Kerem Ussakli

Kerem Ussakli is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, with a focus on political anthropology in the Middle East. His doctoral research was funded by the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Kerem holds BAs in political science and sociology from Bogazici University in Istanbul, and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Kerem’s dissertation project, tentatively titled Trust, Sovereignty, and Social Lives of Displacement in Iraq, looks into a particular sponsorship agreement called kafala, which has a long-standing, multivalent, and complex history in the Middle East, and has emerged as a way of regulating internal displacement in Iraq after 2003. It shows how these sponsorship agreements, which are made between Iraqi Arabs and Kurds, are articulated through a host of practices and social relations: of trust, hospitality, friendship, kinship, accusation, and security. This research draws from Kerem’s long-standing interest in ethnographic, philosophical, moral, and conceptual-historical writings that critically examines the relationship between sovereignty and autonomy.