2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) actualised. 3 Instead, Britain and France (with Russian assent) partitioned the Kurdish population between the regions that would become the modern-day states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, 4 within which Kurds constitute minority groups.5 In the decades that have followed, Kurds have been victims of oppression and violence — conditions under which many have been forced to flee — and continue to be regarded as inferior to citizens of the nation-states’ respective majority groups. 6 This paper seeks to explore the exclusion of Kurds through the lens of citizenship and statelessness. It will look at the role of citizenship within the creation and maintenance of exclusion and ask what function citizenship can play in addressing this exclusion. The aim is not to compare the Kurdish regions of concern (Kurdistan-Turkey, Kurdistan-Syria, Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Kur distan-Iran), but instead to provide a nuanced understanding of the breadth and complexity of individuals’ experiences of citizenship in the Middle East and as a diaspora population in the Netherlands. Literature on statelessness predominantly focuses on de jure statelessness and tends to frame the issue as a problem of lack of citizenship, whereby citizenship acquisition is understood as the solution to statelessness. 7 Drawing on this literature, this paper acknowledges the paramount importance of legal citizenship status for the ability to access rights and recognition and to live a full life. However, based on this understanding, it is recognised that individuals are heavily dependent on states for such recognition. The paper here deviates from the dominant discourse on statelessness by assuming both the state and its inhabitants are political actors with particular interests. Due to the political and historical context of Kurdistan and its status as a stateless nation, the case of Kurdistan makes the political dimension of citizenship and statelessness explicit and unavoidable. Through understanding citizenship and statelessness to be political, and by coupling this with individuals’ dependency on states for recognition as citizens, the notion of citizenship as a political tool will be developed. This paper will start by looking at the role of states and citizenship within the modern state system in order explore the hegemonic framework through which states are considered to be emancipatory actors and citizenship is assumed to be a blanket solution to statelessness. These assumptions will then be broken down by taking a closer look at how legalistic notions of citizenship are intimately tied up with racialised, ethnicised and nationalist ideals. Furthermore, dominant global frameworks will be juxtaposed with individuals’ lived experiences in order to 3 4 5 6 7 Radpey (n 1) 480. ibid 469–70. Barzoo Eliassi, ‘Statelessness in a World of Nation-States: The Cases of Kurdish Diasporas in Sweden and the UK’ (2016) 42(9) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1403, 1405; Barzoo Eliassi, ‘Conceiving Citizenship and Statelessness in the Middle East and Sweden: The Experiences of Kurdish Migrants in Sweden’ in Nicole Stokes-DuPass and Ramona Fruja (eds), Citizenship, Belonging, and Nation-States in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) 85, 87–88. Eliassi, ‘Conceiving Citizenship and Statelessness in the Middle East and Sweden’ (n 5); Ozlem Goner and Joseph T Rebello, ‘State Violence, Nature, and Primitive Accumulation: Dispossession in Dersim’ (2017) 41(1) Dialectical Anthropology 33; David Phillips, The Kurdish Spring: A New Map of the Middle East (Routledge 2015). See, eg, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ending Statelessness within 10 Years (Special Report, 2010) (‘Ending Statelessness within 10 Years; Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless (Wolf Legal Publishers 2014); European Network on Statelessness, Still Stateless, Still Suffering: Why Europe Must Act Now to Protect Stateless Persons (Report, 2014) (‘Still Stateless, Still Suffering’). 284