‘People without a State Also Must Live’ beyond the territorial state and beyond the particular period of time in which direct prohibitive measures are enacted. The 54-year-old refers to the concept of statelessness to construct meaning around this experience, suggesting that the absence of a state to protect and preserve one’s cultural identity constitutes a risk of cultural dispossession and is a marker of statelessness. 123 Although the narratives of the research participants notably differ regarding their views on statehood, there is a recognition of the idea that the stateless nation’s lack of a state can — but does not necessarily — lead to the repression and erosion of the minority group’s cultural identity. CONCLUSION Through recognising the state as a political actor for whom citizenship can be used as a tool to serve its own particular interests, it becomes imperative to also recognise Kurds as political actors for whom citizenship acquisition, within certain contexts, can undermine collective interests. In recognising Kurds as political actors, it is crucial to ask the question of how Kurds experience and construct meaning around their historical and ongoing exclusion and oppression and how they wish for this to be addressed. When citizenship is recognised as political, it can no longer be assumed that Kurds necessarily wish for their exclusion to be addressed through citizenship to a nation-state that has repeatedly denied their full inclusion. The aim of the paper has been to explore the ways in which Kurds experience and construct meaning around citizenship. However, in order to do so, it becomes necessary to recognise the structural context within which Kurds carry out their lives — accessing education, marriage, traveling, fleeing — and the role of states and citizenship in this political reality. It is only once the structural dimensions of the modern state system, the sovereignty norm and the human rights regime have been considered that we can explore the lived experiences of citizenship in a manner that takes into account the political context within which these experiences are situated. Through the phenomenological understanding of citizenship that emerges from the participants’ narratives, a tension is introduced between citizenship as a structural necessity for individuals to access rights and recognition and citizenship as a tool that threatens to undermine collective interests. Through considering the role of citizenship in relation to collective interests, in terms of the existence and assertion of Kurdish ethnicity, formal citizenship status can be recognised as constituting only one aspect of inclusion. Therefore, when considering individuals’ experiences of citizenship in relation to the collective (but not uniform) interests of Kurds, such as linguistic and cultural rights, the concept and impact of citizenship must be considered beyond its technical and legalistic definition. Whereas the discussion of Kurds’ citizenship in the Middle East focuses on the exclusion and oppression of Kurds in light of their particular Kurdish ethnicity, the analysis of citizenship in the Netherlands highlights the broader processes of racialisation within citizenship regimes. When participants distinguish between the perceived level of Dutch state protection granted to themselves (as dual citizens and/or as racialised Others) and to a ‘native’ and/or single citizen, the modern state system’s fundamental assumption of citizenship as universal is challenged. Instead, concepts such as ineffective citizenship and 123 See Eliassi, ‘Statelessness in a World of Nation-States’ (n 5) 1412. 305