Event Description:

More than a decade of multi-actor conflict in Syria has resulted in a complex patchwork of legal identity documentation issued by state and non-state actors. This seminar talk considers the legal identity practices pursued by the Kurdish-led Self Administration governing large swathes of territory in the north of the country. Specifically, we explore the forms of identity documentation the Self Administration does and does not provide to people present under its control. We discuss how this system coexists with that of the central state, reflective of the Self Administration’s broader approach to operate as a de facto authority respecting the overall sovereignty, yet challenging specific policies, of the central state. These practices of conferring or maintaining legal identity under non-state actor rule raise some fundamental questions about the way law and (state) authority are constructed and reproduced.


Event Speakers:

Thomas McGee is a PhD researcher at Melbourne Law School focusing on statelessness and citizenship issues predating and emanating from the Syria conflict since 2011. As an Arabic and Kurdish speaker, Thomas has worked on various humanitarian and development programmes in Syria and Iraq. Thomas has published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Migration Review, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Citizenship Studies, Genocide Studies International, Statelessness & Citizenship Review and the Kurdish Studies Journal.

Christoph Sperfeldt is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University. He is also Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, and Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. Prior to joining academia, he worked for more than a decade on human rights and transitional justice in Southeast Asia. From 2021-2022 he was Visiting Scholar at the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security & Justice, Queen’s University Belfast.