Statelessness in a world of nation-states: the cases of Kurdish diasporas in Sweden and the UK

ABSTRACT

Mass displacement in the Middle East is a major political challenge for contemporary Middle Eastern and Western states. As a consequence, statelessness has emerged as one of the central political issues in relation to the collapse and weakening of the states in the Middle East. Through deploying a qualitative inquiry and interviews with 50 Kurdish immigrants, this article investigates how members of Kurdish diasporas in Sweden and the UK conceive and experience statelessness in a world of unequal nation-states and hierarchical citizenship. Since diasporas are important non-state actors in nation-building processes, it is important to analyse their diasporic visions and the ways they challenge or reinforce the power of the nation-state in the context of migration. While from a legal or a right-based approach, the solution to statelessness is found in acquisition of a nationality/citizenship, I posit that in a world structured by the political normativity of the nation-state, nations without states will continue to be in search of national self-determination, political autonomy and sovereignty in the international comity of sovereign nations.

KEYWORDS:

• Kurdish diaspora
• statelessness
• nationalism
• citizenship
• sovereignty

Acknowledgements

This study is part of the research project ‘(Re)conceptualizing “Stateless Diasporas” in the EU’ at Oxford University. I would like to thank Robin Cohen, Oliver Bakewell, and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh from the International Migration Institute at Oxford University for providing useful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I also would like to thank Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University for supporting this research. I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers, the editors of JEMS, Abbas Vali, Lena Halldenius, Dan-Erik Andersson and Leif Stenberg for their valuable and instructive comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Barzoo Eliassi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0950-5083

Additional information

Funding

The work received generous funding from Leverhulme Trust. The author would like to thank Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University for funding parts of this research.