Stateless Kurds of Syria in Germany and Sweden

Statelessness and migration across time and space

Seeking asylum as a stateless person is often fraught with multiple risks that begin with the difficulty of leaving home by regular routes. Challenges continue through the perilous journeys across international borders and extend to the asylum procedure and long-term settlement and integration pathways in destination countries. More specifically, these challenges include being intercepted, detained, disbelieved, and rejected as stateless asylum seekers or being met with ignorance, lack of understanding and knowledge, and misrecognition of one's identity. Considered collectively, intersecting experiences of forced migration and statelessness expose a set of normative measures that can be experienced as disciplinary and alienating when combined with prolonged asylum processes, waiting, and uncertainty about the future.

Individual experiences in this study indicate how fleeing Syria represented for the Kurds a double loss of home(land) in both political and territorial terms as it simultaneously exposed the long-standing state policy of control and confinement against stateless Kurds – a predicament that many came to re-experience through the long and strenuous journey towards safety, recognition and a different future in the countries of destination.

Before the recent conflict in Syria, stateless Kurds who left the country often ended up in situations of legal limbo as information about their particular situation and different statuses in Syria was scarce. As more Syrians were forced to leave their homes after 2011, issues of establishing legal identity for the stateless became all too complex. This complexity resulted in increased vulnerability for stateless people originating from Syria during their asylum journeys to Europe, as well as in their destination countries. It also meant that for many, statelessness turned into a long-standing issue intersecting with multiple other social predicaments.

“Proving” statelessness

As evidenced by the individual experiences of stateless Kurds, proving statelessness can be a daunting task for two main reasons. First, both in Germany and Sweden, there is inherent ambiguity regarding the burden of proof, as both countries formally lack statelessness determination procedures (SDPs). In practice, this translates into demands for recognisable documents, although a system for recognising and verifying such documents may not exist. Despite stateless Kurds often presenting official documents issued by Syria, the credibility of these documents is frequently doubted, as seen in other countries as well (the UK, for instance). The dismissal of stateless documents is often perceived as a trust issue, which for some stateless Kurds evokes memories of their unrecognised status in Syria, where their mere existence was denied. Paradoxically, stateless Kurds facing this challenge felt compelled to prove their statelessness with the very documents that denied their existence in Syria, ultimately getting caught in a cycle of doubt and mistrust regarding both their identity and statelessness. 

Second, proving statelessness is closely related to the imposition of Syrian identity on stateless Kurds. This was often experienced when the country of origin needed to be established. As articulated by one participant in the study: “It seems that Europeans take it for granted that being born in a country makes you a citizen of that country.” The assumption here is a vivid example of how stateless individuals may experience the citizenist disposition of asylum bureaucracies that are somehow more accommodating to asylum seekers who are citizens than to stateless asylum seekers. In the cases discussed in this study, the imposition of Syrian nationality, and by extension, Syrian “Arab” identity, occurred when asylum systems appeared inflexible towards the complexity of statelessness and the multiple identities that stateless people may carry. Additionally, stateless Kurds faced the imposition of Syrian nationality  alongside other categories typical of statelessness in the context of asylum and migration, such as “unknown,” “unclear,” and “undetermined” nationality. 

Contestation of identity

What is even more challenging is how individuals found themselves stuck in legal limbo for long periods of time, often also confined to a particular place, whilst their identity is contested throughout. In several cases, this manifested in long waiting times and ambiguous categorisation of people’s identities, with individuals sometimes being categorised differently within the same stateless household. From a temporal perspective, the contestation of identity can evolve into a daily struggle that links past denial of Kurdish identity in Syria with present ambiguities and impositions of identity in the countries of asylum (Germany and Sweden), and bears further consequences for uncertain futures. 

To further give evidence to this manifestation of statelessness in the context of migration, we need to unpack the combination and the sometimes overlap of arbitrariness, bureaucracy, protection norms, and lack of knowledge about statelessness. In both Germany and Sweden, bureaucratic uncertainties and the absence of formal SDPs, combined with a limited knowledge about the specific case of stateless Kurds of Syria, can translate into arbitrary outcomes in individual asylum cases.

Even when knowledge about statelessness is available, updated information about the situation of the Kurds of Syria might be missing. Indeed, in many of my conversations with research participants, I noticed their eagerness to make this knowledge available, first and foremost for decision makers in Germany and Sweden. Through their narratives, I could vividly see how a lack of such knowledge could lead not only to long processing times, difficulties in proving their statelessness and establishing their “legal identity”, but also how it could obscure their histories, identities, and struggles.

Stateless knowledge

While I have explored the above and other issues in my dissertation, I find it crucial to emphasise the importance of history and the struggle for identity for the stateless as the grounds from which they construct knowledge about statelessness. As a case in point, the dissertation illustrates how this knowledge, or the stateless standpoint epistemology as I call it, unpacks the delicate links of statelessness, identity, and migration across time and space.

Going forward, it is essential to study and analyse these links beyond the traditional understanding of statelessness as mere lack of citizenship, as well as beyond the view of citizenship as the ultimate solution for all the predicaments of statelessness.