One hundred years since the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which sealed the fate of Kurdistan as a region divided among four sovereign countries – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – the Kurds have made remarkable progress on achieving some measure of autonomy, although this has been overladen with enormous challenges and threats.

Kurdish cultural and political rights under the hegemonic rule of the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian states have rarely been fully respected and Kurds have often been used as proxies in conflicts between these states. This pattern is nothing new. It has existed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Ottoman sultans used Kurdish emirates to fight the Iranian Safavid empire while banishing Kurdish emirs, who had become more powerful, demanding independence. There are more modern examples of this, too. The late Shah of Iran's military support for the Kurds in Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein's government in the early 1970s ended abruptly and tragically for the Kurds when the Iranian army withdrew, following the Shah and Saddam signing the Algiers Accord in 1975. Another example is Hafez al-Assad's government in Syria, having allowed the PKK to relocate to Syria in 1980 when at loggerheads with Turkey over its annexation of the Hatay Province in 1939, expelling it in 1998, under pressure from Turkey, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of its leader Abdullah Öcalan.

The Kurdish movement in the twentieth century became more astute in seizing opportunities to assert Kurdish cultural and social rights at times of political crisis and transition in the dominant states. The Mahabad Kurdish Republic was established in Iran the wake of the Second World War and after the demise of Reza Shah Pahlavi's repressive regime. In Iraq, following the first Gulf War in 1991, a central government weakened by its catastrophic military defeat following another in the eight-year war with Iran, paving the way for the establishment of some measure of local autonomy for the Kurds in northern Iraq as a result of the no-fly zone policy. Following the US-led coalition's removal of Saddam Hussein from power in 2003, the establishment of the KRG became an ardent vehicle for Kurdish autonomy in the region.