‘People without a State Also Must Live’ Batchelor uses the terms effective nationality and effective protection as tools to conceptualise the differences in quality of citizenship, suggesting that a technical legal definition can address solely technical and legalistic problems. 23 In order to appropriately conceptualise these nuances, sociologically informed theories on citizenship will be used to explore citizenship within the context of Kurdistan. A sociologically informed understanding of citizenship problematises the assumption that citizenship is universal. Isin and Turner suggest that citizenship is a concept located along three axes — extent, or who is included/excluded, content, or associated rights and responsibilities, and depth, in terms of its ‘thinness’ or ‘thickness’. 24 Whereas the dominant legal discourse around statelessness employs a ‘thin’ notion of citizenship, restricting the concept to denote only formal legal status, 25 Isin and Turner’s conceptualisation of citizenship problematises underlying assumptions of the dominant legal understanding of citizenship and statelessness. 26 Using the three axes to conceptualise citizenship allows for nuances between different states’ citizenship regimes, as well as disparities between citizens within the same state, to be explored. The assumption within the modern political idea of citizenship as universal, or ‘implying the inclusion of all persons in full citizenship status under the equal protection of the law’, 27 is thereby challenged. By considering citizenship as complex and occurring along different axes, formal legal status is relegated to constituting merely one part of a broader concept of citizenship. Linda Bosniak explains that subordinated groups have at various points in history possessed legal citizenship yet continued to be excluded in other respects, referring to this as second-class citizenship. 28 Bosniak expands on this by conceptualising formal citizenship as a mask through which the state operationalises its dominant idea of the nation, masquerading as the state’s universal identity. 29 Citizenship thus not only represents a particular idea of national identity as universal, but thereby also obscures structures of exclusion along the lines of gender, class, ethnicity, race, ability and age. 30 Conceptualising citizenship as a broad sociologically informed concept including, but not restricted to, formal legal status, allows for Kurds’ inclusion and exclusion within Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the Netherlands to be considered in a more nuanced manner. Within everyday usage as well as legal discourse on statelessness, citizenship and nationality are conflated and both are understood as referring solely to formal legal status. 31 Importantly, a sociologically informed understanding of the concepts of citizenship, nationality and ethnicity allow for differentiations to be 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Carol A Batchelor, ‘Stateless Persons: Some Gaps in International Protection’ (1995) 7(2) International Journal of Refugee Law 232, 232. Engin F Isin and Bryan S Turner, ‘Citizenship Studies: An Introduction’ in Engin F Isin and Bryan S Turner (eds), Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Sage 2002) 2. Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, ‘Statelessness, Identity Cards and Citizenship as Status in the Case of the Nubians of Kenya’ (2014) 18(1) Citizenship Studies 15, 17. Isin and Turner (n 24). Iris Marion Young, ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’ (1989) 99(2) Ethics 250, 250. Linda Bosniak, ‘Constitutional Citizenship through the Prism of Alienage’ (2002) 63(5) Ohio State Law Journal 1285, 1305. ibid 1306. Engin F Isin and Patricia K Wood, Citizenship and Identity (Sage 1999) vii. Katherine Tonkiss, ‘Statelessness and the Performance of Citizenship-As-Nationality’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 241. Notably, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ Global Action Plan to End Statelessness (Report, 2017) uses the terms ‘nationality’ and ‘citizenship’ interchangeably. 287