Voices of the Disenfranchized

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 that limit refugees' epistemic capabilities and viewpoints. Veysi Dag is a research fellow of the Minerva Foundation at the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also a research associate at SOAS, University of London. His research interests focus on studies of migration and diaspora, governance, social movements and transnationalism, comparative politics with a focus on refugee and migration policies in Europe, peacebuilding and conflict transformation, and regional policy analysis with a focus on Middle Eastern politics and the Kurdish-Turkish conflict.