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Art & Agency: Transforming Relationships Of Power Through Art In Iraqi Kurdistan, Autumn Cockrell-Abdullah

Doctor of International Conflict Management Dissertations

Today, the Kurds factor significantly both as a key to some of the most critical conflicts in the Middle East and also as citizens of the world interacting with a highly global, highly interconnected reality. Despite their importance, we lack a nuanced understanding of the complex and multi-layered cultural context of the Kurds that impacts the socio-political factors inside Iraqi Kurdistan.

The deeply entrenched political rhetoric of the hegemonic Kurdish nationalist narrative in Iraqi Kurdistan has served to homogenize the idea of what the Kurdish “nation” is, to whitewash deep social, economic and political concerns inside Iraqi Kurdistan and to …