the Kurdish Spring

This book by David Phillips is one of the many books in the pile I assembled over a month ago for my dissertation project about the Rojava revolution and its implications. It's also the first of these (so far*) that I've read all the way through, as it just kept yielding good points for my notes. It's also due back at the library TODAY, so excuse me for avoiding doing anywhere near a properly in-depth post about it - but since I'll be reading so many other books about the Kurdish question and its surrounding social, historical, ideological, and geopolitical contexts, there will be plenty of space in future posts to give this enormous and complex and fascinating topic more blogroom,** as right now my priority is to return this book to the inter-library loans bin so I don't get fined.***

   Anyway, the book itself. It's a pretty good introduction to the current state of affairs for Kurdistan as an overall region, but is largely focussed on the semi-autonomous Iraqi region in terms of in-depth considerations of context and prospects. The first chapter lays out a clear historical picture of how, in the scrabbling between Britain and France to carve up the remains of the collapsed Ottoman empire, Kurdish demands for national sovereignty were thoroughly neglected and they ended up as a split stateless minority, lumped between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The next four chapters explore how in each of these countries, since then, the Kurds have been quite consistently and horrendously marginalised, their ethnic and linguistic and cultural traditions suffering attempts by the despotic regimes that took root in the post-colonial Middle-Eastern world to be entirely stamped out and denied, and efforts by Kurds in each of these countries to assert their own identity and independence has been repressed (through political dominance, as in the Iranian theocracy, or through all-out guerrilla warfare, as in the PKK's clashes with the Turkish state since the late 1970s). Though things may be slowly changing: Phillips then considers the relative (compared to other nation state projects in the region) success of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, the relatively promising peace process being negotiated between the Turkish state and the imprisoned leader of the PKK, the ongoing (if tough) capacity for democratic reform in Iran, and the phoenix-like situation of the Syrian Kurds - who have, in the wake of the state collapsing into civil war, taken initiative (mobilised in large part by the PYD) in self-organising male and female militia forces, reclaiming as much territory as they can safely control from the forces of Daesh, and running it through bottom-up democratically autonomous structures that throw into question the entire necessity of centralised states. The final three chapters look at the potential future for the Iraqi region, which is arguably the 'most like' a currently existing independent Kurdistan, and consider how it may continue on its path to becoming this, and what challenges still may lie ahead.****

   Phillips writes accessibly and makes of an incredibly convoluted subject a book that most people already vaguely familiar with the current lay of the Middle East could get to grips with. However, I think his focus on the KRG rather than Rojava as the key locus of Kurdish hope for independence is misplaced, and though he makes some very balanced and reasonable conclusions, at the end of the day he's neglected the more radical and revolutionary aspect of the current Kurdish struggle, and in my view, if a genuine 'spring' of freedom and independence is emergent anywhere, it is from West Kurdistan that such momentum will be developed to propel the Kurdish people forwards.*****

* Okay, except Homage to Catalonia, but that was more like recreational reading that I managed to squeeze a few more-or-less relevant parallels from which I probably won't even end up using, rather than being an actual proper source.

** I might even upload my finished dissertation onto here as a pdf, since it will essentially be comprised of my thoughts on a load of books (well, and journal papers)... or is that needlessly self-indulgent academic whiffery? Probably. Dunno. I'll decide when it's done.

*** Apparently I went over my borrowing limit, and the library staff have been very nice and just let me do so as it's summer (and who else is going to be taking out thirty or so books about Kurdistan, ecofeminism, anti-hierarchical sociology, and the general muck that is Middle-Eastern geopolitics? exactly) but I still don't want to push it.

**** Spoiler: they include pretty much every other major regional power. And America.

***** The KRG has, in my view, made too many geopolitical concessions to regional powers (e.g. Turkey) who ultimately don't want the Kurdish struggle to succeed. Rojava has not and probably will not ask anyone any permission for any of what they're doing - why should they when they're fending off Daesh?