Education of a Non-State Nation: Reconstructing a University in the War Zone of Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract

Education has been an indispensable institution of nation building and state building, and is often seen in terms of its emancipatory, enlightening, and progressive potential. However, it has been a site of struggle between conflicting interests that are at times irreconcilable. This chapter examines the conflict over higher education in the context of competing nation-building projects that involved genocide, linguicide, ethnocide, and unceasing war. The nation-states of Turkey, Iran, and Syria have used their educational systems in order to assimilate the Kurds into their Turkish, Persian, and Arab ethnic polities. In these nation-building projects, education was one of the means for perpetrating violent forms of linguicide, ethnocide, and genocide against the Kurds,2 and as such this chapter fits into this book’s exploration of education’s role in violence and peace-making, as well as reflections on the role of Western universities in assisting the construction of civil society.KeywordsFaculty MemberSafe HavenNation BuildingKurdistan RegionTongue EducationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.