The Introduction provides a theoretical and conceptual framework of the book by defining ecological disequilibrium and slow violence. It also provides a historiographical discussion on collective violence against Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire.

This chapter assesses the evolution of demands by the Turkish Kurdish community from secession to devolution in the context of the most recent negotiations between the Turkish state and Kurdish leaders. The chapter begins by offering background on the Kurdish community with an emphasis on Turkish Kurdistan and the priority placed on decentralization by the Kurdish leadership in that country. This context sets the stage for a close examination of the reconciliation or “peace” process in Turkey between 2009 and 2015 and the evolution of Kurdish leaders’ views on decentralization that emerged over the course of that period. In the third section, the chapter engages with the published political tracts detailing the theory of democratic confederalism that encapsulates the innovative thinking that has emerged over the last two decades among the Kurdish leadership about the potential for devolution to serve their goals of self-governance. The final section of the chapter considers from the perspective of the comparative literature on federalism and devolution the implications of Kurdish theorizing about decentralization as a form of self-determination and the potential of the political experimentation underway in Turkish Kurdistan seeking to implement those theories on the ground.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

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.

Talk of decentralization in Iraq is usually dominated by attempts to define the extent and geographical reach of Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq, including the question of natural resources. The primary challenge for the state has been how to accommodate a nationalistic ethnic group that has throughout its existence expressed a stalwart desire for self-rule if not independence. This chapter examines Iraq’s decentralization “moments” in 1970, between 1991 and 2003, and in the 2005 Constitution. It then explores the challenges of implementing Kurdish regional autonomy after 2005, focusing on governance and natural resources. It argues that despite a brief experience with independence, self-rule or enhanced autonomy has been held hostage to several variables, namely: Kurdish disunity, the strength of the central government, and concerns in Turkey and Iran about the potential impact of Kurdish self-government in Iraq on their own Kurdish minority populations.

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.

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 tackles several interrelated issues around the Kurdish language. It provides a general internal classification of Kurdish varieties, proposing also a theoretically informed distinction between language history and collective identity perceptions of speakers to resolve the classification disputes around Zazaki and Gorani varieties. ‘Kurdish’ in this sense is considered more a sociolinguistic unit than a purely linguistic entity. The chapter then provides summary discussion of the position of Iranian philology on the history of Kurdish, whereby it is shown that Kurdish is not in a direct descendant relationship with any of the known languages of the Old and Middle Iranian periods. The chapter traces the history of written and literary Kurmanji Kurdish. The rise of literary or written code in Kurmanji is shown to have taken place in late sixteenth century within the wider sociopolitical context of, on one hand, the emergence of powerful Kurdish principalities and widespread madrasa education, and, on the other hand, a general trend in the vernacularization of local community languages in Kurdistan. Finally, the development of modern Kurmanji as a polycentric variety is discussed and the current approximation of written norms are projected to merge in a more comprehensive plurinormative Kurmanji standard.

This chapter focuses on the maps of Kurdistan produced by Western travellers and colonial officers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period of the end of the empires. Colonialist understanding of what constitutes national identity, which had strong perennialist and civilisationalist underpinnings, shaped the way territorial identity was understood. Western map-making in this period was also shaped by the political, economic and geostrategic interests of the colonial powers engaged in the region. Western travellers’ and states’ perceptions of nationality and colonisation and their view of the peoples of this region shaped the construction of a retrospective view on Kurdish national identity in the nineteenth century. Such perceptions overlook the ambiguous, tribally defined and non-universal conceptions of Kurdish territoriality in the late Ottoman era. Nonetheless, Western maps of Kurdistan were adopted and used by Kurdish nationalists in early twentieth century and became the key sources of mapping the Kurdish nation.

The introductory chapter sets the conceptual and theoretical scene for the book. It justifies why examining the formative role of self-determination and territoriality is important to understand why and by whom the map of Kurdistan is produced and used, and how it is perceived. It argues that, as a means of communicating Kurdish nationalist ideals to international society, the map of Kurdistan is generated and perceived through prevalent assumptions on the link between nation and territory. These assumptions derive from the principle of self-determination. Changes in the meaning and function of self-determination have also changed assumptions on the link between nation and territory. Therefore, self-determination and the way in which the nation-territory link was understood had a formative role in the use and perception of the map of Kurdistan.