CMES Research Seminar: Seeing like the Stateless in an Uneven World of Nation-States - Kurdish and Palestinian Experiences

In this talk, Barzoo Eliassi will draw on his book Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness to outline a framework to understand the lived experiences of statelessness among members of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in Western Europe. While statelessness and citizenship are often juxtaposed as each other’s negation, Eliassi will demonstrate how Kurdish and Palestinians diasporas conceive and value citizenship in the Middle East and European contexts, within which they are embedded. In order to illustrate the complexity of the political positioning of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas, Eliassi will look into the ways Kurdistan and Palestine are imagined within a nationalist and a non-nationalist framework in the context of military occupation and ethnic subordination. In other words, how they define or redefine the concept of community that reproduce or undo the reproduction of a nationalistic ontology that embraces statehood as vehicle of political freedom among other sovereign nations. In order to bring these two diasporas into a conversation about each other’s political vulnerability and eligibility to statehood, Eliassi will explore how members of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas politically relate to each other in the context of statelessness and establish bonds of solidarity or hierarchies of statelessness in order to gain international recognition and situate themselves at the forefront of the queue to gain statehood and political sovereignty.

Barzoo Eliassi holds a full-time position as a senior lecturer and Associate Professor in social work at Linnaeus University since 2014. Eliassi carried out his postdoctoral research at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University between 2011 and 2014. In 2014, Eliassi was recruited by the International Migration Institute at Oxford University to work within a major research program: Oxford Diasporas Program. He has published widely on citizenship, nationalism, statelessness, Middle Eastern studies, state formation, diaspora, migration, multiculturalism and the response of welfare states to migration in Western Europe. His latest book Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness was recently published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Hybrid Seminar

The talk is presented at CMES, Finngatan 16. If you prefer to attend via Zoom please register here: https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5MvdumgrzotHtS-VyLDtFbBwDC-GisRmFDD