Identity Restlessness of Feyli Kurds in Post‐Saddam Iraq: A Discursive Analysis of Political, Social and Cultural Deprivations

This article asks why the post‐2003 settlement in Iraq has not closed the identity question for the Feyli (Faili) Kurds, a community that was denationalized under the Ba'thist state and now lives across an ambiguous line between the Kurdistan Region and the federal centre. The existing literature treats the case largely as a human rights story: a victims‐led narrative of Arabization, Anfal and statelessness, followed by partial restoration of citizenship after 2017. What that literature underexamines is the discursive work that keeps the community in a permanent condition of identity restlessness even after the legal status has been repaired. The article argues that Laclau and Mouffe's post‐structuralist discourse theory captures this dynamic better than the dominant rights‐based or rational‐choice frameworks. After reconceptualizing the case in those terms, the article identifies the floating signifiers (Kurdishness, Shia‐ness, belonging, return) and equivalence chains that the major political actors use to fix or refuse Feyli identification in post‐Saddam Iraq. Empirically, the analysis draws on a purposive, four‐subcorpus textual sample of 243 primary documents (47 post‐2003 legal instruments; 23 parliamentary debates sampled around each legislative milestone; 81 federal and KRG communiqués and ministerial speeches; 92 Arabic and Kurdish media articles drawn from al‐Mada, Rudaw, KNN, Awena and al‐Hurra Iraq) supplemented by 36 peer‐reviewed scholarly sources published between 2014 and 2026. The four‐step analytic procedure separates nodal‐point identification, equivalence‐chain mapping, floating‐signifier detection and frontier‐effect identification. Four policy‐relevant findings follow: The discursive frontier runs through Khanaqin, not along it; federal‐centre and KRG‐statist articulations actively decouple Feyli identification from wider Iraqi minoritization; elite capture of the return mythology chills genuine restitution; and remedy must address the discursive configuration, not only the statutory one. The article contributes to Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism by theorizing a non‐state minority identity as a contested articulatory practice rather than as a fixed cultural attribute and by offering a methodologically auditable template for using post‐foundational discourse analysis in security‐sensitive Middle Eastern fieldwork with insider positionality and vulnerable‐community ethics protocols.