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The Civic Culture of Statelessness - A Comparative Analysis of Kurds in Iraq, Iran and Turkey

Citizenship
Civil Society
Comparative Politics
Democratisation
National Identity
Representation
Quantitative
Political Cultures
Dastan Jasim
German Institute for Global And Area Studies
Dastan Jasim
German Institute for Global And Area Studies

Abstract

Being a people that has no formal nation-state on its own and has developed various armed and unarmed political groups from resistance to participation, a lot of research was already presented on Kurds. A lot of it is often, however, hardly systematically theory-driven nor based on empirical data. Furthermore, in the current situation of political unrest and a growing crisis of nation states in the Middle East it is important to ask how the nation state and democratic transition and consolidation can coexist? Theories of political and civic culture have tried to approach this issue, however, often did not include the growing population of people who have no status or a disputed status in their country. The Kurdish case gives an important case to study on the way to this bigger question. This paper seeks to answer the research question: How has the status of statelessness influenced in the Civic Culture of Kurdish People in Iran, Iraq and Turkey? I assume that the last hundred years of Kurdish political movements in these four countries have taken very different turns but also highly influenced the ideas of democracy, trust and civic culture among the Kurdish population. This paper furthermore seeks to fill out the gap in quantitative research on Kurds and presents answers to this question based on the first merged large-N dataset including Kurds from Turkey, Iran and Iraq consisting of Arab Barometer and World Values Survey data. The data will test different hypotheses on differences and similarities of civic culture between Kurdish populations and majority populations of the countries they inhabit. By that it contributes to the larger discussion on how transnational, secessionist and democratic movements act and react to states that they oppose or influence like Turkey, Iraq and Iran. It will also support the debate on modern civic cultures and democratic transition by presenting the case of the Kurdish people as an example of how having no status can under specific circumstances support interesting mechanisms of democratization and civic identity-building in a nation-state.