Voices of the Disenfranchized

Knowledge Production by Kurdish-Yezidi Refugees from Below

Veysi Dag

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031468087
• eBook ISBN: 9783031468094
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over a million Kurdish-Yezidi refugees are dispersed across European cities and towns. However, they are neither recognized as a distinct community of stateless immigrants nor as a distinct European ethnic or religious minority. They are frequently utilized as data sources without having a voice to address their challenges. This oral testimony project, moving beyond, but contributing to, conventional academic research, provides these communities with a space to tackle multiple questions in their own languages and with their own voices. The book seeks to answer what drives their departures from their home countries, how they escape, what shapes their lives in receiving cities, and finally, how homeland affairs influence their lives in new environments. By addressing all these themes, this book presents refugee-centric knowledge by and with refugees as objects and subjects of their narratives and transcends neoliberal humanitarian, state-centric, and colonial hegemonic epistemes thatlimit refugees' epistemic capabilities and viewpoints.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Homeland Conditions: “Speaking Kurdish Was Equal to a Crime”
• 3. Escape: “I Had Seen the Deaths of My Children with My Own Eyes”
• 4. Asylum Processes and Challenges: “We Neither Die nor Live but Receive Some Breath”
• 5. Toward Integration: “We Cannot Achieve Integration Without Struggle”
• 6. Self-Governance from Below: “Self-Help Services Are Necessary to Mitigate Our Suffering”
• 7. Exile: “I Have Not Dreamed of Being Here Since I Still Live There”
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter