Martyrdom as a Mask: Unveiling Symbolic Violence in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Civil War Aftermath
Martyrdom as a Mask: Unveiling Symbolic Violence in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Civil War Aftermath
Kamal Chomani Institute of Political Science, Chair for International Relations and Transnational Politics, Leipzig University, Leipzig, GermanyKamal Chomani is a Ph.D. student at the University of Leipzig, Germany, focusing on questions of political legitimacy in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. He holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, Erfurt, completed in September 2022. Prior to that, he obtained a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Bangalore, India, in 2013. With over a decade of experience as a journalist in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, he has extensively written in English and Kurdish about the region and Iraq affairs with a focus on state building, democracy, human rights, corruption, Middle East affairs, including the Kurdish question in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. His research interests also encompass state-building in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, corruption, and human rights. Kamal currently serves as an editor at the independent platform, the Kurdistan Times, and is a non-resident fellow at the Kurdish Peace Institute in Washington. Previously, he held the position of a non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for the Middle East Policy in Washington. His writing has been published by The Foreign Policy, The New Lines Magazine, The Middle East Forum, Al-Monitor, and several other outlets.This paper was accepted for a conference at the Bundeswehr University in Munich in September 2024, and it has been accepted for the BRISMES Conference in Newcastle University in July 2025.