2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) made between these distinct (albeit deeply interrelated) concepts and for the tensions between them to be explored. Although nation, nationality and nationalism are notoriously difficult to define, they will here be understood in accordance with Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as ‘an imagined political community’, in which ‘communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’. 32 The term ‘imagined’ is here used to suggest the non-prescriptiveness of the nation, rather than falsity. Although theorists such as Anthony Smith argue that the origin of nations lies in pre-existing ethnic populations, 33 contemporary literature on nations and nationalism takes an overwhelmingly modernist approach, shifting away from the idea of the nation and ethnic groups as fixed entities. 34 Rogers Brubaker argues that rather than treating ethnic, racial or national groups as externally bounded and internally homogenous entities, one should seek to consider ethnicity in terms of the process of ethnicisation. 35 Accordingly, the concern of this paper lies in understanding how Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran became ethnicised nation-states and what role citizenship plays in relation to dominant ethno-nationalist conceptualisations. The status of Kurds as a minority ethnic group will be considered in light of the ethnicised processes of exclusion within the respective nation states of concern. In exploring how citizenship relates to the concepts of nationhood and ethnicity, it is important to attend to the ways in which nation states require the formation of minority populations in order for a majority population to exist. Arjun Appadurai introduces the concept predatory identities, or identities that are conceptualised as being under constant threat from other proximate social identities and require their extinction. 36 It is in situations where the notion of the ‘imagined community’ is reduced to an idea of ethnic singularity that minority identities come to be seen as deficits to the nation’s purity and as threats to the continued existence of the ethnic majority group and thereby serve to legitimise the oppression of minority groups. 37 Situating this within the international state system and the historical division of the Middle East into modern nation state entities, Kurds have been rendered a minority population in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran rather than a majority population of a sovereign state. However, it is not necessarily the status as an ethnic minority group in itself that is problematic, but the status as a minority within ethno-nationalist nation states in which the respective majority populations are conceptualised as living under constant threat of minority populations. It is thus from within this context, coupled with the legitimacy of government afforded to states through the modern state system,38 that Kurds’ exclusion and oppression ought to be understood and possible solutions can be conceptualised. 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso 2006) 6. Anthony D Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Basil Blackwell 1986). See, eg, Barry Hindess, ‘Citizenship in the International Management of Populations’ (2000) 43(9) American Behavioral Scientist 1486, 1491. Rogers Brubaker, ‘Ethnicity without Groups’ (2002) 43(2) European Journal of Sociology 163, 164, 166. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke University Press 2006) 51. ibid 51–3. Hindess (n 34) 1494. 288