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Violent chronic conflicts, uprooting, and the continuous massive (re)generation of displacement waves constitute the main elements of the Kurds’ history within nation-states’ (changing) geographies. Today, Kurdish-inhabited territories represent palimpsests of involuntary dislocations and relocation stories, constantly (re)written by refuge-seeking/ granting (spatial) practices. Since 2011, contemporary uprisings and wars in Syria and Iraq have inscribed the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KR-I) territories with a new layer of displacement stories. These territories acted as frontline receptors for consecutive Syrian refugees and Iraqi internally displaced waves seeking protection. Displacees found refuge in the rural, urban and newly set humanitarian camps’ spaces; hence, they (temporarily) anchored and carved some sort of a presence within their receiving sites. The rationale behind such receiving sites' emergence, use and progression in the KR-I have historically oscillated between modernization, discipline, development and humanitarianism.
Guided by the urbanism lens, this research aims to narrate the KR-I’s forced displacement territorial biography of involuntary dislocated and (re)located Kurds. This narration chronologically traces these groups' newly (re)shaped receiving sites and how refuge-seeking/granting practices aggregated and (re) articulated the KR-I’s territories. It investigates the ways in which these receiving sites act as seeds of emerging urbanities in such a politically contested region. On the one hand, the research zooms out and repositions these sites' emergence and spatial progression within a broader geopolitical context, socioeconomic conditionalities, uses and meaning subversions due to the ever-changing actors. On the other hand, it zooms closely into the newly set Syrian-Kurdish refugee camps in the KR-I within and beyond predefined (nation-state) belongings in their ever-distorted time-space frames. It securitizes on the ways in which these sites are conceived and inhabited to (re)claim rights “to” and “in” space, territory, history and future. Between the large and small pictures, the research investigates the human and the non-human spatial agency that (re)patches these ruptured Kurds' collective memories and contemporary narratives of where, when, what and with whom (a future) home rests.
This study is an urgent call for the international and local constellation of actors to critically rethink their standardized ready-made solutions and piece-meal spatial interventions in geographies associated with chronic crisis, ever (re)branded under emergency, development and peace ‘help’ banners. It sets the basis for rearticulating and developing further research-based interventions that account for exhausted conflict-ridden (infra)structures, political sensitivities, socio-economic situations and environmental impacts.