Between February and May 2022 Dastan Jasim, a doctoral fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, and a doctoral candidate at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg is our returning visiting scholar. Dastan was our first visiting scholar in 2019 when she spent three months at CGDS. She helped with the EU media monitoring project and co-authored the related report on the portrayal of women in Iraqi Kurdish and Arab TV stations.This year she will conduct her fieldwork in the KRI for her dissertation titled “Civic Culture Without A State: Conceptualizing Kurdish Civic Culture in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria between State-Control and Resistance.” The dissertation looks at a large set of quantitative data on Kurdish people's perceptions of institutions and democracy in the four respective countries and seeks to answer if there’s a difference in political culture of Kurds and how those differences are related to the unique history of oppression and resistance in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. In her time here she will also support CGDS activities.Image description: A woman with dark, wavy hair looks at the camera, her head tilted slightly to the right. She wears a pink and black houndstooth jacket over a grey turtleneck; we see her from the shoulders up. The background is an office setting, slightly blurred.