Kurdish Youth and Civic Culture In: Youth Identity, Politics, and Change in Contemporary Kurdistan

In 1991 the foundations of the Kurdistan region of Iraq (KRI) were laid. What started as a de facto autonomy, became an official autonomy in 2005, being enshrined in the new Iraqi con-stitution. This brought major changes to how Kurdish people were socialized in the newly es-tablished Kurdish region from then on, in which Kurdish nationalism took a major role in me-dia, education, and other spheres of society. A new generation was born in these decisive 1990s, that has now grown up to be citizens of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq. However, this generation arguably has a more linguistic and cultural attachment to the KRI than to Iraq. Overall, the cohort of people under the age of 30 constitutes at least 60% of Iraq and KRI as well. The systematic changes of governance in Kurdistan and Iraq in 1991 and 2003, have led to a situation where especially the Kurdish cohort was politically socialized in a different way than their parents. Unlike their parents, they were able to have access to a fully Kurdish cur-riculum, which was shaped by the idea of Kurdish nationalism, and many do not regularly use the Arabic language or do not know it at all, like the older generation did. Further, the Kurdi-stan Region saw a great rise in urbanization as well as increasing access to the internet in the 2000s which embedded this generation in bigger and more connected social circles. On top of that, more and more Kurdish women join the labor market and constitute a growing part of the labor force. This significantly influenced the protest movement in the Kurdistan Region, notably those in 2011, 2018, and recently in 2020 where many adolescents joined especially in urban and semi-urban regions. Likewise, the majority Arab population of the rest of Iraq saw protest movements for example in Baghdad in 2019 with many young people protesting because of economic grievances. The question, however, is how similar or dissimilar these populations are along the lines of ethnic and generational differences. Based on this assessment this chapter assumes that lived political experience has been significantly different for Kurdish and non-Kurdish youth from 1991 on-ward but in the recent years of political crisis becomes more similar. We must wonder: What shapes this new generation and what differences can be seen? This study will show how a generational split, gender, and being a Kurdish citizen of the KRI make a difference in the civic culture of Iraq’s citizenry. The research question, therefore, is: Is there a generational, gender-based, and ethnic difference in the civic culture of the popula-tion of Iraq? The theory of civic culture and modern expansions of it are introduced to show what causal relation is assumed here. The deduced Hypotheses are being tested based on a merged Dataset of 6110 Iraqis interviewed from 2010 to 2019. The paper will show that age, gender, and being a citizen of the Kurdistan Region greatly shape patterns of civic culture in Iraq.