, p. 29) argues that “scholarship on statelessness is complicated, in part, by a limited vocabulary that makes it difficult to adequately discuss notions of membership and status”. It is within this context that statelessness will be explored as a broader sociological concept and in relation to the international state system in order to interrogate the role of citizenship in relation to the realisation of inclusion.

Statelessness and International State System

The scope of the issue of statelessness, and the profundity of its impact can only be appropriately understood within the context of the hegemonic international state system.

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UNHCR estimates that over 10 million individuals are stateless, although the figure is likely to be significantly higher due to enormous methodological and political difficulties in

accessing reliable statistics as well as the exclusion of Palestinians, who generally do not fall under UNHCR’s mandate (ISI, 2018). Laura van Waas (2008, p. 12) argues that individuals who lack recognised legal citizenship regularly struggle to access fundamental rights,

suggesting that citizenship may be required in practice even in cases where this might not be stipulated in theory. As a consequence of their lack of citizenship, stateless individuals face barriers to accessing education, employment, healthcare, housing and social welfare (ISI, 2019). Furthermore, stateless persons are in many cases unable to travel or migrate, formally marry or register their children, and are disproportionately at risk of abuse and exploitation (van Waas, 2008, p. 12). Relating this idea to the international state system, and building on the work of Hannah Arendt, Patrick Hayden (2008, p. 252) argues that the exclusion of non-citizens from certain rights is integral to a shift in the role of the state. Drawing on Arendt, Hayden (2008, p. 253) argues that as states have been empowered with the sovereign right to determine who is a citizen and who is not, the state has also acquired the responsibility of protecting the rights of citizens and, by extension, denying the rights of individuals who the state determines to be non-citizens. Furthermore, Hayden (2008, p. 252) suggests that the state’s role in protecting human rights has led to human rights being granted on the basis of state recognition as a citizen, rather than on the basis of being human, in what Arendt (2004, p. 379) refers to as the “tragedy of the nation-state”. Relatedly, Kahler (2011) suggests that conflicting international norms regarding human rights, peace preservation and the norm of state sovereignty risk undermining the human rights norm at the expense of upholding the sovereignty norm. Crucially, individuals are thereby highly dependent on recognition as citizens by the state in order to have their human rights protected. Thus, the idea of state sovereignty – sovereignty to determine who is a citizen and who is not, coupled with the role of ensuring human rights – exacerbates the vulnerability of stateless individuals and

strengthens the power of sovereign states.

Hannah Arendt (2004) significantly identifies statelessness as an iconic fallacy of the international state system, and this analysis is echoed by a range of contemporary scholars who consider the global system of sovereign states to be the root cause of statelessness (Bloom, 2017; Bloom, Tonkiss & Cole, 2017; Eliassi, 2016b; Gabiam, 2015). Importantly, understanding statelessness as a consequence of the international state system provides an avenue for exploring statelessness as both an individual and a collective issue, often

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inextricably linked (Gabiam, 2015). As the issue of who is recognised as a citizen (and who is excluded) in the respective sovereign states is explored, the question of which nations are recognised as sovereign states (and which are not) comes to light. Statelessness thus becomes an issue not only of who is granted citizenship status within recognised sovereign states, but an issue of which states have been internationally recognised to hold this sovereign power of legitimate recognition. Following this, a conceptual distinction has been drawn between “stateless persons”, understood as individuals without formal citizenship status, and “stateless peoples”, referring to individuals who, regardless of formal citizenship status, are members of a stateless nation (Gabiam, 2015, p. 486; McGee, 2014, p. 172).2 Within the concept of the

stateless nation is a recognition of the value of territory and sovereignty as well as an understanding of the state as an institution capable to preserve and foster a cultural identity (Eliassi, 2016b, p. 1412). In this paper, the distinction between stateless persons and stateless people will be used as conceptual tools to aid in the understanding of how Netherlands-based3

Kurdish individuals experience and construct meaning around citizenship. Citizenship will therefore be explored in light of its significance within the international state system, as well as through considering the status of members of stateless nations within the citizenship

regimes of other states. Crucially, the notion of “stateless people” does not necessarily suggest that the establishment of a sovereign state for this group is the most desirable outcome, as opinions within groups of stateless people can differ significantly. However, it does require that the notion of the (pre-existing) state as an emancipatory actor is problematized and that the presumption of citizenship as a blanket solution is challenged.

Conceptualising Citizenship

Although the 1954 Statelessness Convention grants legal protection exclusively to de

jure stateless persons (van Waas, 2008, p. 22), the concept of de facto statelessness challenges

the fundamental binary assumption of citizenship as something an individual either has or does not have. Crucially, the definition of de facto statelessness as the status of possessing formal citizenship that is ineffective, acknowledges that citizenship cannot be reduced to solely denoting the possession of formal legal status. Rather, it begs the question of when

2 Latif Tas (2016, p. 49) makes a similar distinction, but uses the term “social statelessness” in the place of “stateless people”.

3 “Netherlands-based” is here used instead of “Dutch” because a small number of the participants are only in the Netherlands on a temporary basis and do not consider themselves Dutch. However, most the individuals interviewed self-identify as Dutch.

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citizenship is effective and when it is not, as it implies that the rights associated with citizenship are not universally applied to citizens. Thus, the concept of de facto citizenship suggests that the relation between formal citizenship status and access to rights is not a given, and that nuances within the status of citizenship exist. Carol Batchelor (1995, p. 232) uses the terms effective nationality and effective protection as a tool to conceptualise the differences in quality of citizenship, suggesting that the technical legal definition of the 1954 convention can address solely technical and legalistic problems. In order to appropriately conceptualise these nuances, sociologically informed theories on citizenship will be used to explore citizenship within the context of Kurdistan.

Whereas the legalistic definition of citizenship is restricted to referring to an individual’s formal legal status, citizenship will in this paper be considered as a broad and sociologically informed concept. The terms “formal citizenship” and “formal legal status” will be used interchangeably to refer to citizenship in the strictly legal sense of recognition as a citizen by a sovereign state, in order to allow for a distinction to be made between the restricted legal definition and citizenship as a broader sociological concept. In turn, a sociologically informed understanding of citizenship places less emphasis on the legal status and more on the norms, practices, meanings and identities associated with citizenship (Isin & Turner, 2002, p. 4). By interrogating citizenship through both its restricted legal definition and in a broader sense, vocabulary and theoretical tools are made available to comprehensively analyse the role of citizenship in the processes of inclusion and exclusion of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the Netherlands.

A sociologically informed understanding of citizenship problematises the assumption of citizenship as universal, as a broad conceptualisation considers citizenship to be situated along a spectrum. Isin and Turner (2002, p. 2) suggest that citizenship is a concept located along three axes – extent, or who is included/excluded, content, or associated rights and

responsibilities, and depth, in terms of its “thinness” or “thickness”. Whereas the dominant legal discourse around statelessness employs a “thin” notion of citizenship (Balaton-Chrimes, 2014, p. 17), restricting the concept to denote only formal legal status, Isin and Turner’s (2002) conceptualisation of citizenship problematises underlying assumptions of the dominant legal understanding of citizenship and statelessness. Using the three axes to conceptualise citizenship allows for nuances between different states’ citizenship regimes, as well as disparities between citizens within the same state, to be explored. The assumption within the modern political idea of citizenship as universal – explained by Marion Young (1989, p. 250)

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as “implying the inclusion of all persons in full citizenship status under the equal protection of law” – is thereby challenged. By considering citizenship as complex and occurring along different axes, formal legal status is relegated to constituting merely one part of a broader concept of citizenship. Rather, a theoretical idea of “full citizenship”, however this may be understood within a particular context, encompasses legal status as well as other aspects of citizenship. Linda Bosniak (2002, p. 1305) argues that citizenship is hierarchical and explains that subordinated groups have at various points in history possessed legal citizenship yet continued to be excluded in other respects, referring to this as second-class citizenship. Conceptualising citizenship as a broad sociologically informed concept, including but not restricted to formal legal status, allows for Kurds’ inclusion and exclusion within Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the Netherlands to be considered in a more nuanced manner.

Citizenship in Light of Ethnicity and Nationality

Within legal discourse on statelessness, citizenship and nationality are conflated and both are, in line with what Balaton-Chrimes (2014, p. 17) categorises as “thin” citizenship, understood as referring solely to status citizenship (Tonkiss, 2017). 4 Importantly, a

sociologically informed understanding of both citizenship and nationality allow for a differentiation to be made between the two distinct (albeit deeply interrelated) concepts. Although the concepts of nation, nationality and nationalism are notoriously difficult to define, they are “among those terms used to refer not to any clearly definable set, the members of which all share some common features which nonmembers lack, but rather to a cluster of “family resemblances”’ (Calhoun, 1993, p. 215). How these family resemblances are defined and distinguished from one another within particular nation-state contexts will be considered later in this chapter. Benedict Anderson (2006, p. 6) famously refers to the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and

sovereign”, and continues by suggesting that “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined”. The term “imagined” is here used to suggest the non-prescriptiveness of the nation, rather than falsity. Although theorists such as Anthony Smith (1986) argue that the origin of nations lies in pre-existing ethnic populations, or “ethnies”, contemporary literature on nations and nationalism takes an overwhelmingly modernist approach, shifting away from the idea of the nation and ethnic 4 Notably, UNHCR’s Global Action Plan to End Statelessness (2014b) uses the terms “nationality” and “citizenship” interchangeably.

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groups as fixed entities (Hindess, 2000, p. 1491). Although an in-depth exploration of the emergence of nations and nationhood is beyond the scope of this paper, an interrogation of the nexus between the state, nationalism and ethnicity is central to forming an understanding of the ways in which citizenship reflects the nation’s boundaries of exclusion.

As Rogers Brubaker (2002, p. 164) argues, social scientific literature on ethnicity, race and nationhood has a tendency of resorting to groupism, or treating ethnic, racial or national groups as externally bounded and internally homogenous entities. Referring to this tendency within literature on ethnic conflict, Brubaker (2002, p. 166) goes on to suggest that such conflict should not be framed as being “between ethnic groups” but rather seek to understand how this conflict became ethnicised. He argues for the conceptualisation of ethnicity in terms of practical categories, institutional forms and organisational routines, and thus to consider ethnicity through the process of ethnicisation (Brubaker, 2002, p. 167). Thus, the concern of this paper lies in understanding how Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran became ethnicised as nation-states and the role of citizenship in relation to dominant ethno-nationalist conceptualisations. The status of Kurds as a minority ethnic group will be considered in light of the ethnicised processes of exclusion within the respective nation-states of concern.

In exploring the ways in which citizenship relates to concepts of nationhood and ethnicity, it is important to not only consider the lines of inclusion and exclusion for being within the national community, but also to attend to the ways in which nation-states require the formation of minority populations in order for a majority population to exist. Arjun Appadurai (2006, p. 49) argues that the idea of minority and majority populations is deeply tied up with the establishment of modern nation-states. Appadurai (2006, p. 51) goes on to introduce the concept of predatory identities, or identities which are conceptualised as being under constant threat from other proximate social identities and require their extinction. It is in situations where the notion of the “imagined community” is reduced to an idea of ethnic singularity that minority identities come to be seen as deficits to the nation’s purity and as threats to the continued existence of the ethnic majority group and thereby serve to legitimise the oppression of minority groups (Appadurai, 2006, pp. 52-3). Situating this within the international state system and the historical division of the Middle East into modern nation-state entities, Kurds have been rendered a minority population in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran rather than a majority population of a sovereign state. However, it is not necessarily the status as an ethnic minority group in itself that is problematic, but the status of a minority within ethno-nationalist nation-states in which the respective majority populations are conceptualised

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as living under constant threat of minority populations. It is thus within this context, coupled with the legitimacy of government afforded to states through the modern state system to govern its citizens (Hindess, 2000, p. 1494), that Kurds’ exclusion and oppression is ought to be understood and from which possible solutions can be conceptualised.

Furthermore, there are here two crucial points to consider: firstly, the sovereign power of the state to determine its criteria for formal citizenship and, secondly, the relationship between the nation-state’s population of formal citizens and the “imagined community” of the nation. To address the first issue, states have the sovereign right to determine its citizenship criteria as well as the power to restrict access to human rights for individuals who are excluded from those criteria (Hayden, 2008, p. 253). Put differently, the extent to which the contours of the “imagined community” are reflected in a state’s citizenship criteria may differ, but where they are closely aligned, the state generally has the authority to exclude potential citizens on such grounds. To consider the second point, Rogers Brubaker’s (1992, p. 3) study on nationalism in France and Germany is valuable to consider, and leads him to conclude that, “definitions of citizenship continue to reflect deeply rooted understandings of nationhood”. Thus, criteria for formal citizenship reflect ideas of the nation as “imagined” by the dominant group in the nation-state. The concept of the nation put forward and reflected in the

citizenship criteria might therefore not be representative of the citizens of the nation-state in question, despite its suggestion of universality. As a consequence of the state’s authority to determine its own citizenship criteria, Bosniak (2006) suggests that citizenship can be used as a tool for institutionalising the particular idea of nationhood and national identity held by a dominant group. Bosniak (2002, p. 1306) illustrates this by conceptualising formal citizenship as a mask through which the state operationalises its dominant idea of the nation,

masquerading as the state’s universal identity. Citizenship thus not only represents a particular idea of national identity as universal, but thereby also obscures structures of exclusion along the lines of gender, class, ethnicity, race, ability and age (Isin & Wood, 1999).

Citizenship, ethnicity and nationality must therefore be understood as deeply interrelated concepts which establish and enforce boundaries of inclusion in and exclusion from the nation-state. It is here valuable to consider Bakkær Simonsen’s (2019) finding that citizenship policies are less important when considering immigrants’ sense of belonging than the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion drawn through political rhetoric and dominant conceptualisations of nationhood. Furthermore, Bakkær Simonsen (2019) proposes a

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having a particular ancestry) and attainable criteria (such as fluency in a language or

respecting local laws) needed to be recognised as a “full” member of the national community. This distinction implies that recognition as a “full citizen” within the terms of the dominant conceptualisation of the nation may require an individual (regardless of formal citizenship) to fulfil certain criteria, of which some may be impossible to fulfil. When considering the dominant conceptualisation of the nation it is therefore necessary to consider along which lines individuals and groups are excluded, and which individuals and groups are able to attain the desired criteria for full citizenship (and which are not). Thus, not only are formal

citizenship criteria reflective of dominant ideas of the nation, but recognition as a full member of the national community, or as a full citizen, may depend on the fulfilment of certain criteria which might require significant assimilation or might be impossible.

Citizenship in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran

The notion of citizenship as deeply interrelated with dominant conceptualisations of the nation is integral to considering the ways in which citizenship regimes in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran shape the processes of inclusion and exclusion of Kurds. Although each nation-state’s citizenship regime must be situated within its appropriate historical context, Eliassi (2016b, p. 1405) argues that citizenship is, in each of these nation-states, understood as a heavily ethno-nationalist concept. He suggests that the national identities are closely associated with being Turkish, Arab or Persian, respectively, and that these identities have been constructed partly through the suppression of Kurds. Building on this idea, Denise Natali (2005, p. xviii) suggests that “what it means to be a Kurd, therefore, must be considered in relation to what it means to be a citizen of Iraq, Turkey, [Syria,] and Iran”. Thus, exploring the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the dominant conceptualisations of the nation in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, respectively, allows for expressions of Kurdish ethnic identity and nationalism to be situated within the contexts in which they have developed.

In Turkey, the conceptualisation of Turkish citizenship is heavily shaped by the country’s nation-formation process at the time of the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923. In particular, the Kemalist project of nation-formation in the 1920s involved

establishing an explicit link between citizenship and national identity in which Turkishness would be defined in terms of possessing Turkish citizenship rather than through ethnic or religious identity (Içuygu, Çolak & Soyarik, 1999, pp. 193-4). However, as Yeğen (2009, p. 597) suggests, the concept of Turkishness has since 1923 continuously oscillated between

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being framed in ethnic or political terms. Yeğen (2009, p. 597) argues that ‘’legal citizenship as a formal status has never been the sole marker of Turkishness in Turkey” and suggests that a distinction has always, whether explicitly or implicitly, been made between “Turkishness as citizenship”, where citizenship is defined as formal legal status, and “Turkishness as such”. Thus, although Turkishness ostensibly encompasses any legally recognised citizen of the country, regardless of ethnicity or religion, a line has been drawn between those who are considered Turkish only in the sense of formal citizenship and those who are also considered Turkish in a fuller sense. It is here valuable to question whether the criteria to be considered fully Turkish are attainable or ascriptive, in line with Bakkær Simonsen’s (2019) conceptual distinction. The status of Kurds within the Turkish nation-state must therefore be interrogated through recognising citizenship as a broad concept, within which Kurds have been, and continue to be, included in the nation-state in some regards and excluded in others.

The state’s new Turkish identity was largely enforced through processes of cultural assimilation. Cultural assimilation built on the notions of Turkey as a community imaged as modern and universal, along the lines of Kemalist ideology (Içuygu, Çolak & Soyarik, 1999, pp. 194-5). Consequently, the culture into which the state espoused for its citizens to

assimilate was a highly particular idea of Turkishness which, despite its claims to universality, “embodies, defends, and represents the particularity of ethnic Turkish identity” (Eliassi, 2016a, p. 95). The inherent and deeply emblematic paradox of this process is that, through showcasing Turkishness and Turkish citizenship as ostensibly unrelated to ethnicity, Kurds were not recognised as an ethnic group until 1991 and consequently denied, and continue to be denied, many cultural rights on the basis their ethnicity (Karlsson, 2017, p. 115). Yeğen (2009, p. 610) suggests that the status of Kurds in Turkey has always been ambiguous, from predominantly being conceived as “prospective-Turks” to increasingly being seen as “pseudo-citizens”. Conceptualised as “prospective-Turks”, Kurds were included in the imagined Turkish nation-state only when considered culturally and linguistically assimilated into the particular idea of Turkish culture espoused by the state. Put differently, Kurds were not considered Turkish, regardless of citizenship, when asserting their Kurdishness, such as through using Kurdish language. Within the idea of Kurds as “pseudo-citizens” is an explicit understanding that “some are more citizens than others” and that Kurds, regardless not only of formal citizenship but also of degree of assimilation, cannot achieve an equal level of

Turkishness to others (Yeğen, 2009, p. 610-1). Furthermore, Yeğen (2006, as cited in Saracoglu, 2009, p. 641) argues that Kurds have also been perceived as the Turkish nation’s

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“primary Other”, or a minority group against which the majority can identify itself, rendering inclusion near impossible.

In Syria, historical and current conceptualisations of citizenship differ in several important regards from its Turkish counterpart, but similarly builds its concept of citizenship partly on the exclusion of Kurds. In perhaps the most explicit illustration of the way in which citizenship reflects the dominant concept of the nation, Syria’s official name – Syrian Arab Republic – denotes the ethnicisation of its citizenship (McGee, 2014, p. 179; Eliassi, 2016a, p. 97). Despite Syria being the home for several different ethnic groups, of which Kurds

constitute the largest ethnic minority group (Karlsson, 2017, p. 205), Arab ethnic identity has been conflated with Syrian citizenship. A line has thereby been drawn between Arabs and non-Arabs in terms of inclusion in the Syrian nation-state, whereby the latter is

conceptualised as being less Syrian than the former. Furthermore, Syria implemented a census in 1962, motivated by the idea that Kurdish presence was threatening the Arabic character of parts of the country, which resulted in approximately 120,000 to 150,000 Syrian Kurds being stripped of their citizenship (Karlsson, 2017, pp. 213-4; McGee, 2014, p. 173). As de jure statelessness in many cases is passed down through generations, it is estimated that

approximately 300,000 Syrian Kurds were de jure stateless in 2011 (McGee, 2014, p. 173). Thus, the lines of inclusion and exclusion in Syrian citizenship have been explicitly marked in Syria through the official designation of Syria as an Arab republic, as well as through the official process of denationalising and denying citizenship to a large number of Syrian Kurds.

However, since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, conceptualisations of citizenship have changed within the context of broader ongoing processes of social

transformation. The idea to remove the term “Arab” from the country’s name has been under consideration, in an attempt to shift towards a more inclusive Syrian nation-state (McGee, 2014, p. 179). Furthermore, the conflict has given rise to claims for greater autonomy by Kurds and other ethnic minority groups in the north of Syria. Although an analysis of the ongoing processes of social transformation and their effects on citizenship is beyond the scope of this paper, the current changes in how the national community is conceptualised highlights the fluidity of the concept of the nation and the ways in which changing notions of the

national community shape how citizenship is understood. Furthermore, the Syrian state issued a decree in 2011 which made it possible for certain de jure stateless Kurds to (re-)apply for Syrian citizenship (Schøtt, 2017, p. 15). However – as will be explored in greater depth later in this chapter – the decision to grant certain Kurds Syrian citizenship was motivated

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predominantly by the state’s political interests at the time, rather than by the intention to foster greater inclusion (McGee, 2014, pp. 173, 179).

Citizenship in Iraq has also undergone significant changes during the last decades in terms of how it is conceptualised. Through government policies of Arabization from the 1930s and, in particular, during the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Kurds and other ethnic minority groups have been subjected to violence, massacres and systematic exclusion on the basis of their non-Arab ethnic identity (Human Rights Watch, 2009, p. 19; Karlsson, 2017, pp. 143-4). Iraq’s Arabisation politics and its ethnicised boundaries of exclusion from the Iraqi nation-state were thus violently explicit. Consequently, Natali (2005, p. 48) argues that the pronounced pan-Arabism in Iraqi national identity fostered an increasingly ethnicised conceptualisation of Kurdish nationalism as a response. However, having undergone conflict and significant social transformation, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) was established in 1991 (Natali, 2005, p. 66). It is important to note that inhabitants of KRI are under Iraq’s national jurisdiction and are, for the most part, citizens of Iraq, although inhabitants are also subjects of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), to which political power has been partially devolved. Thus, the status of Kurdish inhabitants of KRI within the Iraqi nation has

necessarily changed. Additionally, the extent to which these Kurdish citizens identify with, or wish to be included in, the central Iraqi state is important to consider when looking at

inclusion and exclusion of Kurds in KRI, although an in-depth analysis is beyond the scope of this paper. Since the establishment of the KRG, both Kurdish and Arabic have been

recognised as official languages in the region and KRI has become more inclusive to minority ethnic and religious groups than central and southern Iraq, although KRI has also been

repeatedly criticised for corruption, nepotism and disparaging socio-economic inequality (Natali, 2005, p. 64; Karlsson, 2017, pp. 155-6).

The status of Kurds in Iran has changed over time – in particular after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 – whilst also having maintained a linear ethno-nationalist Persian historiography (Natali, 2005, p. 140; Soleimani & Muhammadpour, 2019, p. 8-9). The country officially became the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, cementing the religious foundations upon which the Iranian nation-state was defined and thereby shifting ethnicity-based boundaries of exclusion to boundaries ethnicity-based on religion (Natali, 2005, pp. 140-1). As Natali (2005, p. 140) argues, Iranianness was increasingly religiously defined and “new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion developed based on conservative Shi’a Islam alongside ethnicity, reducing opportunities for Kurds, non-Shi’a communities, and secular groups in the

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state”. Meanwhile, Soleimani and Muhammadpour (2019, pp. 4, 8-9) argue that the dominant conceptualisation of the Iranian state is firmly situated within a framework of Persian culture and language, upheld partly through the idea of Iranian history as linear and exclusively Persian. Within this context, assertions of Kurdish or other non-Persian identities are perceived as a threat to the Iranian nation-state (Soleimani & Muhammadpour, 2019, p. 4). However, the exclusion of Kurds in Iran has manifested itself differently than in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Phillips (2015) argues that since 1997, Kurds have experienced a symbolic inclusion in Iran. In line with this idea, Natali (2005, p. 153) suggests that “the post-1980 Iranian Kurdish formula was based on the notion that Kurds and Iranians shared special ethnic, cultural, and linguistic ties that could not be constructed among Arabs, Turks, and Kurds”. Although crucial aspects of Kurdish culture and identity were prohibited, Kurdish identity was accepted to a greater extent than in Turkey (Karlsson, 2017, p. 185).

Furthermore, it has been argued that division in Iran has largely been on socio-economic terms and that Kurds in Iran considered themselves to have more in common with other oppressed groups within the country than with Kurds elsewhere in the region (Natali, 2005, p. 142; Karlsson, 2017, p. 203). Karlsson (2017, p. 204) argues that, in contrast to in Iraq and Turkey, Kurdish cultural identity has not been conceived of as a threat to the Iranian state to the same extent. Rather, he argues that Kurds have primarily been seen as a threat in their capacity as members of opposition movements. Consequently, Natali (2005, pp. 149, 159) argues that although Kurdish nationalism became ethnicised in response to the restrictions and militarisation of Iranian political space, Kurdish nationalism operated predominantly

alongside other opposition movements in Iran.

Kurdish ethnic identity and nationalism are here understood as being situated within particular nation-state contexts and conceptualised in response to the lines along which Kurds experience exclusion from the national community. Eliassi (2016b, pp. 1404-5) argues that the respective Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian national identities have been constructed in part through the suppression of Kurds, and goes on to suggest that the process of “cultural Othering” of Kurds form a basis for Kurdish identity formation. Thus, the ways in which Kurdish identity and nationalism are conceptualised shift and respond in accordance to the ways in which Kurds are excluded from other national communities. Furthermore, Natali (2005, p. 17) suggests that “ethnicity became the basis of Kurdish identity not because it was rooted in some premodern past, but because it was the category of political identities used by central governments to determine inclusion and exclusion in the modern state system”.

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Locating ethnicised Kurdish identity formation and nationalism within the citizenship regimes of the Middle Eastern states in question, Natali (2005, p. 180) explains that “Kurdish

communities ‘Kurdified’ what the state elite Arabized, Turkified, and Persianized”. Thus, Kurdish ethnicity ought to be understood, not as an essentialised feature, but as a response to the lines along which exclusion of Kurds has been articulated.

Citizenship in the Netherlands

Theorising the boundaries drawn within the conceptualization of citizenship in the Netherlands, Schinkel and van Houdt (2010, p. 697) distinguish between formal and moral citizenship. Whereas formal citizenship is defined in terms of juridical status and the rights which it entails, moral citizenship is understood as “an extra-juridical normative concept of what the good citizen is and/or should be” (Schinkel & van Houdt, 2010, pp. 697-8). Thus, citizenship is conceptualised as consisting of two layers, whereby it is possible for individuals to be considered citizens in one regard but not in the other. Schinkel and van Houdt thereby suggest that inhabitants of the Netherlands are not only differentiated according to whether or not they have Dutch citizenship, but that legally recognised Dutch citizens are further

differentiated between those who are considered to be full Dutch citizens and those who are considered citizens solely in a formal sense. Furthermore, Schinkel and van Houdt (2010, p. 704) point to the culturalisation in Dutch citizenship, whereby “real entry into ‘Dutch society’ is possible only through moral citizenship”, and suggest that citizenship is in this

assimilationist turn conceived of as “a duty to be similar, i.e., assimilated”. This shift in the

way that citizenship is conceptualised – from referring primarily to formal citizenship to instead emphasising assimilation – reflects a change in the dominant understanding of Dutch nationhood. Furthermore, Schinkel and van Houdt (2010, p. 706) suggest that citizenship is becoming virtualised, where, “instead of being an actuality, a status, [citizenship] becomes a virtual possibility, a status yet to be attained”. Put differently, an individual’s citizenship is increasingly conceptualised as a status that must be attained through assimilation to specific cultural norms, and thereby as a status that must be legitimised in order to be seen as an actuality.

This conceptualisation of citizenship can be further expanded by considering

Slootman and Duyvendak’s (2016, p. 62) idea that Dutch discourse on citizenship includes a nativist layer which creates an additional exclusionary boundary, conceiving of some citizens as “unassimilable” and thus as definitively and inherently out of reach of full Dutch

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citizenship. Duyvendak (2012, p. 75) suggests that Dutch discourse on citizenship includes a layer of Dutch nativism, or “an intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of the latter being foreign, ‘xenos’, i.e. un-Dutch”, and argues that it is through nativist discourse that a distinction is drawn between those possessing Dutch citizenship “legitimately” and those who do not. Within Dutch nativist discourse, perhaps illustrated most clearly through the commonly used, albeit deeply problematic, distinction between “allochtonen” (literally: not from this soil) and “autochtonen” (literally: from this soil), an exclusionary line is drawn between non-Western immigrants and their children and a group considered to be “native” Dutch (Slootman & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 61). The way in which the nation is conceptualised through this nativist discourse implies that immigrants and their offspring, regardless of formal citizenship status, cannot fully belong in the Dutch nation. Thus, at the same time as citizenship is increasingly understood in terms of moralisation and expectations of

assimilation, a certain group of individuals are through nativist discourse framed as

“unassimilable” and thus excluded, beyond dispute, from being considered as a legitimate and full citizen within this line of reasoning (Slootman & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 62). Importantly, Slootman and Duyvendak identify nativism as one strand within a broader Dutch discourse on citizenship and do not suggest that nativism is the dominant framework through which

citizenship is conceived in Dutch society. As such, Slootman and Duyvendak (2016, p. 62) argue that although the nativist layer of Dutch discourse on citizenship might not technically change the formal access or content of rights for minority citizens, nativist discourse

contributes to continuously challenging and denying the legitimacy of minority citizens’ access to rights.

Although Schinkel and van Houdt’s (2010) and Slootman and Duyvendak’s (2016) respective theories are highly valuable for conceptualizing the ways in which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn within the notion of Dutch citizenship, Pooyan Tamimi Arab (2012, p. 69) crucially notes that the concepts culturalisation and nativism downplay the existence and impact of racism within Dutch discourse on citizenship and inclusion (and exclusion). In Philomena Essed’s (1991, p. 4) influential book Understanding Everyday

Racism, she argues that racism in the Netherlands operates largely as cultural oppression.

Essed (1991, p. 4) refers to this as ethnicism, explained as “an ideology that explicitly proclaims the existence of ‘multiethnic’ equality but implicitly presupposes an ethnic or cultural hierarchical order”. Like Tamimi Arab, Essed (1991, p. 4) argues that the denial of racism is widespread in the Netherlands, implying that the racialized nature of the boundaries of exclusion within the Dutch national community tend to be underestimated or overlooked. It

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is here valuable to again consider Bakkær Simonsen’s (2019) distinction between ascriptive and attainable criteria for being considered a full member of the national community, which resonates well with Schinkel and van Houdt’s (2010, p. 706) notion of the virtualization of citizenship. However, Schinkel and van Houdt’s (2010, p. 704) idea of the culturalisation of citizenship suggests that full citizenship is possible as long as individuals become sufficiently assimilated, thereby implying that the criteria for moral citizenship necessarily are attainable. Duyvendak and Slootman’s (2016, p. 62) nativism concept, by contrast, suggests that

recognition as a full citizen within nativist logic requires the fulfillment of criteria which for some are impossible to attain, and would thus be considered ascriptive criteria. By

recognizing racism within the Dutch national community’s boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, it becomes clear that certain cultural norms and values are more highly regarded than others and that regardless of the extent to which certain individuals and groups seek to assimilate to these norms, racialised lines of exclusion can serve to render recognition as a full citizen impossible.

Problematising the State as an Emancipatory Actor and Citizenship as a Blanket Solution

Within dominant legal discourse on statelessness, in which citizenship acquisition is central to addressing the issue, the state is assumed to be an emancipatory actor and

citizenship (in the sense of formal legal status) is generally considered as a blanket solution to statelessness. These two core tenets of legal discourse on statelessness have been

problematized by a range of authors (Blitz, 2017; Bloom, Tonkiss & Cole, 2017; Eliassi, 2016b; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015; Gabiam, 2015; Kingston, 2014; Staples, 2012; Tas, 2016); it will here be challenged through considering these core assumptions within the Kurdish

context. The idea of citizenship as a blanket solution to statelessness is problematized when considering citizenship as a broad sociological concept, functioning in different ways and conceptualised as being situated along different axes. As the notion of citizenship “solving” rightlessness and exclusion associated with statelessness is appealing primarily when

citizenship is conceptualised as a guarantee for rights being protected and upheld, the idea of ineffective or second-class citizenship undermines the assumption of universality on which the idea of citizenship as a blanket solution rests. When considering historical examples of subordinated groups being granted legal citizenship status but continuing to be excluded in many other arenas associated with citizenship (Bosniak, 2002, p. 1305), the emancipatory power of formal citizenship becomes a potential possibility rather than an inherent certainty.

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The intention here is not to undermine the vast importance of citizenship acquisition, or to suggest that academics and practitioners in the field presume citizenship acquisition to solve all problems, but rather to challenge the idea of citizenship as inherently entailing inclusion along the lines by which the group in question wishes to be included.

Particularly when considering the situation of members of stateless nations and ongoing struggles for self-determination, it is essential that the notion of the state as an emancipatory actor be questioned. Although members of different minority groups within a state may all be oppressed and excluded, it is crucial to recognise that the ways in which they wish for this exclusion to be addressed may differ. This is not to suggest that members of stateless nations necessarily seek the formation of a sovereign state, but instead to argue that a desire for inclusion within the pre-existing state cannot be assumed. The importance of

seeking to understand the ways in which individuals experience and construct meaning around their exclusion from a nation-state, as well as how they envision this exclusion to be addressed and into what institution they wish to be included must be considered. This is particularly apparent within the context of struggles for self-determination, in which the explicitly sought solution to oppression is independence from the pre-existing state under whose citizenship regime the individuals in question are subjects. Within this context, the assumption of the state as an emancipatory actor can undermine the form of inclusion sought by the particular oppressed individual or group, and could paradoxically serve to legitimise ongoing oppression. By recognising the political context in which statelessness takes place, coupled with the understanding of citizenship as a broad sociological concept , it becomes clear that the inclusion sought by stateless individuals or groups cannot necessarily be

achieved through citizenship of the state in question. Thus, exploring the role of citizenship in addressing the situation of Kurds requires that analysis does not start from the presumption of the pre-existing state as an emancipatory actor through formal inclusion in state citizenship regimes.

Citizenship as a Political Tool

Through considering statelessness and citizenship within their appropriate political context and identifying the actors involved and the interests of these actors, both statelessness and citizenship can be understood as functioning as political tools and, in some cases, as tools of oppression. Citizenship has, arguably, since its inception been used as a political tool to serve the interests of the state – from facilitating tax collection to the mobilisation of labour

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and drafting citizens into the army (Torpey, 1998, p. 241). In order to conceptualise the ways in which citizenship is used as a political tool, the interests of the state must therefore be identified. In light of the previous discussion on citizenship as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, citizenship will here be considered as a tool used by states to operationalise their vision of the boundaries of the national community. The ways in which this is done will be explored through Foucault’s (1982) analytics of power and governmentality. Crucially, the extent to which the state is able to exert its interests through citizenship is largely enabled through the sovereign rights granted to the state through the international state system and the reliance of individuals on states for citizenship in order to access rights and be recognised as existing within the given world order.

Providing a stark example of the use of citizenship as a political tool, McGee (2014, p. 178) illustrates how the Syrian government has strategically used citizenship in its

relationship with Syrian Kurds to further the Syrian state’s political aims. After having stripped 120,000 Kurds of their Syrian citizenship in 1962 through a politically motivated census, the government in 2011 issued a strategic decree that made certain Kurds eligible to apply for citizenship, in an attempt to dissuade Kurds from joining ongoing anti-government protests (McGee, 2014, pp. 173, 179). It is here crucial to situate the state’s decision to issue the decree within its political context, as the decision to allow certain Syrian Kurds to apply for citizenship was taken due to the political interest of the state to dissuade protests rather than in an effort to include Kurds in the Syrian national community as equals. Importantly, although the majority of eligible Kurds did apply for citizenship and benefitted greatly from citizenship acquisition, most Kurds also acknowledged the value of rejecting Syrian

citizenship on the grounds that it was insufficient in addressing the injustices experienced as Kurds and as stateless persons (McGee, 2014, p. 179). Thus, through the dependency of individuals on recognition as citizens of sovereign states, and as a consequence of certain entities being recognised as sovereign states and others not, individuals become reliant on recognition as citizens within citizenship regimes which they otherwise may have rejected.

The aim of this section is by no means to suggest that de jure stateless persons cannot be oppressed by states. Rather, it is to recognise that both statelessness and citizenship can be used as political tools, including as tools of oppression. Working from this understanding, this section intends to problematise the idea of legal citizenship as a blanket solution to

statelessness by interrogating the ways in which states utilise citizenship as a tool of oppression to exclude formal citizens who are considered to not fully belong within the

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national community. Put differently, citizens are not oppressed more than stateless persons, but citizenship can function as a particular tool for states to exert oppression. Citizenship regimes provide states with the power to (threaten to) deny citizenship or to denationalise certain individuals or groups as well as to use its legitimacy to govern in order to exploit citizens’ subjugation and dependency on the state.

Providing an explicit example of how citizenship has functioned as a tool of oppression and served to legitimise state violence in the face of the victims’ possession of citizenship, Eliassi (2016b, p. 1410) outlines the way in which the Iraqi government made use of the Iraqi citizenship of Kurds in the 1980s to be able to exert state violence over the

community with considerable legitimacy. Eliassi (2016b, p. 1410) argues that the state’s mass murder campaign targeting Kurds was referred to as Saddam Hussein killing “his own

people”, and goes on to suggest that it was the Kurdish victims’ status as Iraqi citizens that initially denied them international protection. In this stark example of citizenship as a tool of oppression, the idea of the state as an emancipatory actor is thus grossly inappropriate. The term “tool” is used not to suggest that formal citizenship is the root cause of oppression, but to argue that the ways in which states can carry out tactics of oppression, and the degree to which it can be conceptualised as legitimate, is shaped by whether or not the subjects possess formal citizenship. As Kahler’s (2011) analysis of the conflicting norms of human rights, state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention suggests, prioritising the norm of state sovereignty risks undermining efforts to ensure human rights. Within contexts of human rights violations, citizenship acquisition ought therefore to be understood as subjugation to a citizenship regime under the sovereign control of the state and thereby as creating a basis by which the

international community can overlook human rights abuses. Thus, citizenship acquisition cannot be presumed to create inclusion, but can enable different forms of exclusion of persons and groups who are conceptualised as existing outside of the boundaries of the national community in question.

In order to further understand how citizenship can function as a tool in the interest of the state, the ways in which states govern their citizens will be explored through Foucault’s (2003, p. 202; 1982)concept of biopolitics and his analytics of power and governmentality. Through introducing the concept of biopolitics, referring to power operating through the administration of life itself, Foucault re-directs attention from the state’s concern to manage its territory to its desire to manage its population (Jessop, 2007). It is thus within the context of the state’s ambition to manage its population that different forms of power, and the ways in

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which they are facilitated through citizenship regimes, will be analysed. Central to Foucault’s (1982) analytics of power and governmentality is the idea that power as such does not exist, but rather that power should be understood as “complex strategical situations” exercised between different actors. Individuals are considered to be both subjects of power and constituted through power, as well as being the very actors who disseminate it (Lilja & Vinthagen, 2014, p. 108). Furthermore, Foucault re-conceptualises the idea of

governmentality throughout his works, and the concept will here be understood as referring to analyses of the art of government which involves seeing a range of authorities governing in different forms at different sites (Rose, O’Malley & Valverde, 2006, p. 85). Although

Foucault draws a firm distinction between state and non-state actors, this has been challenged by a number of scholars who argue that Foucauldian analytics of governmentality is key to understanding the state’s central role in how national and outsider identities are formed (Goner, 2016, p. 167; Poulantzas, 1978, pp. 36-7). Foucault’s analytics of power and governmentality will be used to explore the ways in which citizenship can be used as a political tool to serve the interests of the state in managing its population through facilitating oppression of Kurdish citizens.

Foucault (1978) distinguishes between juridical power, operating through prohibition and punishment, and disciplinary power, referring to norms and statistics. These conceptual tools facilitate analysis of how Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran use citizenship as a political tool and the ways in which this shapes the status of Kurds within each state. In particular, state-driven processes of assimilation will be explored through juridical and disciplinary power and the ways in which states utilise both forms of power to legitimise one another. Crucially, Foucault situates the production of a discursive norm at the center of his understanding of power. In contrast to juridical power, Foucault (1994, p. 44) refers to the discourse of discipline through stating that “the code they come to define is not that of law but that of normalization”. Through this process, humans are conceived of in reference to the idea of the norm, and governed accordingly. Foucault writes that, “the idea is that non-conformity with the norm is punishable and that to be equal is to be the same. To be different is to be inferior (Foucault, 1991, as cited in Lilja & Vinthagen, 2014, p. 109). Within the context of nation-states, the discursive norm ought thus to be understood in light of Benedict Anderson’s (2006) concept of the “imagined community”. Foucault (1991, as cited in Lilja & Vinthagen, 2014, p. 109) suggests that “in this sense, disciplinary power shapes and normalises subjects who eventually become, speak, think and act in similar manners”. States’ policies of cultural assimilation can thereby be understood as processes through which citizens are subjugated to

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the state’s ideas of the norm of the national community and eventually become themselves become disseminators of the norms to which they have been subjected. Relatedly, Foucault (1977) suggests that surveillance can be used to induce populations to internalise norms and thus absolve the state (or other actor) of the need to use juridical or disciplinary power to achieve its aims, making its subjects “instruments of its exercise” (Foucault, 1977, p. 170).

Governmentality is inherently a political project and is therefore a useful conceptual tool for seeking to understand how citizenship can be used as an instrument through

facilitating governance of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in ways which foster exclusion and oppression (McKee, 2009, p. 468). It is thus through highlighting the “inventedness of our world” that governmentality can be used to address and challenge

assumptions about the current world order (Burchell, 1993, p. 277). By seeking to deconstruct the foundations upon which state oppression of Kurds depends, the aim is to bring to light the politics embedded within overreliance on formal citizenship as a solution to address

statelessness and exclusion. Through acknowledging the state as a political actor whose particular interests are facilitated through its citizenship regime, it becomes crucial to also recognise Kurds as political actors for whom citizenship acquisition can undermine collective interests. Underlying these processes is the international state system, through which

individuals are dependent on state citizenship for recognition and access to rights. The aim of this section is by no means to suggest that de jure stateless persons are not subject to state oppression, but rather that the consequences of de jure statelessness are so severe because recognition and rights are so heavily restricted within the domain of sovereign states within the international state system. Consequently, individuals in possession of state citizenship are heavily reliant on this citizenship, which in turn augments the potential of the state to utilise citizenship to serve the state’s own political interests.

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