The Kurdish nationalists in Turkey learned how to survive periods of severe repression under various military governments (1960, 1971, 1980, 1993 and 1997) and thrive during periods of relative political relaxation, allowing them space to organize and expand their membership and activities. A major development for the movement, however, occurred in 1978 with the official formation of the PKK, which impacted on the movement in Turkey as well as across the region. The impact outside Turkey has been especially significant in Syria and Iraq, where the PKK (renamed the KCK in 2000) gained substantial political support in Kurdish-majority areas 1980–99. In Syria this started to happen when its entire leadership was based there. However, since 2012, its political influence has grown substantially through its Syrian Kurdish affiliate the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekiti ya Demokrat; PYD), taking advantage of a fragile central government.

What makes the PKK/KCK stand out in the Kurdish movement in general is its refreshingly progressive approach to addressing the oppression, marginalization and disenfranchisement of the Kurdish people and its ability to adapt to new political developments regionally as well as globally. Introducing an intersectional approach to discrimination and inequality in 2000, the PKK/KCK has focused on inequality in all shapes and forms: class, gender, ethnic, cultural and religious. In addition, the approach encompasses social ecology. As a concept, social ecology was created and developed by Murray Bookchin, an American libertarian socialist. It refers to the potential of human beings to play a creative role in natural evolution by uprooting the hierarchical and ecologically destructive society we currently live under and replacing it with a socially enlightened and ecological society. Bookchin's model of democratic municipalism has been an inspiration to Abdullah Öcalan, PKK's founder/leader, who had studied it in prison, on the basis of which he developed democratic confederalism, the PKK/KCK's political agenda and model of government since 2005. This system of government has been implemented by AANES since 2012 as an alternative to nation-statism (Chapter 5). This was a major political shift, making the differences between the PKK's political worldview and those of other Kurdish political parties even starker.

KURDS IN SYRIA

No accurate data are currently available on the numbers of Kurds in Syria. Until 2000, the government of Syria denied that Syria had an indigenous Kurdish population. The PYD-led administration conducted a census in 2016 of the areas under their control, but unfortunately questions about ethnicity and religion of the respondents were excluded from the census. It is estimated that Kurds make up as much as 9 per cent of Syria's population, comprising around 1.6 million people. The distribution of Kurds between the three non-contiguous enclaves of Jazira, Jarablus (Kobani) and Kurd Dagh (Afrin), which have the largest Kurdish concentrations, are 40, 30 and 10 per cent respectively, with the remaining 20 per cent scattered across Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo (Allsopp & van Wilgenburg 2019: 15).

The rapid rise to power of the PYD and its armed wings – the People's Protection Units (Yekineyen Parastina Gel; YPG (male) and Yekineyen Parastina Jin; YPJ (female)) – supported by popular uprisings in Kurdish cities and villages in north and north-east Syria (known as the Rojava Revolution), and the establishment of the AANES, are among the unexpected turns in the Syrian conflict. Using social movement theories, other key factors instrumental to this include structural conditions and political opportunities: namely, civil unrest in Syria and a weakened Syrian regime, strong transnational support for the PYD/YPG from the Iraq-based PKK and an informal deal struck between the PKK (under the name of the PYD) and the Bashar al-Assad government in 2011. Under this deal, the Syrian regime agreed to withdraw its forces from the three Kurdish-majority northern enclaves and hand over governance to the Kurds under PYD leadership, in return for the PYD agreeing to police the Kurdish communities in the north and north-east, ensuring that they withdraw from mass protests. Later in 2015, a tactical partnership was agreed between the PYD and the USA in order to defeat IS after the liberation of Kobani. This partnership is still active in 2023, although US objectives have partially shifted from defeating IS to countering the Syrian regime and Iran. Such international support has further enhanced the PYD's prominence in the north and north-east of Syria. Indeed, following the defeat of IS, the AANES expanded its sphere of control to the Arab-majority provinces of Manbij (2016), Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor (2019).

Unlike other freedom movements (Tamils in Sri Lanka and Catalans in Spain), the Kurdish movement lacks an inclusive concept of what actually constitutes Kurdistan that all parties agree on. There is no evidence of a common platform among Kurdish political organizations or even an umbrella organization, the task of which would be the coordination of Kurdish political activism. Furthermore, there are competing models of state-building, at the forefront of which are the nation-state model and the revolutionary model.

The KRG and the AANES essentially represent two different models of statehood, although none is officially a state (the KRG is a regional government but acts like a state and the AANES is a de facto administration). While the KRG adheres to the older nation-state model – an internationally safeguarded autonomous Kurdish entity within Iraq in the short and medium term, leaving open the possibility of an independent Kurdish nation in the long term – the AANES has aimed to follow the revolutionary model: democratic confederalism. However, in practice the KRG model has all the hallmarks of authoritarian modernizers – failed models of the last century – with only superficial nods towards a legally constituted democracy with a system based on the rule of law. The AANES, on the other hand, has advanced the revolutionary model, which ignores the state and advocates for bottom-up democracy – a grassroots, self-organizing Kurdish model of autonomy – under the auspices of the PYD founded in Syria in 2003. In practice, however, in the context of today's war-torn Syria under the hawkish eye of Turkey to the north, the model has unravelled many challenges. Perhaps with time and contextual changes, the revolutionary model with its egalitarian and democratic potentials will improve. Although the existence of both models has energized Kurdish national aspirations across the region and the diaspora, they have failed thus far to demonstrate a meaningful system of democracy. This chapter covers the KRG and its development, achievements and challenges. Chapter 6 covers the AANES, its origins and its growth into a formidable force in Syria.

IRAQI KURDS: A HISTORY OF STATE REPRESSION

The Kurds, alongside the Arab Shi’as, bore the brunt of Saddam's wrath more than any other Iraqis. The Kurds in particular paid a high price in Saddam's campaign of Kurdish genocide known as al-Anfal.

This book aims to provide an introduction to the Kurds as the largest stateless people in the world, a contemporary overview of their history and a critical examination of their quest for national identity and statehood from the demise of the Ottoman Empire, following the First World War (1914–18), to today. In doing so, it endeavours to explore and analyse discourses on Kurdish national identity, using existing theories of nationalism, addressing the following questions: why has the struggle for Kurdish national identity been imagined and not realized in statehood? Are the challenges and threats currently facing Kurdish autonomy, as manifested in the Kurdistan region, Iraq and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, likely to ignite a regional conflict in the already volatile Middle East?

The Kurds and the Kurdish nationalist movement have been the subjects of many scholarly works since the 1950s. However, much of this work has tended to be too detailed, overly specialist and bulky, with some giving disproportionate attention to the history of the Kurds. This book differs in that it aims to be the first foray into the topic, giving focus and voice, in a concise and accessible format, to the contemporary issues and challenges facing the Kurds and their quest for national identity and statehood.

THE KURDS: POPULATION DISTRIBUTION AND CULTURAL RIGHTS

Numbering 25–35 million, the Kurds make up the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East. They are one of the indigenous peoples of the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands in what are now south-eastern Turkey, a contiguous 500,000 square kilometres straddling north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and south-western Armenia.

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.

Kurdish women, as women and as members of an oppressed people suffering ethnic discrimination within the four dominant states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – nation states with a well-rooted patriarchal system spanning several millennia – face a double discrimination. Some in the Kurdish women's movement go further and define the oppression experienced by Kurdish women as threefold, stemming from capitalism, patriarchy and nation states (Käser 2021: 27). “Patriarchy and autocratic nation-states”, says Firat Anli, the former co-mayor of Diyarbakir, “have similar mind-sets, similar souls and similar aims. Both are based on inequality and the imposition of hegemony and one single identity” (Al-Ali & Taş 2018a: 463). Anli and his co-mayor, Gültan Kişanak, like many others elected by the pro-Kurd movement, have been bearing the brunt of Turkey's alarming misuse of terrorist charges (Human Rights Watch 2022). “Of the 171 mayors elected on the HDP's ticket in the past decade, some 154 have been dismissed or prevented from taking office. Dozens have been arrested” (Economist 2023a). And some, like Kişanak, have been languishing in jail since 2016.

The Kurdish women's movement has evolved over time, taking different routes, shapes and forms, but it has always been united in the aim of achieving gender equality and social justice for women in Kurdistan. Whether as part of the Kurdish liberation movements (broadly referring to both clandestine and legal organizations and groups) or independently as champions for ending violence against women and girls, Kurdish women have made an impressive impact on both the prevailing political landscape and women's social status.

Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK/KCK's incarcerated leader, has dedicated the twenty-first century to the liberation of women. He said in 2013:

The word “diaspora” is derived from the Greek word dia, meaning through, and speirein, meaning scatter, the dictionary definition of which is “dispersion from”. Avtar Brah suggests that the word embodies the notion of a centre, a home, from where the dispersion occurs (Brah 1996). William Safran further defines diasporas as expatriate communities characterized by their special relationship with a homeland, whether real or imagined (Safran 1991).

The last few decades have seen the proliferation of Kurds in the diaspora. The most significant of all are the Kurds who left both Kurdistan and the state they belonged to. The history of such movements goes back to the nineteenth century when large numbers of Yezidi Kurds migrated to the former Russian-controlled Transcaucasia, now the republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. Although the population was later dispersed, with some being forcibly moved by Stalin to Siberia and central Asia, they played a substantive role in developing modern Kurdish culture through radio transmissions from Yerevan in Armenia and via print media. The radio broadcasts in particular had a notable impact on the national awareness of the Kurds in Kurdistan (van Bruinessen 2000).

The twentieth century saw the Kurdish diaspora developing in multiple patterns. Large populations of Kurds moved out of the Kurdistan regions in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran to other parts of these sovereign states, the Middle East region and further afield to western Europe, north America and Australia. Many of them, especially those who settled in Europe, north America and Australia, were politicized Kurds who had left Kurdistan from any one of its four segments, seeking refuge from political repression and persecution. McDowall estimates the number of diaspora Kurds to be around two million (McDowall 2021: 4).

While a cross-section of diaspora Kurds succeeded in boosting and promoting Kurdish art, literature and language, the more politicized Kurds concentrated on advancing Kurdish nationalist aspirations, transnationalizing the Kurdish struggle for territory and national identity. This chapter focuses on the latter group, who have undeniably made an enormous contribution to Kurdish nation-building, or “long-distance nationalism”, a term coined by Benedict Anderson referring to “a nationalism that no longer depends as it once did on territorial location in a home country” (Anderson 2001: 42).

Our ability to work together or not has a dramatic impact on our ability to resolve any environmental problem. We therefore begin by exploring the concept of collective action, or cooperation. The theory of collective action has been developed in multiple independent disciplines. The perspective of evolutionary theory frames collective action as a mystery: why would individuals cooperate with each other when it is individually costly and publicly beneficial? In environmental studies, the failure to act collectively is associated with the tragedy of the commons, or environmental ruin.

The first chapter in this part deals with the tragedy of the commons as the dominant framing for environmental property rights. Here we will also interrogate the utility of this framing and consider others as well. Chapter 2 builds directly on Chapter 1 by asking how social and ecological boundaries can facilitate cooperation and address the tragedy of the commons. In this chapter we also consider the different types of boundaries that we see and what function they play. Finally, in Chapter 3 we turn to the primary mechanisms for cooperation among humans or any species: reciprocity and kinship. We will also see that the human psychologies of reciprocity and kinship can be used to motivate environmental stewardship and reframe the Western perspective on environmental property rights.

In the previous chapter, we discussed how intergroup competition promotes within-group cooperation. But this is not the only thing needed for cooperation; we must also consider mechanisms that develop and maintain cooperation within groups. The two most well-established mechanisms for enabling cooperation across all species are kinship and reciprocity. We have already touched on reciprocity in the previous chapter.

A large scientific controversy persists over whether intergroup competition and the selection of cooperation at the level of groups, as discussed in Chapter 2, or reciprocity and kinship are the primary factors that enable cooperation. As an outsider to the academic communities involved, my interpretation is that this controversy is in part due to the very same tribal instincts we discussed in Chapter 2: often the easiest way to identify yourself as belonging to a group is to clarify that you don't like “them” and what they’re doing and thinking. In his discussion of the mathematical equivalence between group selection and kinship-based selection, Wilson (2016) – arguably the primary proponent of group-based selection through his multilevel selection framework – has argued that these mechanisms do not need to be seen as mutually exclusive. My interpretation is that cooperation requires the identification of an in-group to ensure that the costs of cooperation are recouped, and that kinship and reciprocity are the two primary mechanisms for this identification. In this chapter, we discuss each of these as mechanisms for establishing and maintaining cooperation, as a means for establishing property rights, and as a way to fundamentally change how we view nature and environmental rights to nature.

Kinship and reciprocity closely relate to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values. Intrinsic values come from the inside, and need no external reinforcement; extrinsic values are only instrumental, and without external reinforcement, will fade. The dominant Western discourse about property rights and public policy has mostly neglected intrinsic value. This is in part due to an abridged understanding of the nature of human actors as only responding to extrinsic incentives (Bowles 2016). I believe that another reason for this is that certain aspects of intrinsic motivation are harder to implement at scale, which is an inherent goal of any public policy.

This chapter pulls together content from several previous chapters to discuss arguably the most popular type of property-based policies: markets. We have already discussed markets through our examination of exchange rights in Chapter 5. There we associated exchange with reciprocity, establishing trade as a culturally ubiquitous phenomenon. As such we need to distinguish “markets”, which include informal exchange and are found everywhere but are less legible to state actors, with market-based policies, which are public policies that include the allocation of exchange rights and are our subject for this chapter. In Chapter 5 we also considered the goals of equity and efficiency that are a strong part of the dominant market discourse. Efficiency is a primary theoretical motivation for most market-based policies, and so we build further on that discussion here.

In Chapter 6, we introduced the idea of a policy panacea, which we will reflect on a fair amount in this chapter, since the market-based policies we will discuss in this chapter have often received the panacea treatment from their promoters. In Chapter 8 we introduced the idea of a hybrid property regime involving multiple types of actors, each with its own set of rights. In this chapter we unpack market policies as their own kind of hybrid property regime, commonly involving a state actor (or in some cases an NGO) with control rights and resource users with use and exchange rights.

We will explore three types of market-based environmental policies, based on O’Donnell's (2018) classification: (1) public goods markets (e.g., PES policies, conservation easements, certifications); (2) tradeable environmental allowances: shared resource markets (e.g., catch shares); and (3) tradeable environmental allowances: regulatory markets (e.g., cap-and-trade). A public goods market involves an external actor paying a local actor for the provision of a public good, based on a formalized evaluation or certification scheme. A prominent example of what O’Donnell (2018) refers to as a public goods market are payment for ecosystem services policies. In this case, money is being exchanged for environmental benefits – such as avoided deforestation – that are framed as public goods, and entitlements are granted to landowners.

Exchange, most broadly, is the act of carrying out our psychology of reciprocity. I give you this, you give me that, or in the case of indirect reciprocity, I give you this so someone else will give me that. Because exchange is a form of cooperation, we can view it as the source of social benefit. Ideally, in the case of direct reciprocity, an exchange produces a win-win outcome between the partners involved, because each partner values what they receive more than what they give up. The potential magic here is that social value is created out of nothing, simply by reallocating resources. This simple, imagined scenario drives a lot of policy discourse and decision-making through phrases like “let the market decide”. What does this mean exactly, and how does exchange of environmental rights promote the public good, or not?

In the previous chapter, we unpacked what it means to use the environment, both directly and indirectly. In this chapter we do the same for exchange: what does it mean to trade in environmental rights? To begin, we continue the discussion of entitlements from the end of the last chapter by discussing the role of exchange entitlements. We do so through the lens of what is referred to as a patron-client relationship, which will have us question a win-win, cooperative framing of exchange.

From here, much of the chapter deals with arguments related to exchange and its relationship to efficiency. Efficiency is the primary theoretical motivation for several market-based environmental policies we will discuss in Chapter 9, so it is worth spending some time grappling with the background. We start by engaging with a dominant discourse that argues that markets promote efficient allocations of resources. To unpack this argument, we explore the relationship between efficiency and equity, which can also be seen as an important allocational principle. After this we explore the relationship between efficiency and stewardship, and explore a hypothesis that efficient markets tend to discount broader social and environmental impacts of exchange. Building on this discussion, we consider the argument that alienation, even if it does not necessarily incentivize stewardship, might incentivize development.

What is a policy panacea? One answer is that it is a solution that has been broadly applied, and panaceas are often talked about as being successful in this way. This is not the same thing as whether the policy is successful in producing the desired outcomes; it may or it may not be. The theory of panaceas I develop in this chapter is agnostic about this second type of success. Rather, the theory developed here is about the features of a policy that enable its spread: its evolutionary success as a panacea. For to spread, policies are often expressed in apolitical, highly legible terms and supported by top-down governance, and at the expense of more extensive cooperation across groups.

In this chapter we are doing two things at once. First, we are unpacking the dimensions that enable the panacea problem that I just mentioned. And in so doing, we discuss key issues of environmental policy analysis. Panaceas are about overgeneralizing, usually beyond the evidence, but how do we think about the trade-offs involved in making generalizations? In the first section of this chapter we tackle that question.

From there, we move on to discuss a set of enabling factors for the spread of a policy panacea, starting with a set of psychological biases and heuristics that we all have, and which lead us to favour the spread of a preferred solution, even in the face of contrary evidence. From here we discuss another social aspect of panaceas, and this comes from the fact that preference for any specific policy is closely related to one's social affiliations, to one's membership in a group. And here we tie this conversation back to our previous discussion of intergroup dynamics and the synergy between intergroup conflict and intragroup cooperation.

In the third section we discuss the role of politics. We have already talked about the role that apolitical framings can play in our discussion of the tragedy of the commons and collective action problems in Chapter 1. Panaceas are likewise often cast as apolitical, technical solutions; this helps them garner support by decision-makers who might feel threatened by the spectre of political controversy.

The goal of this book is to synthesize multiple perspectives and evidence on environmental property rights, and thereby improve understanding and decision-making. I begin this final chapter by reflecting on the methods used to conduct this synthesis. After this, I outline two ways in which we can use this synthesis to make better environmental policy decisions. First, I discuss a process of institutional diagnosis (Ostrom et al. 2007a; Young 2002). This is a process of ascertaining the relevant features of a problem to explore their implications for the design of responses. In the second section below, I describe how this book can be used to diagnose environmental problems by drawing questions from each chapter that we should ask about a problem and its possible solutions. Second, I discuss how expertise depends on the qualities of the expert. Here I am drawing on work by Matson, Clark and Andersson (2016), who describe qualities of effective sustainability leaders. The third and final section in this chapter explores the qualities of the experts who would be making the prescriptions based on these diagnoses.

Methods

Much of the motivation for this book is my perception of the synthesis bottleneck in the study of environmental property rights that results from the siloed nature of research. The goal here was to pull together multiple disciplines to tell a more comprehensive story about the meaning and role of environmental ownership. It is worth reflecting here on the methods that I used and the implications these have for how we should interpret this work. Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom (2010) reflect on the various methods that are used by scholars in the study of environmental commons governance. The types of studies that they consider are found through the pages of this book: individual and comparative case studies, experiments, large-n analyses and synthetic meta-analyses. And the method for the book as a whole is reflected in what Poteete et al. (2010) call a qualitative “narrative synthesis”, with their prime example of this being the well-known work on natural resource management by Baland and Platteau (1996).