Marrying Against Erasure: Marriage Decisions of Iraqi Yezidi Refugees in Germany Amidst the Contradictions of Assimilation and Continuity

Abstract

Numbering between 500,000 and a million worldwide, Yezidis are Kurdish-speaking practitioners of an ancient monotheistic religion who have long experienced oppression and violence due to their religious beliefs, claims to land, and resistance to land-occupying powers. In August 2014, ISIS attacked the Yezidi people of northern Iraq, killing roughly 3,100 people and capturing an estimated 6,800 people (mostly women and children) to be enslaved or forced to serve as child soldiers (Cetorelli et al. 2017). Since 2014, tens of thousands of Yezidis have fled to Germany, which now shelters the largest Yezidi community outside of Iraq (about 250,000). In Germany, refugee policy is focused on integration; the German state makes access to mobility, legal status, and citizenship contingent upon meeting integration benchmarks. This pressure to assimilate exists in tension with pressure within the Yezidi refugee community to preserve their culture. Based on a combined 22 months of ethnographic research, this dissertation explores marriage decisions as a means by which young Iraqi Yezidis balance these competing pressures.