Contesting Kurdish identities in Sweden : quest for belonging among Middle Eastern youth / Barzoo Eliassi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eliassi, Barzoo, 1978-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kurds--Sweden--Social conditions.

Kurds.

Kurds--Sweden--Ethnic identity.

Youth, Kurdish--Sweden--Social conditions.

Youth, Kurdish.

Youth, Kurdish--Sweden--Ethnic identity.

Citizenship--Social aspects--Sweden.

Citizenship.

Citizenship--Social aspects.

Ethnicity.

Social conditions.

Sweden.

Physical Description:

224 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden explores how young Kurdish immigrants living in Sweden experience and articulate their ideas about citizenship rights, belonging, and statehood as they are shuttled between different citizenship regimes and exclusive structures of belonging. Unlike immigrants who come to Sweden from countries where their groups are dominant, Kurds who immigrate to Sweden re-occupy a minoritized position; they do so not merely under the marginalized label of "Kurd," common in the Middle East, but under other, overlapping identity categories that are equally negative and loaded. Examining how national and ethnic conflicts in the Middle East continue to impinge on Kurdish youths' identities in Sweden, Barzoo Eliassi highlights the gulf between a rhetoric of equality and the lived experience of cultural, political, and economic subordination. He argues that, despite important theoretical deliberations about cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism, the international nation-state system has created a global apartheid that divides the world into nations with states and nations without, where the latter continue to be treated as anomalous and politically, legally, and socially superfluous. Book jacket.

Contents:

Kurdish diaspora and the retreat of multictulturalism in Western Europe

Kurdish identities and political struggle in the Middle East

Theorizing belonging and citizenship in ethnically divided societies

Historical injustices, uneven nationalisms and reproduction of ethnopolitical conflict in diaspora

Unequal citizenship, home(land)s and strategies of dealing with ethnic discrimination in Sweden

Orientalization of the Kurds and reproduction of colonial categorization by Kurdish youth in Sweden

Conclusion : struggle for social justice and citizenship rights.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781137282071

113728207X

OCLC:

829386969