City Talks: Ethnicity and Conflict in Iraq's Oil City: A History of Kirkuk

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Thursday, October 17th, 2019
7:30 PM to 9:00 PM

This Fall 2019 series marks the 10-year anniversary of the City Talks. This Fall 2019 series is themed around Politics and the city. This three-part lecture series focuses on a panelist of Victoria Electoral District candidates, ethnicity and conflicts as well as the politics of racism.

On October 17th, Arbella Bet-Shlimon an associate Professor in History from the University of Washington will be giving a presentation about the History of Kirkuk in reference to Ethnicity and Conflict in Iraq's Oil. Kirkuk is Iraq’s most multilingual city, for millennia home to a diverse population. It was also where, in 1927, a foreign company first struck oil in Iraq. Kirkuk soon became the heart of Iraq’s booming petroleum industry. Over the decades that followed, oil, urbanization, and colonialism shaped the identities of Kirkuk’s citizens, forming the foundation of an ethnic conflict. In the early 1920s, when the Iraqi state was formed under British administration, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid. But as the oil industry fostered colonial power and Baghdad’s influence over Kirkuk, intercommunal violence and competing claims to the city’s history took hold. The ethnicities of Kurds, Turkmens, and Arabs in Kirkuk were formed throughout a century of urban development, interactions between communities, and political mobilization. Ultimately, this lecture argues that contentious politics in disputed areas are not primordial traits of those regions, but are a modern phenomenon tightly bound to the society and economics of urban life.