2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) an actuality. 75 Thus, a distinction is made between those with and those without Dutch formal citizenship status, and thereafter between Dutch citizens who are considered ‘full citizens’, or sufficiently assimilated, and those who are not.76 Furthermore, racialised hierarchies within the Dutch national community contribute to the continuous challenging of the legitimacy of minority citizens’ inclusion and access to rights. Thus, whereas the access and content of the rights of minority citizens might not technically differ from citizens recognised as ‘native’, these racialised lines of exclusion render minority citizens’ recognition as full citizens impossible. 77 Thus, Kurds’ exclusion in the Netherlands is shaped less by their specific Kurdish ethnicity and more by an ongoing racialisation as a non-Dutch visible minority. METHODOLOGY This study is based on interviews with 13 individuals (six women and seven men) in the Netherlands with a Kurdish background and aims to explore experiences and constructed meanings around citizenship and statelessness within a Kurdish context. The interviews were conducted face-to-face in either English or in Dutch with an interpreter. Both first- and second-generation Kurdish immigrants (from Kurdistan-Syria, Kurdistan-Turkey, Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Kurdistan-Iran) were interviewed and 10 of the 13 participants had Dutch citizenship. The interviewees had a range of different migratory histories, including arriving in the Netherlands as a refugee, through family reunification, as a student, and being born in the Netherlands. As a researcher with outsider status in relation to both Kurdish and Dutch identity, this will undoubtedly have shaped the responses of the participants during the interview as well as the analysis and conclusions drawn at the end of the study. Considering the restricted sample size, the aim of the study is not to provide a generalisable illustration of experiences of citizenship and statelessness from each of the regions and/or generations, but rather to develop a greater understanding of subjective realities of citizenship and statelessness and to situate this within a broader sociological framework. However, brief biographical details of the participants have been included alongside quotes in order to not mask potential specificities regarding regions, genders and ages. Phenomenology was identified as a methodology well suited to achieve the aims of the study — namely, to explore individuals’ experiences and construction of meaning around citizenship and statelessness within the context of Kurdistan. Phenomenology will for the purpose of this study be defined as ‘a philosophy that … [calls] for an analysis of “the things themselves”’, 78 and which recognises the individual as an agent. In this study, the significance of a phenomenological approach is crucial, as this approach allows for individuals’ conceptualisations and experiences of concepts such as citizenship, statehood, nationalism and 75 76 77 78 Willem Schinkel and Friso van Houdt, ‘The Double Helix of Cultural Assimilationism and Neo-Liberalism: Citizenship in Contemporary Governmentality’ (2010) 61(4) The British Journal of Sociology 696, 702–4, 706–7. See generally ibid. Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak, ‘Politics of Belonging, from National to Personal: The Political Framing of “Dutch” Identity and Ethnic Minority Citizens’ in Nicole Stokes-DuPass and Ramona Fruja (eds), Citizenship, Belonging, and Nation-States in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) 55, 62; Pooyan Tamimi Arab, ‘(Dis)Entangling Culturalism, Nativism, Racism’ [2012] (2) Krisis 68. Thomas S Eberle, ‘Phenomenology as a Research Method’ in Uwe Flick (ed), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis (Sage 2014) 194. 294