- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: found
Upon the Walls of the UN Camp: Situated Intersectionality, Trajectories of Belonging, and Built Environment Among Syrian Refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Abstract
Upon the walls of homes in the Arbat ‘camp’ community in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), the ubiquitous UN logo lays claim to a built environment disrupted by ornamental facades, muralism, and radical iconography. Engaging photographs and qualitative interviews gathered in the Kurdish Region of Iraq in 2017 and 2018, this essay traces expressions of “belonging” within a situated intersectional framework to surface and assess the categories of social division evident in Arbat's non-Western context.
Content
Author and article information
Footnotes
Ahmed 2004: 119.
Anthias 2013a: 7.
Yuval-Davis 2011: 9, 81 89.
UNHCR 2015.
The TOB project asks what the theory and methods of literacy studies might reveal about the relationships between the communicative practices, mobility, settlement, and felt affiliations of Syrian refugees who came to the KRI after the Syrian War began in 2011.
Betts and Collier 2017: 48.
Ramadan 2013: 74.
Carastathis et al. 2018: 5.
Loescher 2013: 220.
The fraught history of Kurdish hopes for statehood includes the imperial West's endorsement of Kurdish self-determination and the incipient Turkish state's successful opposition to it. As Michael Gunter unfolds, the League of Nations recognized that “the non-Turkish minorities of the Ottoman Empire should be granted the right of 'autonomous development.'” The 1920 Treaty of Sevres, imposed upon the defeated Ottoman Empire, went further, referencing “local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish area” and suggesting for “the Kurdish peoples'” a possible future “independence from Turkey.” After securing itself by force of arms against a war-weary West, the incipient Turkish state effectively struck down these provisions with the1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which “made no mention of the Kurds, condemning them to a de facto colonial existence in Iraq as well as in Turkey, Iran, and Syria … . As a result, the Kurds were in an almost constant state of revolt.” (See Gunter 2016: 61-63).
Kaya and Lowe 2017: 281; McDowall 2004: 420 26.
Bookchin 2019.
Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2015: 4.
Bookchin 2019; Schmidinger 2019: “The Attack on the City of Afrin”; Washington Kurdish Institute 2019.
Rapoport 1994: 470.
Rapoport 2000: 184.
Ahmed et al. 2003: 2.
Ramadan 2013: 66.
Yuval-Davis 2011: 36.
Betts and Collier 2017: 31.
Syrian Kurds' home language is typically Kurmanji, yet most are fluent as well in Levantine Arabic, the official language in the Syrian Arab Republic, where Kurdish has long been suppressed (see Gunter 2016: 99). Iraqi Kurds tend to speak Sorani, and those who were educated in the post-Hussein era (after 2003), are less likely than their elders to speak Arabic. As a student of Levantine Arabic, I cultivated a translingual disposition toward the project, working with the TOB research assistant-interpreters to note epiphenomenal shifts between Arabic and Kurmanji. According to Lu and Horner, “Monolingualism associates language difference strictly with subordinated groups” but a translingual disposition regards linguistic difference “as an inevitable product of all language acts” (2013: 583-585). Thus, I have generally left the versions of English heard during interviews as recorded, whether the interviewee spoke in English (as some did) or the comment was translated by an interpreter into their own English. Any changes added in brackets are intended to avoid confusion, rather than shift the transcription into Standard Edited English.
Fontana and Frey 2000: 74; Muylaert et al. 2014.
Natali 2017: 52.
Sindi 2016: 74, 83.
Chatty 2010: 232; Eppel 2008
O'Leary 2017: 356; Sheyholislami 2010: 299.
Burgess 2014.
Gunter 2016: xi.
O'Leary 2017: 355.
Albert 2014: 222.
Chatty 2010: 276 77; Gunter 2016: 87 90.
Crabapple 2018.
The New Arab 2018.
Kaya and Whiting 2017: 81 83.
Pseudonyms are used throughout to safeguard the TOB participants' privacy, as per the study's IRB protocols.
Balanche 2016.
Betts and Collier 2017: 198-99.
Ibid., 199.
Van Hear 2004: 28.
Crabapple 2018.
Schmidinger 2019: “The War Against Afrin.”
Carastathis et al. 2018: 6.
Crenshaw 1989, 1991.
Including Anthias 2013, Brah and Phoenix 2004, and Collins 2015.
Crenshaw 1989: 140.
Loescher 2013: 220.
Crenshaw 1991: 1245.
Turner 2016: 140.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 1951.
Yuval-Davis 2015b
Yuval-Davis 2015a: 638.
Yuval-Davis 2015b: 94.
Ibid., 93.
Yuval-Davis 2015b: 94.
Said 2003: 15, my emphasis.
I am indebted to the staff of the Jiyan Foundation for Human Rights in Halbja, Iraq, whose commentary helped clarify this point for me. https://www.jiyan-foundation.org/
American University Sulaimani Iraq Nd; Azeez 2019; Hardi 2005, 2013.
Bilge 2013: 411.
Puar 2012: 54.
Chatty 2010: 233.
Winker and Degele 2011: 57.
Nash 2011: 468.
Hunt 2017:131; Lorde 1983.
Yuval-Davis 2015b: 95.
Ibid., 95.
Horton 2017: 129.
Yuval-Davis 2015b: 95.
Anthias 2013a: 6,10; Assmann 2013: 36.
Isin 2007: 214-215.
Yuval-Davis 2011: 94.
Haraway 1988: 588.
Gries 2015a: 298.
Saelens and Handy 2008: 2.
Mahmood 2015.
None of the Arbat residents or staff whom I consulted about the mural could recall precisely who had sponsored it. The consensus was that it had been painted with the help of students from the camp who were attending programs run by STEP UK, an NGO responsible for educational and child-friendly spaces within the community. Several local sources suggested that Florence Robichon, who collaborated with children on a series of smaller but striking murals elsewhere in the Arbat camp, might have also led the work on the Kobanî bakery, but she has informed me that this is not the case. (Examples of Robichon's project in Arbat are accessible online at https://arbatbrighterfuture.weebly.com/gallery.html).
Turner 2016: 142.
Betts and Collier 2017: 53, 137.
Devictor 2016; Loescher 2013: 218.
Ramadan 2013: 66.
Crenshaw 1989: 140.
Assmann 2013: 37; Rapoport 2000: 184.
Isin 2007: 215.
Ferreira and Santiago 2018: 486; Gunter 2017: 57; Kaya and Whiting 2017: 13; Saadi: 2019; Tank 2017: 412.
McDowall 2007: 420.
Nalin 2017: 61 fn.
McDowall 2007: 422.
Öcalan 2015: 33.
Ibid., 21-25, 34.
Bookchin 1971; Bookchin 2015; De Jong 2016.
Öcalan 2015: 38-39.
Isin 2007: 214.
Kaya and Whiting 2017: 87.
Knapp et al. 2016: 50.
Gries 2015a 298.
Gries 215b: 110.
Latour 2005: 180,184.
Gries 2015a: 299.
Krajeski 2014
Bruce 2015: 44-45.
Azeez 2019.
O'Leary 2017: 355.
Faidhi 2019.
McDowall 2004: 239.
Assmann 2013:40.
Kaya and Lowe 2017: 276
Ibid., 276.
Moss 2016; Pearlman 2016.
Because this section necessarily references several different political entities in addition to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), I'll list them here for ease of reference. In Rojava (officially the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or NES) there is the:• PYD (Democratic Union Party), the dominant political party in Rojava attempting to implement Öcalan's program of democratic confederalism. The PYD is often seen as the Syrian branch of the broader PKK tendency.• YPG (People's Protection Units), the main militia in Rojava, closely aligned with the PYD. The US military allied with the YPG in order to fight ISIS in Syria (see Bookchin 2019).• YPJ (Women's Protection Units), the all-woman military force in Rojava, also closely aligned with the PYD.
Ferreira and Santiago 2018: 486.
In the KRI, two major political parties rose to power in the wake of Western intervention in Iraq during and following the First Gulf War of 1990-1991 (see Gunter 2016: 61-70):• The KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), historically the dominant party in the KRI, based in Erbil, founded in 1946 by Mustafa Barzani led by his son Masoud Barzani since 1973.• The PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), rival to the KDP with a strong base in Sulaymaniyah, often associated with Jalal Talabani, who died in 2017.
Kaya and Whiting 2017: 14.
Ibid., 80.
Helfont 2017: 2.
Foschi 2018:7-19, 132; Helfont 2017: 3
In other work more oriented to questions of mobility, I take up the tendency reported among the TOB interviews for women rather than men to make brief counter-migratory journeys back to Syria, typically on family or legal business. A frequently stated reason for this was that men wanted to avoid conscription. On the one hand, the Syrian government demanded that men fulfill (or else extend) their mandatory military service. On the other, opposition groups pressured men to take up arms. As a result, husbands and brothers tended to avoid returning to Syria.
Ferreira and Santiago 2018: 489.
Gunter 2017: 79; McGurk 2019.
Albert 2013: 232.
Kelly 2010: 727.
Gunter 2016: 18
Kaya and Lowe 2017: 27.
Yuval Davis 2011: 20.
Knapp et al. 2016: 134.
Ibid., 48-51.
Öcalan 2015: 26.
Ibid., 34.
Bruce 2015: 45.
Rapoport 1994: 489.
UNHCR 2015.
Ramadan 2013: 70.
Turner 2016: 139.
Natali 2017: 52.
Ek 2006: 365-66; Owens 2009: 572.
Chatty 2010: 271.
Frith 2015: 19; Rapoport 1994: 496.
Brun 2016: 426.
Yuval-Davis 2011: 20.
Assmann 2013: 37.
Crenshaw 1989: 140.
Carastathis 2014: 308.
Crenshaw 1991: 1242.
Schmidinger 2019: “Advance of the Turkish Troops.”
Ibid., “The War Against Afrin.”
Carastathis et al. 2018: 3,9.
Collins 2015: 9-15.
Knapp et al. 2016: 50
Crabapple 2018; Tanir 2017; Wintour 2019.
Ahmed et al. 2003: 2.