Getting Out: Mixing Outdoor Recreation, Place-Making, and War in Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract

This dissertation explores outdoor recreation as a means of making political claims, restructuring memory, and reimagining the Iraqi Kurdish Region (Başûr), also colloquially known as Kurdistan. Existing scholarship has explored Kurdish sovereignty, trail-building in the Middle East, and war-curated landscapes across the region. Building on this work, my research addresses twin questions: What does getting outside enable in Kurdistan and how do ideas of care and exercise as leisure create relations across varied Kurdish contexts? Outdoor recreation in Kurdistan expanded with the formalization of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in 2005. Reading through two years of fieldwork, I contend that getting outside (be it in mountaineering, paragliding, or hiking), and the economies these activities create, permit plasticity and reinvention amid the tensions of family, ongoing violence, and regional geopolitics. This rise in Kurdish outdoor recreation involves expansive claims; the KRG claims to govern all of Kurdistan. The Kurdish Mountaineering and Climbing Federation claims to represent all Kurdish mountaineers. Participants claim the “right way” to get outside. Trails link nomadism and war to claim histories of belonging. Together, these claims construct a historical entitlement to place as well as new horizons for connections. The dissertation approaches getting outside as a creative process. Hiking makes land Kurdish through traversals that create embodied histories. Building Kurdish trails makes places Kurdish. Envisioning getting outside as a return manifests a history in which that past existed. Far from peripheral to matters of state-making and belonging, outdoor recreation materializes them in its performance. At the same time, combining recreation, environmentalism, and discipline creates hierarchies of difference between the semi-autonomous state and federal Iraq, between hikers and picnickers, and between Kurdish and Arab participants. In exploring all of this, I suggest that outdoor recreation opens new ways to discuss Kurdish sovereignty and temporalities of war. With these proposals, this study contributes to ethnographies of Kurdistan and mountaineering, as well as to theories of ecologies of war, outdoor sport, and nationalism.