2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) It is here crucial to situate the exertion of violence within the norm of state sovereignty in order to understand the extent to which state violence against its citizens can continue. Here it ought again to be acknowledged that oppression against Kurds is not due to their status as citizens. Rather, their status as citizens coupled with the international norm of state sovereignty can serve to partially protect the state from extensive international scrutiny or intervention, thereby allowing the state to continue its practice of oppression. 120 Furthermore, oppression also operates through prohibition, of which there is a wide range of examples regarding Kurdish language, culture and assertions of identity within Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. In the ethno-nationalist conceptualisations of the nation-states, the dominance of the language of the majority ethnic group has been integral to the idea of an ethnically singular nation. 121 Thus, state-led efforts to assimilate minority groups through prohibition of markers of their ethnic identity ought to be conceptualised through an understanding of the majority population’s view of Kurdishness as a threat to the national community. A number of the participants — both first- and secondgeneration immigrants to the Netherlands — do not speak any Kurdish language due to prohibitions on Kurdish language within their state of origin. The enforced prohibition on language is deeply interrelated with and dependent upon concurrent forms of state violence, which together, constitute an amplified form of oppression. Strikingly, a number of participants explained how assimilatory measures of the Turkish state continue to be internalised and reproduced within the Netherlands. Participants listed examples from the Netherlands of where Kurds’ social media accounts were being monitored and applications used to report nonconforming social media content to the Turkish government, and phones being tapped. Importantly, participants did not describe themselves as being under total surveillance, but the continuous possibility and threat of surveillance, as well as the trauma of oppression, has been observed by participants to lead to Kurds internalising the norms of the Turkish state. The main thing I want to emphasise is the effect of statelessness still on people here in Europe — they are safe but they have a trauma and they are raising their children in the same way. They are raising them with a fear about the nations they come from. They don’t teach their children their own identity, they don’t teach them their own cultural origin. They don’t teach them the languages, but instead teach them Turkish or Dutch, not Kurdish language. And trying to get their children safe because they are going to Turkey on holiday, and for the sake of their children’s safety they are like assimilating but without the suppression anymore. The suppression is in them — they have internalised the suppression and the traumas. They are now acting by themselves like the countries that occupy Kurdistan wanted them to act. 122 The participant here explicitly refers to the process of Kurds’ internalisation of the norms of the Turkish state in his attempt to illustrate the extent to which Turkish citizenship has shaped the ways in which Kurds live, including in the relative safety of the Netherlands. Thus, he illustrates how the Turkish state’s repression of Kurdish linguistic and cultural rights has widespread consequences 120 Kahler (n 15). 121 Soleimani and Mohammadpour (n 67); Yegen (n 50) 602. 122 54-year-old man (Kurdistan-Turkey) (emphasis added). 304