Upon the Walls of the UN Camp: Situated Intersectionality, Trajectories of Belonging, and Built Environment Among Syrian Refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.2.2.0059
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018
• Pages: 59-102
• Author: Jordan Clarke Hayes
• Subject Matter: situated intersectionality,belonging,Kurdish art,Sulaimani,Iraqi Kurdistan,intersectionality,conflict

The Journal of Intersectionality

59Volume Two, Number Two

Upon the Walls of the UN Camp:

Situated Interseconality, Trajectories of Belonging,

and Built Environment Among Syrian Refugees in the

Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Jordan Clarke Hayes

University of Pittsburgh

Abstract: Upon the walls of homes in the Arbat ‘camp’ community in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

(KRI), the ubiquitous UN logo lays claim to a built environment disrupted by ornamental facades,

muralism, and radical iconography. Engaging photographs and qualitative interviews gathered in the

Kurdish Region of Iraq in 2017 and 2018, this essay traces expressions of “belonging” within a situated

intersectional framework to surface and assess the categories of social division evident in Arbat’s non-

Western context.

Keywords: situated intersectionality, belonging, Kurdish art, Sulaimani, Iraqi Kurdistan,

intersectionality, conict

الغريب أعمى ولو كان بصيرا

“A stranger is blind even if he can see.”

Resident, Arbat Camp, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, 2017

Belonging: Three doors

To whom does a refugee camp belong? Referring to Arbat, a United Nations High Commissioner

for Refugees (UNHCR) camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), a young man acquainted

with both the host and refugee communities told me: “The camp — it’s ours.” This feeling, that

the camp belongs to the Syrian refugee community, reects the years that thousands of Syrian

asylum seekers have spent building lives in Arbat since it opened in 2013. I met a woman there in

2017 who said, while gesturing out a window in her house toward the rest of the camp, “It feels

like a Syrian society.” Like hers, the homes one sees in Arbat were built mainly by the refugee

community itself.

But neither putting a roof over one’s own head nor feeling at home within it amount to

a legal claim to it. A UNHCR representative, speaking to me in the organization’s compound

in the nearest major city, Sulaymaniyah, claried that it was the UNHCR who “built the camp”

and therefore retains control of the lots upon which residents have built. While the UNHCR is

a powerful player in the ecology of forces within the camp, it is not the only voice. Cinder-block

dwellings have edged out UNHCR tents, and the ubiquitous UNHCR logo is disrupted by

ornamental facades, muralism, and radical iconography.

60 Volume Two, Number Two

Hayes — “Upon the Walls of the UN Camp”

Using the built environment and its inscribed, public-facing surfaces to supplement a

corpus of qualitative interviews collected in Arbat and Sulaymaniyah in 2017 and 2018, this paper

works toward a situated intersectional understanding of the Syrian refugee community in the

Kurdistan Region of Iraq, commonly referred to by people there as ‘Kurdistan.’ Throughout, I use

belonging as a social and aective lens to negotiate the variable materiality of the source materials.

Sarah Ahmed theorizes that “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—

or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments.”1 In this

way, belonging names the emotional process of aligning oneself to something, such as “spaces

and places to which people are accepted as members or feel that they are members.”2 It is, as

Yuval-Davis writes, an “emotional (or even ontological) attachment, about feeling ‘at home,’”

and is essential to imagined futures mobilizing group identications such as those pertaining to

ethnicity, race, citizenship, and nationality.3 In Arbat, belonging relates bodies, buildings, and

built-environmental surfaces in a range of contradictory invitations and incitements. There is,

for example, little option for residents other than to make Arbat a kind of home, yet this UNHCR

camp, even though it is a “permanent” facility equipped for protracted displacement, is founded

upon a presumption that

refugees’ authentic belonging

lies both elsewhere and in

other times.4

A photograph I took while

visiting Arbat in the summer

of 2017 suggests the eld of

inquiry (see image 1). I was

granted permission to enter the

community in the service of

my doctoral research project,

“Trajectories of Belonging:

Sociomaterial Literacies and

Situated Intersectionality

among Syrian Refugees in the

Kurdistan Region of Iraq”

(TOB).5 The exterior of the

dwelling shown in the photo is typical of Arbat insomuch as it is portrays a house instead of a

tent, and includes architectural details—railing, tiles, and (to the far left) a glimpse of a stonework

facade—which make it unique, a home, and in some instances a physical reference to a built

environment in Syria. What caught my eye, though, was the contrast between the UNHCR

1 Ahmed 2004: 119.

2 Anthias 2013a: 7.

3 Yuval-Davis 2011: 9, 81–89.

4 UNHCR 2015.

5 The TOB project asks what the theory and methods of literacy studies might reveal about the relationships

between the communicative practices, mobility, settlement, and felt aliations of Syrian refugees who came

to the KRI after the Syrian War began in 2011.

Image 1: “Belonging: Three doors” by Jordan Clarke Hayes. Photo credit Jordan

Clarke Hayes. Arbat UNHCR Camp, Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

The Journal of Intersectionality

61Volume Two, Number Two

logo, to the left; the mustachioed likeness of Abdullah Öcalan, stenciled along with the Kurdish

word for uncle, “Apo,” by which this Kurdish partisan is generally known; and, to the right, a

green door within a decorative frame, a departure from the UN-blue gates common in the camp.

As I later reected upon the image, it seemed to anchor three dierent ways in which the people

there might locate themselves — as refugees, as Kurds, or residents of the community.

Within the KRI, ‘refugee’ functions as a vernacular term used to describe forced migrants

from other countries who register with the UNHCR. Globally, the asylum regime is highly

variable. Because it can tether people to the country where they le for asylum, extra-legal

travel remains one of the most common ways to achieve asylum in Western states.6 The asylum

regime in Kurdistan is a “hybrid” entity combining local government, regional NGOs, and the

UNHCR.7 Rather than securing UN refugee status, Syrians registering with the UNHCR in the

KRI are recognized as asylum seekers, a status extended to Arabs and Kurds, both documented

and stateless, whether or not their entry was legal — much to the credit of the Kurdish Regional

Government. As a form of ocial legibility that doesn’t guarantee resettlement in a desirable

third country, asylum seeking can still, according to the will and capacity of local power, uphold

crucial protections.8 Kurdistan recognizes, for example, Syrian asylum seekers’ right to seek

employment. It also honors their prerogative to become residents, which allows them access to

the system of camps of which Arbat is a part.9 At the same time, asylum seeking underpins the

social experience of living as a person referred to as a ‘refugee’ by the host community.

The tidy blue UN logo symbolizing this system pairs strangely with the stenciled Öcalan

icon and its freehand appellation, “Apo.” His face invites recognition among the Arbat residents,

the overwhelming majority of whom identify as Kurds — the most numerous people to be left

without a state of their own by the colonial division of the post-Ottoman Middle East.10 Öcalan

has been imprisoned since 1999 for his leadership role in the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK).

This organization is widely regarded by state powers as a terrorist organization because of its

decades of often violent resistance to the Turkish state.11 Despite being jailed, Öcalan remains

inuential. He is the theoretical architect of democratic confederalism, the revolutionary program

6 Betts and Collier 2017: 48.

7 Ramadan 2013: 74.

8 Carastathis et al. 2018: 5.

9 Loescher 2013: 220.

10 The fraught history of Kurdish hopes for statehood includes the imperial West’s endorsement of Kurdish

self-determination and the incipient Turkish state’s successful opposition to it. As Michael Gunter unfolds, the

League of Nations recognized that “the non-Turkish minorities of the Ottoman Empire should be granted

the right of ‘autonomous development.’” The 1920 Treaty of Sevres, imposed upon the defeated Ottoman

Empire, went further, referencing “local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish area” and suggesting for

“the Kurdish peoples’” a possible future “independence from Turkey.” After securing itself by force of arms

against a war-weary West, the incipient Turkish state eectively struck down these provisions with the1923

Treaty of Lausanne, which “made no mention of the Kurds, condemning them to a de facto colonial exis-

tence in Iraq as well as in Turkey, Iran, and Syria . . . . As a result, the Kurds were in an almost constant state

of revolt.” (See Gunter 2016: 61-63).

11 Kaya and Lowe 2017: 281; McDowall 2004: 420–26.