Kurdish People, History and Politics

Kurdish People, History and Politics is envisioned as a series to create new knowledge about the Kurds. The social basis of Kurdish Studies began to widen in the latter part of the twentieth century, growing in the context of major political and cultural changes on the global and regional levels including the coming to power of the Kurdistan Regional Government in the wake of the 1991 U.S. war against Iraq, the process of peace negotiation between the Turkish State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) since the 1990s, and in more recent years, the struggle of the Syrian Kurds in Rojava (Northern Syria) for self-determination. In the last three decades, an expanded network of Kurdish Studies scholars have borrowed theoretical and methodological approaches from feminist studies, cultural studies, anti-colonial and anti-racist epistemology.
This series pushes the boundaries of existing scholarship through a robust engagement with critiques of nationalism, patriarchy, class, colonialism, and orientalism, with the aim of contributing to the renewal of Kurdish Studies in two distinctive ways: First, it aims to prevail over the limitations imposed on knowledge production and dissemination on the Kurds and their homeland of Kurdistan, in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Second, it strives to broaden the social base of Kurdish Studies, which until the mid-twentieth century was primarily conducted by Western academics specializing in the anthropological study of the Kurdish people, languages and culture.
The series encourages authors to engage with theoretical frameworks that allow a radical break with the colonial, orientalist, and nationalist traditions of knowledge production, exploring social media, democratization, border studies, and geographies of resistance in the context of Kurdish diaspora through this critical lens.
We welcome proposals for monographs, oral history projects, anthologies, edited collections, and projects interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature.