Ethnic Capital Across Borders and Regional Development: A Comparative Analysis of Kurds in Iraq and Turkey

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how economic and trade relations among Kurds across borders are promoted via ethnic capital. Assimilation as a means toward an end of homogenization is assumed to minimize transaction costs that would otherwise be higher under multiethnic and multilinguistic social order. This is why homogenizing national outlook through assimilation has been the conventional governing mechanism of the nation-states in the twentieth century. However, scholars of ethnicity and migration have shown that how ethnic distinctiveness within the conceptual framework of ethnic capital can lead to better socioeconomic mobility among migrant communities. Although the role of ethnic capital among migrant communities have been studied extensively, the ways that how and when ethnic capital would function in a nonmigrant transnational setting—that is a geographical-cultural context within which a single ethnic group dominantly populates and cuts across national borders—have mostly been neglected. By taking the case of Kurdish identity in the Middle East, this article analyzes the role of ethnic capital among Kurds across borders in their trading and labor market activities. It is argued that as assimilation policies by the nation-states decline, opportunity spaces for the use of ethnic capital across borders increases with the outcome of regional economic development.