Syrian Kurds: Ethos, Ethics, Politics

Despite being the second largest ethnic group in Syria, constituting around 10-15% of the total population, and the target of state machinery since the mid-1930s, Syrian Kurds’ everyday lives and experiences have largely been omitted from academic discourses. This thesis aims to represent their voices in the scholarly literature by analysing their everyday lives to conceptualise the entanglement between their sense of self, Kurdish identity, and everyday experiences. The ‘everyday life’ was used as a framework to collect data from Syrian Kurds who live as refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (through semi-structured interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019). The participants' narratives, serving as the primary source, were pivotal in shaping and adapting the theoretical frameworks used in this thesis. Four significant themes emerged from the data: the integral relationship between the sense of self and social relations; the cathectic relationship that participants disclosed towards praxes identified as Kurdish; communal agency and collective orientation in Kurdish society; and the sense of disorientation that they experienced due to the securitisation of Kurdish identity in Syria. These themes were analysed using theoretical frameworks and concepts in psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and political science. These frameworks were aligned with the empirical data to conceptualise the abovementioned themes. The data analysis demonstrated a profound entanglement between the sense of self, social relations, communal life, and collective identity. It further illustrated the psychic life of Kurdish identity under the repression of the monist Arab regime in Syria. Participants' narratives, as represented by lengthy quotations throughout the thesis, carried their voices into the academic literature, exemplified and elaborated the discussed themes, contributed to the theoretical frameworks used, and provided a basis for further research in the field. The theoretical 3 discussions unveiled a nuanced and intertwined sense of self with everyday life, wherein the self simultaneously experiences and interacts with the power dynamics at micro, meso, and macro levels