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Constructing Kurdistan: Cross-Border Kurdish Relations And Ethnic Identity, Benjamin Meyer

Government and International Relations Honors Papers

This thesis examines the emergence and politicization of ethnic identity in the Kurdish populations of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Through a historical analysis of Kurdish revolts and nationalist movements the late imperial and colonial eras, it demonstrates that ‘Kurdishness’, or Kurdayetî, has been instrumentalized as ethnonationalism primarily in a defensive capacity, in response to external coercive pressures forcing the Kurds to ‘think like a state’ and view themselves in increasingly ethnopolitical terms. By illustrating the extent to which ethnonationalism was imposed upon the Kurdish people and the limited appeal it enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century, …