This chapter discusses and compares two different understandings of self-determination in Kurdistan against the background of administrative centralization and nationalization of populations occurring in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is argued that as a result of the intertwining of centralized-territorial state formation and nationalism a new order emerged that saw Kurds turned into a surplus population confronted with assimilation and erasure. Initially Kurdish movements responded to this new political reality by embracing the very principle by which they were excluded: the idea that a population, defined as a nation, is entitled to a state exercising exclusive territorial control. It was in this context that Kurdish national liberation movements emerging after World War II mostly declared the establishment of an independent state in which to build a postcolonial society as an ultimate goal. Towards the end of the twentieth century, and following a critique (and self-critique) on the character of national liberation struggles, a vein in the Kurdish movement started to tie self-determination not to the establishment of a state, but rather to the development of peoples’ capacities to govern themselves. These two understandings are compared and discussed as responses to the nation-statification of society.

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 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 focuses on the emergence and of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) in 1991 and its evolution since then. The Kurds maintained their strong desire to be sovereign over territories they defined as Kurdistan, but reluctantly remained within Iraq. The removal of Saddam Hussein from power in 2003 by the US-led coalition allowed the Kurdish leaders to strengthen their alliance with Western powers and consolidate their autonomy. The instability in Iraq during the 2000s and the growing dominance of Shia political parties steadily deteriorated the relations between the KRI and the federal government of Iraq, and the insurgency by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) from 2013 posed an existential threat to the KRI. The struggle against ISIS brought under Kurdish control vast areas of northern Iraq that the Kurds claimed as being historically Kurdish, but that did not lie within KRI’s authority. However, the subsequent Kurdish efforts to secede from Iraq, which faced strong opposition from Iran and Turkey, reached an abrupt end when the Shia forces took control of the Kirkuk city along with other disputed regions back from the Kurdish forces in October 2017.