The purpose of this article is to examine the experiences of two generations among the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden: those who migrated as adults and those who were born and/or raised in Sweden. The focus will be on issues of identity, home(land) and politics of belonging with regard to generational and temporal aspects. We will argue that there are significant differences among the older and younger generations with regard to their experiences that demand different theoretical and analytical conceptualisations.

In this article, we analyse contemporary discourses about social exclusion in the suburbs. The empirical material is mainly based on speeches of different Swedish political party leaders during the Politician's Week (politikerveckan) in Almedalen that took place in 2016. By adopting a discursive psychology approach, we have examined the interpretative repertoires and the discursive resources that the party leaders use to frame the suburbs as sites of "parallel society", criminality, passivity, gender oppression, radicalization and dominance of values that assumingly pose a threat to the social cohesion of Swedish society and the basis of the People's Home. In order to remediate the "crisis of values" in Swedish society that migration and social exclusion of suburbs have supposedly engendered, "Swedish values" are highlighted as important resources to strengthen social cohesion and reclaim the endangered People's Home. Thus, values are gradually becoming primary markers of difference and deployed to construct hierarchies of belonging and rights in the Swedish society.

This dissertation examines how young people with Kurdish backgrounds form their identity in Sweden with regards to processes of inclusion and exclusion. It also sheds light on the ways these young people deal with ethnic discrimination and racism. Further, the study outlines the importance of these social processes for the discipline of social work and the ways social workers can work with disadvantaged and marginalized groups and endorse their struggle for social justice and full equal citizenship beyond racist and discriminatory practices. The empirical analysis is built on interviews with 28 young men and women with Kurdish backgrounds in Sweden. Postcolonial theory, belonging and identity formation constitute the central conceptual framework of this study.

The young people referred to different sites in which they experienced ethnic discrimination and stigmatization. These experiences involved the labor market, mass media, housing segregation, legal system and school system. The interviewees also referred to the roles of ‘ordinary’ Swedes in obstructing their participation in the Swedish society through exclusionary discourses relating to Swedish identity. The interviewees’ life situation in Sweden, sense of ethnic discrimination as well as disputes over identity making with other young people with Middle-Eastern background are among the most important reasons for fostering strong Kurdish nationalist sentiments, issues that are related to the ways they can exercise their citizenship rights in Sweden and how they deal with exclusionary practices in their everyday life. The study shows that the interviewees respond to and resist ethnic discrimination in a variety of ways including interpersonal debates and discussions, changing their names to Swedish names, strengthening differences between the self and the other, violence, silence and deliberately ignoring racism. They also challenged and spoke out against the gendered racism that they were subjected to in their daily lives due to the paternalist discourse of ”honor-killing”.

The research participants had been denied an equal place within the boundary of Swedishness partly due to a racist postcolonial discourse that valued whiteness highly. Paradoxically, some interviewees reproduced the same discourse through choosing to use it against black people, Africans, newly-arrived Kurdish immigrants (”imports”), ”Gypsies” and Islam in order to claim a modern Kurdish identity as near to whiteness as possible. This indicates the multiple dimensions of racism. Those who are subjected to racism and ethnic discrimination can be discriminatory and reproduce the racist discourse. Despite unequal power relations, both dominant and minoritized subjects are all marked by the postcolonial condition in structuring subjectivities, belonging and identification.

Drawing on 22 qualitative interviews with social workers in Sweden, this article analyzes how social workers conceive immigrant integration and racism and tackle racism within their institutions and the wider Swedish society. The majority of the white social workers framed integration in relation to cultural differences and denied or minimized the role of racism in structuring their services and the ethnic relations in Sweden. In contrast, social workers with immigrant backgrounds were less compromising in discussing racism and assumed it as a problem both for themselves as institutional actors and as immigrants in everyday life and institutional settings. Social institutions in Sweden have been important actors in endorsing equality and accommodating differences. However, it is of paramount importance for social justice-minded social workers to identify and unsettle those structures and discourses that enable racist and discriminatory policies and practices against those groups who are not viewed as “core” members of the Swedish society. The absence of anti-racist social work within Swedish social work is primarily related to the idea of color-blind welfare universalism that is assumed to transcend the particularity of the needs, experiences, and perspectives of different groups in Sweden. While integration is envisioned and framed as a political project of inclusion of non-white immigrants, it tends to become a political device through which hierarchies of belonging are constructed. Following such conception of integration, cultural/religious differences and equality are framed as conflicting where cultural conformity underpinned by assimilationist discourses becomes a requirement for political, social, and economic equality.

Dr Eliassi's presentation explored how statelessness is experienced and narrated by members of the Kurdish diasporas in Sweden and the UK. Concerning the broader debates on statelessness that have focused mainly on the acquisition of nationality/citizenship as a solution to the political and existential vulnerability of stateless individuals and collectivities, Eliassi's presentation illustrated that while the acquisition of citizenship is important, it has also its limits in understanding the everyday life of people who consider themselves to be stateless in the world of nation-states. In Sweden the majority of Kurds have Swedish citizenship but claim to be stateless. The notion of statelessness is used to motivate transnational political mobilization and to maintain a politicised identity.10 In this context, citizenship can become a device of inclusion as well as of exclusion as the notion of ‘We are all citizens’ can maintain political inequality. In fact, the liberal citizenship tradition cannot fully accommodate the political grievances of stateless people like the Kurds because, as long as the sovereign identities are not decentred in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, Kurds by large will continue to perceive themselves as an endangered nation. Dr Demir, the discussant, highlighted that in the world of nation states, the issue is not that of statelessness but of master identity: the task has to be to de-master the dominant master identity as we all live in multi-national states and the idea of ‘Nation States’ is a discourse, a claim that does not exist in reality.

The aim of the article is to analyze how social workers frame the social problems of immigrant clients in Sweden. The study is based on in-depth interviews with 20 social workers in three different Swedish municipalities. While Swedish social work often assumes a discourse of color-blindness and universalism, this study indicates that Swedish social workers not only see cultural differences but also regard these differences as central when they frame, assess, and formulate their interventions. The discourse of culturalization not only produces and reinforces the ideas of cultural hierarchy and Swedish superiority, but it also tends to obstruct non-European immigrants from equal participation in the Swedish society since they are not allowed to enjoy their full citizenship. Consequently, there is a need for social work in Sweden to rethink its culturalist framework and go beyond cultural reductionism and take into consideration other issues such as unemployment, housing conditions, poverty, social isolation, marginalization, and ethnic discrimination.

Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden explores how young Kurdish immigrants living in Sweden experience and articulate their ideas about citizenship rights, belonging, and statehood as they are shuttled between different citizenship regimes and exclusive structures of belonging. Unlike immigrants who come to Sweden from countries where their groups are dominant, Kurds who immigrate to Sweden re-occupy a minoritized position; they do so not merely under the marginalized label of "Kurd," common in the Middle East, but under other, overlapping identity categories that are equally negative and loaded. Examining how national and ethnic conflicts in the Middle East continue to impinge on Kurdish youths' identities in Sweden, Barzoo Eliassi highlights the gulf between a rhetoric of equality and the lived experience of cultural, political, and economic subordination. He argues that, despite important theoretical deliberations about cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism, the international nation-state system has created a global apartheid that divides the world into nations with states and nations without, where the latter continue to be treated as anomalous and politically, legally, and socially superfluous.

Migration has been a transformative experience for many Kurdish migrants who have fled Turkey and attempted to shake off their imposed Turkish identity and/or alter their pattern of identification with the Turkish state. Against this background and based on qualitative inquiry and interviews with thirty Kurdish migrants in Sweden and the United Kingdom, this chapter will investigate politics of belonging among the Kurds of Turkey, engage with the ways they have experienced Turkish assimilation policies, and assign meanings to these experiences in diasporic contexts. Moreover, this chapter will explore the politics and limits of resistance that attempt to subvert Turkish assimilation discourses and reclaim Kurdishness in the context of political violence and denial in Turkey.

This chapter argues that even working-class labour migrants may become cosmopolitans, willing to 'engage with the Other'; and that transnationals inevitably must engage in social processes of 'opening up to the world', even if that world is still relatively circumscribed culturally. Against the globalizing Northern (or Western) thrust of economic goods, technological experts and mediatized images, it considers a counter-trend: the emergence of complex transnational ethnic or religious cultural worlds, created by vast flows of labour migrants. Migration is a class-related phenomenon, and notions of transnationalism or cosmopolitanism as cultural phenomena are of necessity class related. The powerful attraction of diaspora for early postcolonial theorists was that, as transnational social formations, diasporas challenged the hegemony and boundedness of the nation-state and, indeed, of any pure imaginaries of nationhood. The most recent challenge to the cosmopolitan vision of diaspora has come from the post-9/11 emergence of Islamic 'terror' cells apparently embedded within settled post-war diasporas in the West.

On May 11, The Iranian Consulate released a statement about Iran's perspective regarding its relationship with the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. This statement was issued in the Kurdish city of Slemani (Sulaimania) and constructs an image of the Kurds that is permeated by misrecognition, distortion and humiliation, writes Barzoo Eliassi.

Although the presence of the Kurdish diaspora is relatively new in the European contexts, it has nonetheless developed as a transnational community, enabled and facilitated by global communication technologies that can be used to politically mobilize resources in support of the Kurds in the Middle East. What makes the Kurdish diaspora a politicized diaspora is the persistent exclusionary and violence of the states against the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. It is during times of crisis and critical events that the Kurdish diaspora is materialized through its claims, lobbying and rallies across the West. Although migration can imply assimilation for many transnational communities, the Kurdish ambivalence vis-à-vis assimilation becomes tangible. It is also true that Kurds might be more receptive to assimilation due to their minoritized backgrounds in the country of origin and experiences of adaptation to the dominant culture and language. However, the political activism of diaspora and the strong attachment to Kurdish identity due to political oppression in the Middle East is a persistent reminder that Kurds have not come to the West to assimilate but to continue struggling for recognition of their identities and rights in the Middle East.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of statelessness and political belonging in a world of unequal nation-states and citizenship regimes. In so doing it will examine the theoretical construction and conceptions of the stateless in contemporary social and political thought and assess their implications for the conceptions of shared identity and citizenship rights in the legal-political framework of the nation-state and international legal processes and practices. In the academic field statelessness has been largely viewed in relation to the ‘lack’ of citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has therefore been presented as a solution to statelessness. Although citizenship rights and membership of an internationally recognized state are central to the human rights of political subjects in the contemporary world, the conditions and experiences of statelessness do not fade away through acquisition of formal citizenship as the persistent political, legal and military struggles of the stateless groups around the world show. It is therefore important to investigate how notions of political belonging underpinning political projects and collective action of the stateless peoples are constructed and how they inform and shape the evolution of national consciousness among them. Political belonging creates collective goals to sustain or transform political order. This study combines theoretical investigation of statelessness and citizenship with empirical field research on the subjective experiences of the phenomena among the Kurds. Through deploying a narrative inquiry and in-depth interviews, this project will use the narratives of Kurdish migrants in Sweden and the UK to analyze how national consciousness emerges in the absence of a nation-state but also the role of the nation-state in shaping discourses about statelessness and political belonging outside of the ‘original’ homelands.

This book argues that citizenship is an inadequate solution to the problem of statelessness based on a critical investigation of the lived experiences of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in western Europe. It examines how statelessness affects identity formations, homelessness, belonging, non-belonging, otherness, voices, status, (non)recognition, (dis)respect, (in)visibility and presence in the uneven world of nation-states. It also demonstrates that the undoing of non-sovereign identities’ subjection to structural subalternization and everyday inferiorization requires rights in excess of the mere acquisition of juridical citizenship, which tends to assume national sameness. That assumption in turn involves sovereign practices of denial and assimilation of ethnic alterity. The book therefore highlights the necessity of de-ethnicizing and decolonizing unitary nation-states that are based on the politico-cultural supremacy of a single, “core” ethnicity as the sovereign legislator of the rules and regimes of national belonging and un-belonging. It therefore broaches questions of “majority” and “minority,” mobility, nationalism, home-making, equality, difference and universalism in the context of the nation-state and illustrates how stateless peoples such as Kurds and Palestinians endure and challenge their subordinate position in a hierarchical (geo-)political order and how in so doing remain bound by political otherness.

This interview with Professor Craig Calhoun expands on issues of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in relation to the question of statelessness. Since the 1990s, Calhoun has worked on nationalism, ethnicity and cosmopolitanism. For Calhoun, nations still matter despite post-national and cosmopolitan elaboration and repudiation of so-called parochial and provincialised identities like nation or national identity and citizenship. In this interview, Calhoun dis-cusses the material, political and cultural situations of the Kurds in the Middle East and the role of Kurdish nationalism in the context of statelessness. Calhoun finds class-based understanding of inequalities between the Kurds and their dominant others in the Middle East as problematic and incomplete since the cultural, political and material inequalities are intimately interlinked in rendering the Kurds to a subordinated position in the states they inhabit. The interview also engages with diasporic identities and examines how countries of residence can impinge on the identity formation of diasporas and how they obstruct or facilitate migrants translating their citizenship status into the right to have rights (Arendt). An important issue that Calhoun discusses is that there are both asymmetrical power relations between dominated (Kurdish) and dominating nationalisms (Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian) and within the same nationalisms.

This interview with Professor Craig Calhoun expands on issues of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in relation to the question of statelessness. Since the 1990s, Calhoun has worked on nationalism, ethnicity and cosmopolitanism. For Calhoun, nations still matter despite post-national and cosmopolitan elaboration and repudiation of so-called parochial and provincialised identities like nation or national identity and citizenship. In this interview, Calhoun dis-cusses the material, political and cultural situations of the Kurds in the Middle East and the role of Kurdish nationalism in the context of statelessness. Calhoun finds class-based understanding of inequalities between the Kurds and their dominant others in the Middle East as problematic and incomplete since the cultural, political and material inequalities are intimately interlinked in rendering the Kurds to a subordinated position in the states they inhabit. The interview also engages with diasporic identities and examines how countries of residence can impinge on the identity formation of diasporas and how they obstruct or facilitate migrants translating their citizenship status into the right to have rights (Arendt). An important issue that Calhoun discusses is that there are both asymmetrical power relations between dominated (Kurdish) and dominating nationalisms (Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian) and within the same nationalisms.

This paper is engaged with the politics of belonging among Kurdish youth. It aims to discuss how Kurdish identity and subjectivity can be understood following Antonio Gramsci within practices of hegemony and the ways the subalternity of Kurds as a stateless people are produced in everyday life. I will use narrative accounts of young Kurdish men and women to discuss experiences of denial by dominant subjects and the jettisoned position they occupy as a stateless nation in the world of unequal nation-states and hierarchical citizenship.

This aim of this article is to critically examine how the concept of culture is used in Sweden to explain the “failure” or the difficulties that Muslim immigrant families are experiencing with regards to their integration into the dominant society. Whereas, the Swedish society is often represented as ‘modern’, ‘progressive’, and ‘democratic’, immigrants with Muslim backgrounds are predominately described as ‘traditional’, ‘authoritarian’ and ‘pre-modern’. There is a widely held idea within Swedish social work research that immigrant families and the white mainstream Swedish society are situated within two different value systems with different world-views regarding family and gender relations. Due to this entrenched binary opposition, Orientalism becomes constitutive to social work research and practices.

Contemporary challenges for seeking new knowledge in feminist studies are intimately intertwined with methodological renewal that promotes justice and equality in changing global contexts. Written by some of the leading scholars in their fields, this edited collection focuses on the emergence of writing methodologies in feminist studies and their implications for the study of power and change.

The book explores some of the central politics, ideas, and dimensions of power that shape and condition knowledge, at the same time as it elaborates critical, embodied, reflective and situated writing practices. By bringing together a variety of multi/transdisciplinary contributions in a single collection, the anthology offers a timely and intellectually stimulating contribution that deals with how new forms of writing research can contribute to promote fruitful analysis of inequality and power relations related to gender, racialisation, ethnicity, class and heteronormativity and their intersections. It also includes the complex relationship between author, text and audiences.

The intended audience is postgraduates, researchers and academics within feminist and intersectionality studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The book is excellent as literature in feminist studies courses and helpful guidance for teaching writing sessions and workshops.

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.

Ethnic discrimination and vilification of Muslims in Europe show that European democracy is declining while racism and repressive policies are taking root and becoming the natural order of mainstream politics in many European countries.

The article engages how statehood and sovereignty are conceived and theorized and discuss the perils, benefits and possibilities that a sovereign state can embody in a world where the nation-states are viewed and cherished as the political standard of organizing human life. It is also equally important to look into the ways states construct majorities and minorities and justify relations of dominance and subordination, etnocultural primacy and cultural otherenss. In other words, how state with the help of nationalist ideas produces a master identity and marked groups whose lives, legal, political, cultural, economic status remain insecure and precarious.

Based on 50 interviews, this paper engages with identity formation among young people with Kurdish backgrounds regarding processes of inclusion and exclusion in Sweden and the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds have fled Kurdistan and migrated to Western countries due to, among other reasons, violent conflicts, political persecution, mass murders, and repressive assimilation policy in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Historical experiences and social inequities are important repertoires for the construction of belonging and identification among Kurdish youth in Sweden. Nevertheless, it is mainly through the intersection of a ‘minoritized’ Kurdish identity in the Middle-East and a ‘minoritized’ Kurdish identity in Sweden through which young people construct their identities. For Kurds, migration to Sweden involves once again occupying a minoritized position, not only as Kurds, but also as gendered and racialized categories such as immigrants, “wogs”, Muslims, Middle-Easterners and Orientals. Despite this minoritized position, Kurds face a significantly different political reality in Sweden where they can organize themselves around their national identity as Kurds and freely express their ‘Kurdishness’ without state-sanctioned harassment. This paper focuses also on those strategies that Kurdish youth use to defend and construct an exclusive Kurdish identity that result from everyday confrontations that occur between young Kurds and certain youth with Arabic, Persian and Turkish backgrounds in Sweden – with those who challenge, make inferior and deny the existence of the Kurdish national identity. While the youth praise the political freedom and democracy that prevails in Sweden and the political support that Sweden provides Kurds, they also question the structural inequality and ethnic relations of dominance and subordination that alienate youth and deny them access to full citizenship rights. This study is based on a forthcoming book entitled “Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden” that will be published by Palgrave.

Bu kitapta, Kürt geçmişine sahip gençlerin dahil etme ve dışlama süreçleri karşısında İsveç’te kimliklerini nasıl oluşturdukları incelenmekte; bu gençlerin etnik ayrımcılık ve ırkçılıkla baş etmek için başvurdukları yollara ışık tutulmaktadır. Ayrıca bu kitap, sosyal çalışma disiplini için bu sosyal süreçlerin önemine ve sosyal çalışmacıların dezavantajlı ve marjinalize edilmiş gruplarla çalışabilme ve onların ırkçı ve ayrımcı uygulamaların ötesinde bir sosyal adalet ile tam eşit vatandaşlık için verdikleri mücadeleyi destekleme yollarına ana hatlarıyla değinmektedir. Ampirik analiz İsveç’te yaşayan ve Kürt geçmişine sahip 28 erkek ve kadın gençle yapılan görüşmelere dayanmaktadır. Post-kolonyal teori, aidiyet ve kimlik inşası, bu çalışmanın kavramsal çerçevesinin nüvesini oluşturmaktadır. Bu çalışmaya katılan gençler, etnik ayrımcılık ve damgalanmayı tecrübe ettikleri farklı alanlardan bahsettiler. Bu tecrübeler; emek piyasası, kitlesel medya, konaklama ayrımcılığı, yasal sistem ve okul sistemi alanlarında yaşananları kapsamaktadır. Katılımcılar, İsveçli kimliğiyle ilgili dışlamacı söylemler aracılığıyla “normal” İsveçlilerin onların İsveç toplumuna katılımını etkilemedeki rollerine değindiler. Katılımcıların İsveç’teki yaşam durumu, etnik ayrımcılık hissi bir tarafa, Ortadoğulu geçmişine sahip diğer gençlerle kimlik oluşumu üzerindeki tartışmalar da İsveç’te kendi vatandaşlık haklarını tatbik edebilme yolları ve günlük yaşamda dışlamacı uygulamalarla nasıl başa çıkılacağı ile ilgili güçlü Kürt milliyetçi duyguları besleyen en önemli nedenlerdendir. Bu çalışma, kişiler arası tartışma ve münakaşalar, isimlerini İsveççe isimlerle değiştirme, kendi ve öteki arasındaki farklılıkları pekiştirme, şiddet, sessizlik ve ırkçılığa kasten aldırmamak gibi çeşitli yollarla katılımcıların etnik ayrımcılığa karşılık verdiklerini ve direndiklerini göstermektedir. Ayrıca, ataerkil “namus cinayeti” söyleminden dolayı günlük yaşamda maruz kaldıkları cinsiyetlendirilmiş* ırkçılığı tartışmakta ve ona açıkça karşı çıkmaktalar. Araştırmaya katılanların, kısmen, beyazlığın değerini yücelten ırkçı post-kolonyal söylemden dolayı İsveçlilik sınırları içinde eşit bir yer almaları reddedilmektedir. Paradoksal bir biçimde, katılımcılardan bazıları mümkün olduğunca beyazlığa yakın olan modern bir Kürt kimliği iddiasında bulunmak için aynı söylemi siyahi insanlara, Afrikalılara, yeni gelen Kürt göçmenlere (“ithalatlara”) “Çingeneler”e ve İslama karşı kullanmaktadırlar. Bu durum ırkçılığın çok boyutluluğunu gösteriyor. Irkçılığa ve etnik ayrımcılığa maruz kalanlar ayrımcı olabilmekte ve ırkçı söylemi yeniden üretebilmektedirler. Eşit olmayan güç ilişkilerine rağmen, hem hakim özneler hem de azınlıklaştırılmış öznelerin hepsi öznellikleri, aidiyeti ve özdeşleşmeyi inşa etmede post-kolonyal şartların damgasını taşımaktadır.