6 - Kurdish Diaspora

Summary

Kurdish activists in the diaspora have played an important role in making the map of greater Kurdistan a widely used symbol of Kurdish territoriality. Their location in liberal democratic states away from home-country pressure gives space for the cultivation of ethnic and cultural identities and enables Kurdish activists to carry out activities. Through their transnational links, they are able to politicise their co-ethnics at home and abroad, raise awareness on the perceived or real unfair treatment of Kurdish people in their home countries and lobby their host states and the international community to support the Kurds and put pressure on their home countries. They combined the prevalent normative and political discourse of human rights, justice and democracy with their identity-based territoriality. They argued that the Kurds are one nation and have one territory and their people and homeland are divided by states. This dividedness, for them, is the underlying cause of the injustices, sufferings and non-democratic treatment they experience. Indeed, pan-Kurdish ideas are often stronger among the Kurdish diaspora than among the Kurds in the region.