Editorial: Mass Violence and the Kurds: Introduction to the Special Issue

Uğur Ümit Üngör and Ayhan Işık
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Uğur Ümit Üngör: University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam.
Ayhan Işık: Visiting Scholar, Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Kurdish Studies, 2021, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence is long and complex. Whereas Kurds lived under the Kurdish Emirates for centuries in pre-national conditions in the Ottoman and Persian empires, the advent of nationalism and colonialism in the Middle East radically changed the situation. World War I was a watershed for most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Kurds, and some political minorities such as Armenians and Assyrians suffered genocide – including at the hands of Kurds. Moreover, the post-Ottoman order precluded the Kurds from building a nation-state of their own. Kurds were either relegated to cultural and political subordination under the Turkish and Persian nation states, or a precarious existence under alternative orders (colonialism in Syria and Iraq, and communism in the Soviet Union). The nation-state system changed the pre-national, Ottoman imperial order with culturally heterogeneous territories into a system of nation-states which began to produce nationalist homogenisation by virtue of various forms of population policies.

Keywords: Kurdish; Mass violence; Middle East; The Kurds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mig:ksjrnl:v:9:y:2021:i:1:p:1-9

DOI: 10.33182/ks.v9i1.634

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