2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) ethnically singular Persian identity consequently renders any self-assertion by non-Persian minority groups to be seen as a threat towards the Persian majority ethnic group and the Iranian nation. 98 In line with Appadurai’s idea of predatory identities, it is this perceived threat and the idea of minority groups as a deficit to the ethnic purity of the nation that can ‘unleash the urge to purify’ and lead states to kill, torture and oppress minority groups. 99 The extreme discrepancy between the idea of citizenship as universal and the violent differentiation between citizens on the basis of ethnicity thereby becomes painfully clear. The 32-year-old man continues by emphasising the differentiation that also occurs along the lines of gender, age and class. In order to form a comprehensive understanding of an individual’s experience of oppression within citizenship regimes, an intersectional approach is therefore crucial. Bosniak’s conceptualisation of citizenship as a mask — ostensibly universal but obscuring exclusionary structures along the lines of ethnicity, gender, class and more — thus serves to illustrate the differentiation, exclusion and oppression within citizenship regimes. 100 Among participants from Kurdistan-Turkey in particular, Kurds’ status within the nation-state is conceptualised largely in reference to politics of cultural assimilation and its expectation of adherence to ethnic Turkish identity and culture at the expense of assertions of Kurdishness. A 54-year-old participant explains that: In order to survive in Turkey, you have to lose your own culture and lose your own language, so I didn’t grow up with the Kurdish identity that I wanted and that I know exists. I knew that I was Kurdish but also that it was not right to act as a Kurd because it would create a situation. As a Kurd in Turkey, you have to adapt to Turkey to survive. 101 The 54-year-old man highlights that ‘to act as a Kurd’, or to assert a nonTurkish ethnic identity, was considered to fall outside of the dominant conceptualisation of Turkishness and result in severe repercussions. The distinction between ‘Turkishness as citizenship’ and ‘Turkishness as such’, and thus the ethno-nationalist terms through which the nation-state has been defined, thereby becomes clearly visible. 102 Although assertions of Kurdishness in the past had been suppressed under the idea that ‘there were no Kurds in Turkey’, nonKurds later came to regard cultural and linguistic expressions of Kurdishness with a fear of racial extinction. 103 Thus, the enforcement of cultural assimilation politics — aiming to shape the population in accordance with an ethnic Turkish ideal — ought to be contextualised within the majority group’s fear of the minority. THE ROLE OF THE STATE AND CITIZENSHIP IN ADDRESSING EXCLUSION Having briefly considered the exclusion of Kurds within specific nation state contexts, the aim of this section is to address the breadth of ways in which participants consider the questions of how, and into what, Kurds envision 98 99 100 101 102 103 Soleimani and Mohammadpour (n 67) 928. Appadurai (n 36) 49, 53. Bosniak (n 28) 1306. Interview with 54-year-old man (Kurdistan-Turkey). See Yegen (n 50). Murat Ergin, ‘The Racialization of Kurdish Identity in Turkey’ (2014) 37(2) Ethnic and Racial Studies 322, 334. 300