Trust, Sovereignty, and Social Lives of Displacement in Iraq
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- How can those who have experienced violence establish a system of order and survival when the state authority fails? This dissertation explores the motivations and moral beliefs of internally displaced Iraqi Arabs who make informal sponsorship agreements with Iraqi Kurds to ensure protection, residency, jobs, and resources for themselves, their families, and acquaintances in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq [KRI]. It challenges the common belief that civil wars lead to the breakdown of neighborliness. Instead, this dissertation demonstrates that these sponsorship agreements enable displaced Iraqi Arabs to maintain a mutual sense of obligation and trust with the Iraqi Kurdish community while remaining separate from an interior domain of Kurdish life. It argues that by redefining colonial and state power, Iraqis who enter into such sponsorship agreements create a less-explored form of sovereignty, in which the founding sovereign act is not the exclusion of bare life, but the conditional integration of the ethnic other into social life. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate of the Kurdistan Region and the adjacent disputed territories, the dissertation weaves together stories of overlapping narratives of displacement in peri-urban neighborhoods, narratives of everyday encounters with authorities in checkpoints, theological ruminations of Kurdish tribal leaders around compassion and engaged humanitarianism, the bitter nihilism and disengagement of young Kurdish men, deeply exhausting travails of fugitive displaced Iraqis falsely accused of terrorism, and the remarkable agency exercised by displaced women in keeping their families together, among others. At a monumental time when social hierarchies are deeply in flux, it provides a lively portrait of how the fragmentation of authority is experienced, imagined, and narrated by Iraqis.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2024 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ussakli, Kerem Can |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Esmeir, Samera |
| Thesis advisor | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Thesis advisor | Tambar, Kabir |
| Degree committee member | Esmeir, Samera |
| Degree committee member | Ferguson, James, 1959- |
| Degree committee member | Tambar, Kabir |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kerem Can Ussakli. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2024. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/zw301hf7198 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Kerem Can Ussakli
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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