The Social and Cultural Challenges of Political Development in Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Abstract

The Kurdistan Region society of Iraq is in a transitional phase, it is neither a completely traditional nor a completely modern society. Therefore, it becomes a reason for the emergence of a state of anomy and conflict between traditional and modern forces on political and social levels. Traditional forces such as clans have joined dominant political parties in order to preserve their traditional customs, law and power. In addition, ruling parties abuses those traditional forces during the elections and take advantages of them in the military conflicts. In other words, both ruling parties and traditional forces influence one another. In this perspective, it will be challenging for the political parties to carry out a radical social change to make political and social developments because they mainly depends on those traditional forces. To put it in another way, if the ruling forces do so, the traditional social forces will not comply, consequently they go to join other political parties as an important social force. In a nutshell, there is a backward social structure in the Kurdistan Region on which the political parties have been made that has an effect on the nature and formation of political parties. Since democracy and the election mechanism, in particular, will make the people’s vote to be measured to achieve political authority, as such, the main functions and focus of political parties will be designed to attract the people and harmonize themselves with the backward social reality rather than trying to change the backward social structures. That being so, the same backward structure will reproduce over and over which is a huge challenge in the way of political and social development.