Exploring the Kurdish Self-Determination Conflict

Abstract: The conflict over Kurdish claims for self-determination can be traced back to the redrawing of territorial boundaries and the formation of the political regimes in the mould of nation-states during the course of the 1920s in the post-Ottoman Middle East. Having transpired as a recurrent conflict between the various governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and the various Kurdish national movements for over a century, the Kurdish quest for self-government continues to act as a major source of contention across four states. This research is an attempt to make sense of this puzzling question. The main argument of this research is that the Kurdish question, and the possibilities of its accommodation, can more properly be discerned if it is conceptualized in terms of a constitutive conflict of self-determination that plays out within a system of asymmetric power relations between the Kurdish movements, the governments of the states in question, and significant third powers, such as the United States (especially after the Second World War), Russia or the former Soviet Union at different times, as well as the United Kingdom and France, as was the case in the aftermath of the World War One. The main question that guides this research is: what explains the emergence, recurrence and durability of the conflict over the Kurdish quest for self-determination? In seeking to answer this underlying question, the research follows two intimately related objectives: first, to identify the underlying mechanisms, policy paradigms and practices that have generated, and continue to generate, the conflict(s), and second, to critically examine the ways in which it canbe democratically addressed and politically accommodated. The proposed research is designed as a historically and ethnographically informed qualitative study that offers a relational and intersectional conceptual approach to the Kurdish case of self-determination conflict with a focus on all substate regions across four states. The ethnographic line of inquiry will be achieved through multi-sited fieldwork in the countries of origin, with a main focus on the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq (hereafter KRG), and within the Kurdish diasporic communities across Europe, whereas the background conditions of the dispute will be interrogated through historical process tracing based on primary and secondary sources in multiple languages. Building on the studies of self-determination conflicts, political theory and conflict resolution, the proposed project offers a novel understanding of the Kurdish question at two levels: first, by reconceptualizing it as a constitutive conflict over self-determination, and second, by offering a relational and intersectional approach to it from a historical comparative perspective. The theoretical framework offered in this research along with its multi-sited method of data gathering lends itself to shedding new light on this decades-long dispute, thereby opening up new avenues for addressing its resolution. Keywords: Kurdish Self-determination Conflict, Self-rule, Ruling States, Statelessness and Conflict Resolution