Between conflict, marginalisation, and peace

: Gypsies and Roma in Iraq and Kosovo

Abstract

This research employs a comparative case study approach to the interrogation of liberal peace in Iraq and Kosovo. Though much scholarship has been produced on conflict and liberal peace in both case studies, existing scholarship tends towards the homogenisation of the ‘minority’ label, resulting in the erasure of particularly marginalised groups. By employing a bottom-up approach to the study of peacebuilding which centres Iraqi Gypsies and Hosta alongside Kosovan Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians, this thesis seeks to elucidate the ways in which neoliberal peacebuilding has perpetuated violence against those communities by reinforcing anti-Gypsyism and promoting necropolitical governance.

Countering the peripheral, excluded status of Iraqi Gypsies and Hosta, and Kosovan Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians from elite-centric liberal peacebuilding processes, this thesis is located firmly in the everyday. Through employing a qualitative, semi-ethnographic methodology, it foregrounds community knowledge and agency by utilising an adapted version of the Everyday Peace Indicator Framework to elicit community-specific conceptualisations of everyday peace. These everyday indicators of peace are contextualised and compared against community experiences of liberal peacebuilding in both Iraq and Kosovo, subsequently highlighting the ways in which layers of structural violence continue to permeate everyday life and reinforce discriminatory socio-political narratives.

This thesis argues that the neoliberal ideological prism which underpins liberal peacebuilding is fundamentally at odds with peace due its narrow definition of violence, permissiveness of necropolitical governance, and failure to recognise structural violence as political. As a result, Iraqi Gypsies and Hosta and Kosovan Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians are consistently consigned to spaces of territorial stigmatisation and a bare life within, where they encounter barriers to essential services which ultimately obstruct social cohesion and peace.

Date of Award	2 Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Fiona McCallum Guiney (Supervisor) & Jeffrey Murer (Supervisor)