第236回白眉セミナー ： Understanding Ethnonationalistic Mobilizations from Below: Identity Politics Above and Beyond Ethnicity
- カリリ モスタファ（東南アジア地域研究研究所、第13期 助教）
- 2023/10/03 4:45pm
- 学術研究支援棟地下会議室1＆2、及びZoom
- 英語
- オンサイト、Zoom
要旨
In the highly interconnected world, the spread of minority nationalism in various countries of the global North and South has caused one of the most significant barriers to achieving international peace and regional developments. In order to come up with a sustainable solution for such challenges, it is critical to understand under what circumstances ethnic groups are mobilized in a regional and transnational context. The primary objective of my research is to pose a challenge to the conventional analysis of ethnonationalistic conflicts, which regards ethnic background as the conflict’s primary driving cleavage. Inspired by the recent developments in the field of ethnicity and nationalism and through employing a bottom-up approach, my project aims to develop a conceptual framework arguing that the incentives for ethnonationalistic mobilization ‘on the ground’ often turn out to be related to local and private conflicts rather than the ethnic background.
The case study that I consider is the long-lasting struggle of the Kurdish people for self-determination in the Middle East. Spread in the four countries of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, the Kurds have represented one of the most notable cross-border ethnonationalistic movements for over a century. Through multi-sited extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the tri-border region of Turkey, Iran and Iraq, my research aims to highlight the differences in the political preferences of the boderlander Kurds compared to those of the city dwellers. Taking such a comparative and bottom-up approach is expected to provide the ground for analyzing identity politics above and beyond ethnicity.