Abstract
AbstractTwo different sociopolitical projects of nation formation seem to be in praxis in Kurdistan simultaneously: The Kurdistan Region of Iraq aspires to be an independent nation‐state, while the movement led by the Kurdistan Workers' Party advocates a democratic confederal project. How did this bifurcation arise? By putting Abdullah Öcalan's interpretation of nationalism and capitalist modernity in dialogue with existing theories of nationalism, I argue that this bifurcation resulted from a difference in scaling the root causes of the Kurdish question: The former project imagines emancipation through state formation within capitalist modernity, while the latter problematises capitalist modernity itself. The modular and hegemonic expansion of nationalism and the nation‐state along with capitalist modernity has been countered in Mesopotamia by politico‐social multiplicity. This has given rise to the particular structural dynamics that underlie a “recurring failure” in state formation. The bifurcation in question here has emerged interactively against this background.
Highlights
The Kurdish question, which emerged as an issue of identity, self-governance, and international recognition, has remained unresolved as a result ofpolitical constellations in the early 20th century
The nationalist project, with its long history, imagines an independent Kurdistan based on the mainstream line of nation and state formation, and it is currently fostered in south Kurdistan
Since the late 19th century, there have been many Kurdish mobilisations for the purposes of nationand/or state-building; none managed to create a sustainable nation-state. This has to do with the confrontation between the modular and hegemonic expansion of nationalism and the nation-state under capitalist modernity and the politico-social structures in Kurdistan which gave rise to the three structural dynamics of the espace kurde: (a) the transborder nature of the question, which confines any development affecting the Kurds within the geopolitical, geosocial and economic dynamics of the wider region; (b) the orientalist mode of state formation based on top-down homogenisation, which aims to “civilise” the Kurds through assimilation and propagates intolerance and punishment of, the promotion of Kurdish rights; (c) the Kurds' deep disunity, the result of the discrepant interests of Kurdish elites, which becomes an obstacle to success and a tool to be instrumentalised by the states
Summary
The Kurdish question, which emerged as an issue of identity, self-governance, and international recognition, has remained unresolved as a result of (geo)political constellations in the early 20th century. The way in which nationalism and the nation-state expanded in the region, as a central component of capitalist modernity, explains the “recurring failure” of the mainstream Kurdish nationalist project which I shall tackle through the historical emergence of the espace kurde and the KRG's aspiration for independence.
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