‘People without a State Also Must Live’ statelessness to be at the forefront of the analysis and conclusions developed, regardless of the degree of consistency with dominant understandings of these terms. This is especially important considering that the term Kurdistan is envisioned in different ways among the participants — such as whether it includes all four regions, or as a geopolitical reality in Iraq — and thus shapes how citizenship, nationality and statelessness are conceptualised. The study seeks to problematise the dominant conceptualisations of citizenship and statelessness as they overlook more nuanced conceptualisations of citizenship and statelessness held by, among others, many Kurds. 79 In order to explore this the concepts of citizenship and statelessness are approached phenomenologically, allowing for the narratives of individuals to be appropriately considered. This then allows for participants’ narratives to be considered in light of dominant understandings of citizenship and statelessness and for the tension between these two conceptions, and its effect, to be analysed. CITIZENSHIP: A CERTIFICATE TO ‘EXIST IN THE GIVEN WORLD’ Within the participants’ narratives, differentiation and inequalities within citizenship regimes are discussed but, on several occasions, situated in relation to an actual or hypothetical status of non-citizenship. One participant from Kurdistan-Syria positioned his thoughts on Syrian citizenship within the historical context of the denationalisation of around 20% of Syrian Kurds in 1962.80 Situating his own experiences within this context, he expresses: For me, I had citizenship. I wasn’t stripped of my citizenship because I lived in Afrin and mainly people from the north-east of Syria were stripped of their citizenship. But what I have seen and heard from people is that people couldn’t do anything, anything. They went to school and they had final exams and they couldn’t go to university because they didn’t have any records. Having citizenship enabled me to study and go to university in Aleppo … For me personally it was good to have it to be able to do many things, to go to university, but on the other hand it was awful. 81 The 29-year-old participant echoes the notion of individuals’ formal legal citizenship status as increasingly forming the basis upon which human rights are granted. 82 The demarcation in access to human rights between citizens and noncitizens is made starkly visible in the context of Kurds in Syria through the disparity in access to rights between the Kurdish de jure stateless population and Kurds recognised as Syrian citizens. 83 It is through recognising the sovereign rights of states, afforded through the international state system, to determine the criteria for citizenship, coupled with states’ role in ensuring human rights, that individuals become dependent on state recognition in order to be able to access their human rights. 84 Thus, the notion of the state as an emancipatory actor and citizenship as a solution to statelessness ought to be problematised. It can only be appropriately grappled with once the individual’s dependency on state citizenship 79 80 81 82 83 84 Eliassi, ‘Statelessness in a World of Nation-States’ (n 5); McGee (n 18); Tas (n 10). Tas (n 10) 45. Interview with 29-year-old man (Kurdistan-Syria). Hayden (n 10) 252. Maureen Lynch and Perveen Ali, Buried Alive: Stateless Kurds in Syria (Report, Refugees International 2006) 1–2. Hayden (n 12) 253. 295