The chapter examines the antagonism of the Turkish political elite towards Kurdish autonomy claims in a broader historical and ideological context with a view to understanding how that antagonism has been codified into law and jurisprudence in Turkey. It explores answers to the question why autonomy has not been a viable political project for Kurds in today’s Turkey and one that can be realized through democratic and legal means. The chapter also explains how the enduring trajectory has led the country into an unprecedented centralist system and authoritarian rule in recent years and the repression of Kurdish claims for autonomy. In so doing, it concentrates on three main reasons behind the impossibility of Kurdish autonomy in the current political and legal status quo. First, a dominant anachronistic reading of the centralist state legacy overlooks the Ottoman legacy for organizational diversity and the Kurdish conventional self-rule. Second, a dexterously designed legal system has made unlawful autonomy as a political project, while presenting the unitary state model as the only one conceivable and fundamental to political and legal order. Third, the mainstream political elites’ ideologically driven response to the Kurds’ claim for autonomy and failure to comprehending or to deal with Kurdish nationalist sentiments and aspirations attached to it.

In the past decade, the Kurdish question has re-established itself at the heart of the regional political debates at a time when the Middle East is once again engulfed in conflict and violence. On numerous occasions during the second half of the twentieth century, Kurdish nationalism has managed to generate and maintain strong appeal amongst Kurdish populations in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, but these states have perceived Kurdish ambitions as a threat to their national security and regional stability. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Kurdish political activism has reached a new height with Kurdish movements in Iraq, Turkey and Syria establishing themselves as important political actors in the domestic politics of these states. The consolidation of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq in 2005 and the establishment of a Kurdish de facto autonomous region within Syria in 2012 have turned the Kurds into actors capable of influencing regional political developments, and consequently enabled them to forge stronger relations with the international forces involved in the region.

Immediately after the partial withdrawal of the Syrian army from several towns in the north and north-east of the country in July 2012, Kurds seemed to emerge ‘out of nowhere’. More significantly, after more than forty years of dictatorship and political marginalization, Syrian Kurds appeared to become masters of their own destiny. For one, both the Democratic Union Party (PYD) - a Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has been fighting the Turkish state since the 1980s – and its military force, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), have been exercising state-like power in the Kurdish regions of Syria. However, in parallel, reports from the region have revealed a murkier picture: Syrian Kurdish parties appeared highly divided, and the PYD ascent brought about significant consequences in the Kurdish enclaves among growing Turkish intervention in northern Syria. This chapter argues that both continuities between 1946 and 2019 (e.g. division of the Kurdish political field, its openness to external influences and ambiguities with regard to the Syrian regime) and changes (e.g. Syrian war context, adoption of armed struggle strategies by Kurdish political parties and ideological transformations) may help us to better grasp current dynamics in northern Syria.

This chapter discuss the emergence of a Kurdish student youth and its projection in a decolonization scheme, along with the development and diffusion of new means of communication enabling the different parts of Kurdistan to get more connected. Many developments of the further decade have their roots in the 1946–75 period. Before 1946, the Kurdish movement relied on tribal networks, and it was embedded in rural societies. The founding of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, although its resonance was limited, was a milestone. It was the first attempt to give the Kurds a territorial state and build unity among different parts of Kurdistan. In 1975, Kurdish demands in Iraq and Turkey were inspired by Marxism, even if tribal figures remain stark. The period between 1946 and 1975, therefore, is a transition period where new actors - urban dwellers, student youth - and new discourses - from the quest for a state to the quest for universal emancipation through cultural rights for the Kurds - emerged.

This chapter problematizes the film modes of Kurdish presence to address the need for a radicalization of artistic tools in the name of artistic autonomy. The industrial mode of cinema’s desire for national totalities is valid in the Kurdish case through a pedagogy of the real to place traumatized Kurdishness in a victimhood discourse in the name of the recognition of Kurdish languages, and to claim its own popular narrations within limits defined by hegemonic powers - i.e. the officially recognized space for Kurdish languages in movie theatres. The limits of this very popular audience are also flagged by international film festivals’ taste and room for them. Within such a historical and political context, which sets Kurdish cinematography as a discursive tool within capitalist film modes, a claim for truth-telling emerges as the domestication of non-linear and non-smooth conflict zones in favour of a consumable form of Kurdish culture.

The history of women’s activism in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is closely intertwined with the history of political resistance. In the 1950s, women mobilized against political oppression. Later, they joined the struggle as members of the underground movement, as couriers, as protectors and nurturers of male fighters, and sometimes as the peshmerga (those who face death) fighters. However, only few women played leadership roles in the resistance. After 1992, when a form of autonomy was attained, civil society organizations, including independent women’s organizations, proliferated. This growth in the 1990s and 2000s, combined with the end of the four-year Kurdish civil war in 1998, led to the formation of collaborative networks and umbrella organizations. Now we can speak of a women’s movement that, despite its internal shortcomings and outside obstacles, has been able to bring about change in the region (Hardi, 2013). This chapter builds on two earlier studies about the women’s movement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Hardi, 2011, 2013). It draws on the voices of a group of experts to highlight the achievements and limitations and focuses on what to do next to surpass the perceived stagnation.

The Kurdish principalities that were renown since the Middle Ages have soon developed an ambiguous relationship with central states. They used the social and political specificities of their lands and the binarity of imperial powers situation in order to thrive. The Mamluk (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and Ottoman (sixteenth to twentieth centuries) eras seem to share some features as for the Kurdish configuration. Both realms intended to integrate while keeping a differentiated Kurdish space aside their core territory as a resource against Iranian (Ilkhani and Safavi) attacks. Although the Mamluks did not fully aggregate a Kurdish entity, two centuries later the Sublime Porte finally made this leap and created a fully Ottoman Kurdistan. The circumstances under which autonomy was granted to Kurdish principalities that recognized the one and only Ottoman rule were multifaceted. To take a few factors at stake, the troubled political situation that preceded the incorporation of Kurdistan, the deal that the Ottoman bureaucrats, among which the infamous Idrîs Bidlisi, crafted for the Kurdish mirs as well as their religious siding, were crucial. However, the process of full integration of Kurdish lands into the Ottoman imperium resumed at the end of the nineteenth century by crushing the weapons it once utilized against their neighbours.

This chapter examines protest in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Prior to 1991, street protests in Iraqi Kurdistan played important roles in perpetuating local claims and broadcasting popular perspectives in a series of regimes that gave ordinary people few avenues for exercising influence. Attention to such protests highlights the fact that the Kurdish struggle under the Ba’ath was waged not only by peshmerga in the mountains but by civilians in towns and cities whose public manifestations of discontent continually pushed the limits of Iraqi authority and validated collective action as a legitimate form of political expression. Since 1991 and especially after 2003, street demonstrations have played an increasingly significant role in Iraqi Kurdish political life. The chapter divides such protests into three main phases, each differentiated primarily by shifts in state society relations, resources and mobilization capacity. Initially focused on improving service provision and infrastructure in specific locales, popular protests soon broadened in geographic and political scope to encompass systemic reforms calling for the redistribution of resources and the rule of law. Expanded meso-level mobilization capacity combined with newly potent master frames and forms of mobilization helped build and sustain a significant level of popular challenge to Kurdish authorities.

The Yezidis (also spelled Yazidi or, in Kurdish, Êzdî) are a Kurmanji (northern Kurdish)-speaking religious minority that are spread across northern Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus (Armenia and Georgia) and Western Europe. Today, the largest group of Yezidis live in northern Iraq, which is also home to most of the holy sites. The Yezidis who settled in the Caucasus had left Anatolia during the nineteenth century as well as during the First World War. Since the collapse of the USSR, unemployment and ethnic tensions have pushed many Yezidis from the Caucasus towards Russia, Ukraine or Western Europe. This chapter will set out (i) the Yezidi presence in the USSR with (ii) a focus on their role in the development of Kurdish studies and cultural institutions, as well as (iii) drawing a picture of how the Yezidi presence has evolved after the end of the Soviet Union, especially centring on new identity debates and the relations between the Yezidis and Kurdish movements in the diaspora.

This chapter argues that one of the longest-surviving forms of local, indirect administration that actually predated the Ottomans were the Kurdish emirates. In most parts of the empire, the Ottomans, like the European governments, for example, relied on a system of indirect rule whereby the local magnates recognized the ruler’s suzerainty. The rise of the modern state and the expansion of its institutions diminished the need for what might be called a symbiotic relationship between the imperial centre and the peripheral power-holders like the Kurdish aristocracy. This practice of ending local autonomies, whereby central states abandoned their ‘confederal organization’ during widespread civil wars, allowed them to replace decentralized structures of politics with administratively and territorially cohesive regimes (Maier, 2006: 43). In Ottoman Kurdistan, the process of centralization and replacing the indirect rule of the Kurdish aristocracy with the direct rule of the government appointees was made possible by a parallel development: the making of the Ottoman-Iranian boundaries and the permanent division of Kurdistan that has been evolving for quite some time. The elimination of Kurdish dynasts, who hitherto held power at the borderland, facilitated the making of the boundary even as the making of the boundary facilitated their elimination.

Self-determination operated as an organizing principle for national liberation movements around the world in the twentieth century. This was no different for Kurdish political movements assuming the principle that a nation is entitled to a state which exercises exclusive territorial control. National self-determination became the grounding of the right they claimed to establish the independent state of Kurdistan. Since the constitutive power of the state relied for its justification on the existence of a self-determining nation, Kurdish political parties emerging after the Second World War framed their struggle in terms of state formation. However, in the course of the twenty-first century, the emphasis on the Kurds as a people without a state became one of the Kurds as a people beyond the state. In this chapter, these contemporary political developments are discussed within a historical context. The chapter looks at the relation of Kurds and Kurdish politics with the state as an object and objective of political struggle. In so doing, it distinguishes between two strong currents in Kurdish politics over the last decades.

This chapter discusses religious traditions that had their origin in Kurdish-speaking regions, notably Yezidism and Yarsanism (the religion of the Yaresan, Ahl-e Haqq, or Kaka’i), with some reference to the Alevis of the Dersim (Tunceli) area, the Shabak and the development of a Kurdish Zoroastrian community in the Kurdish Autonomous Region. The chapter offers an outline of the characteristics of the main traditions discussed here, points to similarities between them and describes their recent history in the homelands, particularly after the IS attacks that began in 2014.

“This chapter focuses on the political developments in the Kurdish regions of the Middle East during the 1970s, which was a pivotal period for the Kurds in a number of respects. The defeat of Kurdish armed struggle there in March 1975 marked the beginning of the fragmentation of the Iraqi Kurdish movement. In this period, Kurdish conflicts in the region became integrated into the regional power struggles and created the possibility of alliances, but as the experience of the Kurdish movement in Iraq demonstrated, the Kurds could not rely on these alliances as the empowerment of the Kurds was not the objective. In Turkey, after years of silence, Kurdish activists began organizing cultural and political activities and challenged Kurds’ oppression and denial of their identity. In Iran, too, the Kurdish movement was highly active and after the overthrow of the shah’s regime, it mobilized a significant section of Kurdish society around the demand of territorial autonomy. In Syria, despite the existence of Kurdish political organization, the consolidation of the authoritarian regime in Syria following Hafez al-Assad’s ascendency to power further limited the opportunities for Syria’s Kurdish movement.”

“This chapter traces the transformation of the Kurdish issue into a transnational indigenous one. It argues that we rethink and shift our analyst categories in tandem with this transformation. By considering the impact of diaspora, Rojava and indigeneity, the chapter argues that the Kurdish issue should no longer simply be conceived as ‘minority rights within a state/regional system’ but one which centres on the issue of Kurdish transnational indigeneity. It argues that Kurdish roots will continue to be articulated through transnational routes. The chapter considers the significance of Kurdish transnational indigeneity for understanding indigeneity and transnationality, as well as the various possible consequences of the Kurdish issue being increasingly framed and understood as a transnational indigenous one. It calls for a linguistic and conceptual shift towards transnational indigeneity in the field of Kurdish studies.”

This chapter historically contextualizes the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement and analyses the trajectory of its organizational structures from 1987 to the present. It traces how the women’s movement managed to establish its own army (1995) and party (1999) within the PKK, while also establishing the co-chair system and the women’s quota in the political sphere in the early 2000s. The chapter zooms into one crucial moment of contestation between the women and men of the movement: the formation of the Kurdistan Women’s Worker’s Party (Partiya Jinên Karkerên Kurdistanê, PJKK) in 1999. It asks to what extent this and similar internal struggles can help us to gain a more nuanced understand of how the women managed to carve out the spaces for autonomous organizing within the wider movement, how the liberation of women came to feature so prominently in the movement’s ideology and how this speaks to ongoing debates around nationalism and feminism. The chapter also highlights some of the tensions and contradictions that emerge between the claim to liberation and the clear framework around the ‘free woman’.