2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) approximately 120,000 Syrian Kurds being stripped of their citizenship.57 However, since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, conceptualisations of citizenship have changed within the context of broader ongoing processes of social transformation. The conflict has given rise to claims for greater autonomy by Kurds and other ethnic minority groups and the idea to remove the term ‘Arab’ from the country’s name has been under consideration. 58 Furthermore, the Syrian state issued a decree in 2011 which made it possible for certain de jure stateless Kurds to (re-)apply for Syrian citizenship. 59 However, the decision to grant certain Kurds Syrian citizenship was motivated predominantly by the state’s political interests at the time, rather than by the intention to foster greater inclusion. 60 Citizenship in Iraq has also undergone significant changes during the last eight decades due to violently explicit government policies of Arabisation from the 1930s to the 90s, during which Kurds and other ethnic minority groups were subjected to denationalisation, violence, massacres and systematic exclusion on the basis of their non-Arab ethnic identity. 61 Natali argues that the pronounced pan-Arabism in Iraqi national identity fostered an increasingly ethnicised conceptualisation of Kurdish nationalism as a response. 62 However, having undergone conflict and significant social transformation, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (‘KRI’) was established in 1991. 63 It is important to note that inhabitants of KRI are under Iraq’s national jurisdiction and are, for the most part, citizens of Iraq, although inhabitants are also subjects of the Kurdistan Regional Government (‘KRG’), to which political power has been partially devolved. 64 The extent to which these Kurdish citizens identify with, or wish to be included in, the central Iraqi state is thus important to consider when looking at inclusion and exclusion of Kurds in KRI. Since the establishment of the KRG, both Kurdish and Arabic have been recognised as official languages in Iraq and KRI has arguably become more inclusive to minority ethnic and religious groups than central and southern Iraq, although KRI has also been repeatedly criticised for corruption, discrimination, nepotism and disparaging socio-economic inequality. 65 As Iran officially became the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, the country cemented the religious foundations upon which the Iranian nation state was defined and thereby shifted ethnicity-based boundaries of exclusion to boundaries based on religion. 66 However, as the dominant conceptualisation of the Iranian state continues to be firmly situated within a framework of Persian culture, 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 McGee (n 18) 173. ibid 179 n 32; Anne Sofie Schøtt, The Kurds of Syria: From the Forgotten People to WorldStage Actors (Brief, Royal Danish Defence College 2017). Schøtt (n 58) 15. McGee (n 18) 178–9. Human Rights Watch, On Vulnerable Ground: Violence against Minority Communities in Nineveh Province’s Disputed Territories (Report, November 2009) 19; Karlsson (n 52) 143– 44; Elizabeth Campbell and Refugees International, The Faili Kurds of Iraq: Thirty Years Without Nationality (Report, 2 April 2010). Natali (n 49) 48. ibid 66. Bahar Baser, ‘Homeland Calling: Kurdish Diaspora and Statebuilding in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in the Post-Saddam Era’ (2018) 27(1) Middle East Critique 78. See ibid. See also Natali (n 49) 64; Karlsson (n 42) 155–56. Natali (n 49) 140–41. 292