Emic Sovereignties and Global Intersections: Governance Beyond the State in Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan

In large parts Iraq and Syria, the central state is no longer a key force in governing people's everyday lives. But this does not mean that there is no order or any system to how people govern themselves. This is what the project investigated: How do we conceive of governance and sovereignty beyond the state? With global movements trying to respectively bolster or dismantle the nation state, on both the political left and the right, this question has become increasingly important. The findings of the project are relevant to people working with foreign relations, people interested in the current events of the Middle East, and people interested in alternative ways in which societies may be structured. Through working ethnographically in two semi-stateless zones, Iraqi Kurdistan and Northern Syria, the project provides empirical answers to how governance and sovereignty are vested in everyday practice. Based on a year-long fieldwork in the region in 2022, the project worked to disentangle understandings of sovereignty from its predominantly western history. Following the idea that sovereignty (as it has been conceived by western canon) did not apply to or figure into local peoples' understanding of governance, the project aimed to extrapolate locally sensitive, bottom-up understandings of terms and practices that could replace or supplement sovereignty. While the data from the project is still being analysed, there are still several basic findings that can be communicated. The first concerns the Iraqi Kurdish and Syrian Kurdish regions’ efforts to present themselves as if they were sovereign. Surrounded by and being encompassed by states who do not favour Kurdish sovereignty, Kurdish actors seek to subvert and overcome these limitations by appealing directly to the international community through sovereignty-emulating means, despite not having a state. This involves, among other things, vesting institutions and representatives with the language, aesthetics, and nominal powers that approximate the state-like, despite having no internationally recognized claim to them. The second finding is related to the first, in that these efforts to present the Kurdish regions as sovereign often run into realpolitikal issues that undercut the characteristics of sovereignty as belonging to states (for instance, free international import and tariff agreements, and opportunities for directly appealing to international organizations and governments for [military] aid). Empirically, the project has provided answers to how stateless sovereignty is manifested in practice. In the publication ‘People vs. Peoples’ (2023), sovereignty in Syrian Kurdistan is compared with sovereignty in the English revolution. The article shows how, in the Kurdish revolutionary context, sovereignty has been disentangled from a singular people and is distributed to a variety of different peoples. This heralds a new way of thinking about state formations, as there is no longer a single foundation for the state to receive glean sovereignty from. In the publication ‘On the Sidelines of Conspiracy’ (under review), the lack of conspiracy theories in Iraqi Kurdistan is used as a point of departure for examining how Kurdish sociality undercuts notions of an ‘objective’ state. Instead, Iraqi Kurdish sociality often presupposes that the state is a facet of social relations, not separated from the general citizenry, meaning that the state not perceived as having its own sovereignty; sovereignty instead lies in the highly manipulable social relations that constitute the state. In the publication ‘Struggle Beyond Tragedy’ (forthcoming 2024), empirical data from the project supplemented an earlier analysis of how re-conceptualizations of life and death contribute to moving sovereignty away from the state to smaller, decentralized political groups. The Kurdish example has also been compared and contextualized in wider frames through a speaker series at the University of Oxford in 2023. In the spring semester, 7 leading researchers on the state gave lectures on how to conceptualize stateless sovereignties. At the end of the semester, the project organized a two-day conference where around 20 leading on experts on Kurdistan came to discuss the problematic. The submissions to the conference are not in the process of being prepared for publication as an edited volume. In 2024, the project moved back to Bergen. There, collaborating researchers from Oxford and abroad were invited to give lectures on themes that had been developed in the last year. Working with input from scholars in Bergen, the theme for the final conference was devided to be “Future endings”. Contextualized with climate change, political instability, and overarching economic changes impacting the region, the conference posited that the stateless sovereignty in Kurdistan needed to be thought of as related to apocalypticism. The contributions are currently being compiled for an edited volume.

The project has developed and analysed sovereignty from a variety of perspectives, founded on the insights gleaned from extended ethnographic fieldwork. The project has contributed to anthropological debates on sovereignty through its single author publications (2023, forthcoming 2024, and 2024 under review), planned edited volumes (2024, 2025), and conference and workshop organization. In the publications, different modalities of stateless sovereignties have been compared and contrasted across time and space. The single author publications have sought to move the study of sovereignty forward by pointing out how it is contingent upon particular imaginations of ‘a people’ that revolutionary situations can overturn (2023), that sovereignty relies upon the state being able to project itself as impartial and beyond manipulation (under review), and how different appropriations of life and death wrest sovereignty from the state and embed it in different political communities (2024, forthcoming). In the conference and workshop organization, the project has ensured that scholars from a wide variety of different disciplines have come and discussed their work with colleagues in Oxford and in Bergen. This has permitted for an interdisciplinary re-working of conceptualizations of sovereignty, both in Kurdistan and beyond, that has led to two planned edited volumes. In the first, stateless sovereignty will be compared across the four different regions of Kurdistan (Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey), both historically and contemporaneously, by authors from a variety of disciplines. By working across not only regions but disciplines, authors have been challenged to re-think their theoretical-methodological commitments and work comparatively to find new ways of approaching sovereignty. In the second edited volume, the discussions at the previous workshops and conferences led collaborators in Bergen and Oxford to suggest that sovereignty needed to be explored in relation to apocalypticism. Both historically and today, ideas about the apocalypse – be they environmental, political, or religious – have been crucial to sustaining, developing, and overturning sovereign power. The second edited volume therefore theorizes the relation between sovereignty and apocalypticism, departing from contributes’ expertise in their respective academic fields and regions of interest. Based on conversations with leading scholars throughout the project, both edited volumes will contribute to move analyses of sovereignty into new domains. The project has additionally created new connections between scholars at the University of Bergen and the University of Oxford, as well as with a wider network of researchers working on sovereignty and Kurdistan. The findings of the project are also in a process of being disseminated to various Kurdish communities and organizations, in the diaspora and in Kurdistan, though events the project has, and is, organizing.

Rapid change in the Middle East has not only challenged how sovereignty is constituted, but has also impacted the very concept of sovereignty. The social and political worlds in the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Syria serve as prime examples, as their stateless and fluctuating condition post-ISIS challenges notions of what sovereignty means in relation to practical governance. Drawing on expertise of leading scholars in Global History at the University of Oxford and in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, this project will conduct fieldwork in the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria to investigate how sovereignty, autonomy and self-governance are being locally re-imagined and re-worked in these contested areas. The aim of the project is to contribute new understandings of sovereignty 'beyond the state' in a fluctuating and changing Middle East. Sovereignty has been traditionally interlinked with statehood in European political theory and anthropology. Considering the non- or pseudo-state nature of the Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish areas, new knowledge is needed to understand how governance and sovereignty may work outside of clearly established state relations. While the two regions have vastly different political-ideological trajectories and modes of social organization, a comparative approach will highlight how conceptualizations of sovereignty and practices of governance are intertwined. The stay at the University of Oxford will allow me to expand the comparative foundation for the project as well as develop new, interdisciplinary understandings of sovereignty and their relevance historically and globally. By prioritizing and starting with local conceptualizations of sovereignty derived from ethnographic field research, the aim is to return the concept to an Anglo-European context, where new intersections may shed light on the concept’s contingency, premises, and disparate use.