Mar
Barzoo Eliassi, Linnaeus University, ‘Seeing as the stateless in a nation-centric world: Kurdish and Palestinian narratives and experiences’
The Higher Research Seminar is the main collective seminar at the Department of Political Science. Welcome!
Wednesday, March 8, 2023: Barzoo Eliassi, Linnaeus University, ‘Seeing as the stateless in a nation-centric world: Kurdish and Palestinian narratives and experiences’. (Chair: Catarina Kinnvall).
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.
The 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 of the 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.
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 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 published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Be most welcome!
Allmänna forskarseminariet | Statsvetenskapliga institutionen (lu.se)
About the event
Location:
Large Conference Room (ED367), Eden, Allhelgona kyrkogata 14, Lund.
Contact:
Catarina [dot] Kinnvall [at] svet [dot] lu [dot] se