Iraqi Kurdish refugee migration to Britain and the United States: Globalization, governance, and geopolitics

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of two Iraqi Kurdish refugee communities in Britain and the United States that investigates the factors leading to community formation, host-state policies governing resettlement, and the domestic and transnational political relations of those communities. By investigating the geopolitical role of Britain and the United States in the precipitation of Iraqi Kurdish refugee migrations and their continued geopolitical interest in those migration paths, this study questions the neo-liberalist and failed-state biases of refugee studies. Likewise, fieldwork in the refugee communities, as an alternative site of international politics, importantly recovers the political subjectivity of refugees and their relationship to other political actors. As such, this study proposes that refugee communities may be understood within a critical geopolitical conceptualization of political globalization. Embedded within this concept of globalization are the governance of refugees and the domestic and transnational organizational structures of resettlement. Data compiled from primary sources and community informants in London, England and Nashville, Tennessee form the basis for an analysis of refugee policies and community-based organizations relating to Iraqi Kurdish refugee migration to those countries. The study finds that, unlike conventional explanatory models of refugees, such migration is, in fact, thoroughly intervened by geopolitical interests, including those of host states.; In addressing these issues this dissertation presents a conceptually informed study that contributes to research on refugee migration and international politics more broadly. Specifically, a path-wise flow of refugee migration (from displacement to resettlement) is employed in reconsidering the spatial order of power at play between refugees and states. Moreover, we can see that refugees do not exist without states and that a critical geopolitics of refugees can usefully contribute to our understanding of both states and the displaced. In conducting research in alternative sites with alternative political actors but without dismissing conventional power relations, this study opens for analysis a space that is poorly explained by existing theories of states and refugees. By investigating the multiple forms of political geography to be found in state practices and the life-world of refuge, this research identifies new, if subtle, dimensions for better understanding contemporary political life.