Abstract
The article focuses on the impact of the Ottoman institutional legacy on ethno-confessional minorities incorporation into the post-imperial national states. Iraqi Kurdistan was selected as a relevant case for analysis. The tested hypothesis is that informal rules and practices exercise a significant influence on the political process in post-imperial societies, which, in case of compatibility of goals between informal and new formal institutions, can contribute positively to the formation of a stable structure of government. In this context, the author analyzes the interaction between the Kurdish communities and the centre in the Ottoman period, identifies the specificities of the Kurdish segment incorporation into the newly formed state of Iraq, and weighs the performance of consociational mechanisms established in Iraq's political system after Saddam Hussein's ouster. The application of such methodological approaches as neo-institutionalism and historical institutionalism makes it possible to define the institutional parameters of the Kurdish minority incorporation into Iraq and, through this lens, to assess the political performance in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. It is stated that the historical informal institutions of the Kurdish community remain functional and substitutive for the formal ones. At this point, the consociational pattern is assessed as the only possible solution that reduces transaction costs in the centre-periphery interaction.
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