Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness

This book argues that citizenship is an inadequate solution to the problem of statelessness based on a critical investigation of the lived experiences of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in western Europe. It examines how statelessness affects identity formations, homelessness, belonging, non-belonging, otherness, voices, status, (non)recognition, (dis)respect, (in)visibility and presence in the uneven world of nation-states. It also demonstrates that the undoing of non-sovereign identities’ subjection to structural subalternization and everyday inferiorization requires rights in excess of the mere acquisition of juridical citizenship, which tends to assume national sameness. That assumption in turn involves sovereign practices of denial and assimilation of ethnic alterity. The book therefore highlights the necessity of de-ethnicizing and decolonizing unitary nation-states that are based on the politico-cultural supremacy of a single, “core” ethnicity as the sovereign legislator ofthe rules and regimes of national belonging and un-belonging. It therefore broaches questions of “majority” and “minority,” mobility, nationalism, home-making, equality, difference and universalism in the context of the nation-state and illustrates how stateless peoples such as Kurds and Palestinians endure and challenge their subordinate position in a hierarchical (geo-)political order and how in so doing remain bound by political otherness.

“Interesting in Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness is that Eliassi also lays the blame with the ethnocultural, authoritarian states of contemporary Middle East. This book is a study of the consequences of inter-subaltern colonialism, in other words, Arab, Turkic and Persian imperialism. … Eliassi’s book interweaves theory and empirical research on political otherness, diaspora, minority rights, nationalism, and citizenship.” (Rachel Stevens, Australian Outlook, June 8, 2022)

“A powerful example of how attention to the institutionalisation of marginality illuminates socio-political processes that affect us all. Statelessness is far more than a legal status and Eliassi uses it to analyse the citizenship regime, the relation between nation and state, and how these produce subjectivities and rights. He combines engagement with theory and complex sensitive empirical work with Kurdish and Palestinian people to build a passionate argument for global equality and justice.”

—Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB), University of Bristol, UK

“Barzoo Eliassi’s impressive, accountable and moving Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness leaves no reader untouched. Eliassi re-writes the geopolitical history of the present, connecting ‘small stories’ from the everyday lives of Kurds and Palestinians in Western Europe, with violent master narratives of place-based identities in a world of nation states. ‘Where do you originally come from?’ echoes the narrative power of governance in the everyday lives of marginalized non-white subjects across generations—subjects that resist through multiple complex stories about home, belonging and social justice. This is a book with long shelf life. It appeals to all readers interested in narrative power, suffering and resistance as an effect of nation and state building.”

—Mona B. Livholts, Professor of Social Work, Helsinki University, Finland

 “Despite the celebration of globalization as presumable borderlessness, the post-Westphalian and post-Potsdam world order remains a highly striated space divided into the increasingly impervious cells of nation-states. In this world statelessness means a political and ontological non-being, whereas having a formal citizenship cannot guarantee a real belonging to a nation/humanity. And even if the state cannot be democratized or decolonized and itsvery political form is downright outdated, the survival and well-being of people are still determined by their relative belonging to a nation-state which even in the most multicultural countries still continues to be defined by blood and by birth. Barzoo Eliassi`s theoretically grounded and empirically rich study lets us feel what it means to be stateless in a contemporary world, what dreams, memories, fears, aspirations and hopes haunt people exiled from or made unwelcome guests in their own ‘home’. Crucially, Eliassi achieves this effect not via abstract speculations but through an intense dialogue with many actual voices and opinions of Kurds and Palestinians living in the West. The outcome of this chorus of tragic human experiences and amazing resilience that the book forcefully presents, is a strongest argument against dehumanization of stateless people and their systematic defuturing.”

—Madina Tlostanova, Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden

“Written with rare verve that is as historical as it is theoretical, Barzoo Eliassi’s book performs, embodies and thinks through the agony and the abjection of stateless-ness and stateless bodies from a perspective that is resolutely and non fungibly local and yet enables deep trans-local insights and conversations about the enforced condition of political alterity. Without ever losing focus on the specific plight of the Kurds and the Palestinians, Eliassi mounts a broad based migrant, diasporic, and ‘post-humanist’ critique of settler and racist regimes whose violence has been laundered and valorized as the hegemony of the western nation state. I applaud Barzoo Eliassi for his unwavering scholarship of rigorous resistance and search for alternatives.”

—R. Radhakrishnan, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, USA

Barzoo Eliassi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Work at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has held previous positions as a Researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden, and at the International Migration Institute at Oxford University, UK. He is also the author of Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden: Quest for Belonging among Middle Eastern Youth (2013).