‘People without a State Also Must Live’ themselves through opposition to the Kurdish minority. 113 As a stateless people, Kurds are thus governed by states who are internationally recognised as holding legitimate authority, but who have been, and continue to be, largely opposed to the existence of Kurds and Kurdishness. CITIZENSHIP: A TOOL OF ASSIMILATION AND OPPRESSION The status of Kurds as inhabitants within the sovereign states of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran has given the governments of the respective states legitimate authority to exert power over the population in line with their own political interests. 114 Furthermore, by recognising Kurds’ position as minority groups within the four states as well as through understanding the identities of majority groups in the respective states as predatory identities, 115 Kurds are understood to be at risk of being conceptualised as a threat to the nation and thus vulnerable to not only exclusion but also to oppression. Both citizenship and statelessness are conceptualised in this paper as political tools that can be used by states to serve their own interests, including their interest to oppress. By virtue of governments’ legitimacy to govern populations in their territorial states, they use citizenship as a tool to further their own interests. This is achieved through decisions to deny citizenship or to denationalise certain individuals or groups, or the threat of doing so, as well as through techniques of government enabled by citizens’ subjugation to the state’s citizenship regime. As Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran have all instituted assimilation policies in the second half of the twentieth century, Kurdish citizens of these nation-states have been subjugated to measures intended to shape their behaviour and identity to conform to the states’ ethno-nationalist conceptualisations of the national community. 116 However, alongside shifts from viewing Kurds as prospective members of the nation to viewing Kurds as unassimilable, 117 as well as the underlying conceptualisation of minorities as a threat, states’ tactics of governing with the intention of achieving assimilation is inextricably linked with the aim to oppress. 118 Most of the participants’ narratives include personal experiences (relating to themselves as individuals or to their families) of state violence, including forced displacement. Although Kurds who are in the Netherlands, and thus are outside of the Kurdish regions in the Middle East, will presumably be disproportionately affected by forced displacement, the issue is crucial when considering the ways in which Kurds experience and construct meaning around citizenship. One participant summarises the oppression experienced by him and his family, and concludes that the Iranian regime is not only dictatorial, but also criminal. I am in exile. I live in exile. We are only one family in Kurdistan: I am in exile, my uncle died in a clash, and my father was also terrorised by the Islamic regime. The son of my uncle is also in prison. This is only one family. So, that’s why I say that this is a criminal regime. It’s not only a dictator — it’s criminal. 119 113 114 115 116 117 Eliassi, ‘Statelessness in a World of Nation-States’ (n 5) 1405. ibid. See Appadurai (n 36) 51. Natali (n 49) xix; Radpey (n 2) 472. On the shift in the conceptualisation of Kurds in Turkey from ‘prospective-Turks’ to ‘pseudoTurks’, see Yegen (n 50). 118 Eliassi, ‘Conceiving Citizenship and Statelessness in the Middle East and Sweden’ (n 5). 119 Interview with 29-year old man (Kurdistan-Iran). 303