Description
In this paper, we engage with the Kurdish community in Japan in order to rethink belonging, solidarity, and statelessness in non-Western situations and contexts. While other European diasporas tend to develop under multicultural or rights-based paradigms, the Japanese case evolves within a tight immigration regime and a culturally homogeneous society where inclusion is limited. Informed by ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kawaguchi and Warabi (Tokyo), we identify three interrelated dynamics: (1) experiences of uncertainty produced by Japan’s restrictive immigration regime; (2) the everyday practice of cultural continuity and intergenerational transmission; and (3) external pressures from Japanese far-right groups and Turkish nationalist actors. Bringing these dimensions together analyzes what the paper discusses as broader theoretical possibilities for the field of International Studies to consider stateless communities and diasporic forms of solidarities developed beyond Eurocentric frames. Insofar, the paper contributes to debates on how the discipline may advance its epistemological horizons toward the future and respond to emerging global forms of exclusion and belonging.
