Description
The 2023 BISA conference coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Iraq. Much has been written about the events that have taken place in Iraq post-2003. The years-long insurgency against the U.S Coalition forces received a great deal of international attention, as did its evolution into sectarian civil war, and the later occupation of vast swathes of territory by the Islamic State. Throughout the past twenty years, one ethnic group of Iraqis has suffered more than most, yet they have remained diligently overlooked by the international community in all its manifestations. The Domari (Romani) people of Iraq have suffered brutal persecution since 2003. Already a stigmatised group, since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, they have become increasingly marginalised, securitised, and vulnerable; a situation exacerbated by their consistent erasure from narratives of war, displacement, and subsequent peacebuilding efforts. This paper is rooted in semi-ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the Iraqi Domari community in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. It aims to assist the Domari community in reclaiming both physical and narrative space in relation to war and peacebuilding by foregrounding Domari narratives surrounding their experiences of each. Furthermore, this paper will explore Domari responses and methods of everyday resistance to their enforced social positionality as Iraq’s most poverty-affected and stigmatised ethnic group, within a context of entrenched structural violence.
