Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Kurdish Football in Sweden

Ethnicity, Nationalism and Kurdish Football: Identities at Play is the result of almost two years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork within members of the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden, as it relates to a football club called Dalkurd FF. Tiago Duarte Dias reflects on the role that identity, ethnicity and football in understanding how Kurds in diaspora relate to both their Kurdish identity and to the nation that has received them. By focusing on football, Tiago analyses how a sports practice that has been a part of Swedish tradition for around 150 years has been instrumental in reinterpreting a Kurdish diaspora. The desire to affirm ethnic belonging to a historically persecuted identity, while at the same time claiming a stake in a multicultural Sweden, is the key aspect of this work. As football fandom brings a collective form of belonging, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Kurdish Football aims to clarify aspects related to this phenomenon in its multiplicity and how topics such as identity, diaspora, ethnicity, racial discrimination intertwines.