“How Migration Shaped 1990s-2000s Iraqi Kurdistan”

Summary: This presentation will offer an ethnographic retrospective of the 1990s and 2000s in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Bookended by the 1991 Gulf War and Kurdish uprising, and the beginning of oil exports in 2009, this was a period of great paradoxes. Millions of people suffered as a result of multiple wars, and many migrated to Europe and elsewhere. But many migrants returned as the region settled into an autonomous governance that has held to the present. During this period of Iraqi Kurdistan’s history, I conducted consistent ethnographic research there. In this talk, I will cover both broad historical developments, as well as consider how out-migration, return migration, and diasporic coming and going during the 1990s and 2000s profoundly shaped everyday life and led to the deep connections with the outside world that the people of the region have today.

Bio: Diane E. King is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her Ph.D. is from Washington State University (2000). She has conducted ethnographic research in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq since 1995. She is currently working on projects having to do with community, citizenship, sectarianism, and descent categories in the modern Middle Eastern state. She has published an edited volume, Middle Eastern Belongings (Routledge 2010), a monograph, Kurdistan on the Global Stage (Rutgers 2014), a co-authored book with Linda Stone, Kinship and Gender, now in its 7th edition (Routledge 2025), and a number of articles and book chapters. In 2022, she gave the prestigious Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture at the University of Bergen.