Iraqi Kurdistan, the PKK and International Relations

Theory and Ethnic Conflict

Hannes Černy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317197584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Due to its primacy in explaining issues of war and peace in the international arena, the discipline of International Relations (IR) looms large in analyses of and responses to ethnic conflict in academia, politics and popular media – in particular with respect to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

Grounded in constitutive theory, this book challenges how ethnic/ethno-nationalist conflict is represented in explanatory IR by deconstructing its most prominent state-centric models, frameworks and analytical concepts. As much a critique of contemporary scholarship on Kurdish ethno-nationalism as a detailed analysis of the most prominent Kurdish ethno-nationalist actors, the book provides the first in-depth investigation into the relations between the PKK and the main Iraqi Kurdish political parties from the 1980s to the present. It situates this inquiry within the wider context of the ambiguous political status of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, its relations with Turkey, and the role Kurdish parties and insurgencies play in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Appreciating these complex dynamics and how they are portrayed in Western scholarship is essential for understanding current developments in the Iraqi and Syrian theatres of war, and for making sense of discussions about a potential independent Kurdish state to emerge in Iraq.

Iraqi Kurdistan provides a comprehensive and critical discussion of the state-centric and essentialising epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies of the three main paradigms of explanatory IR, as well as their analytical models and frameworks on ethnic identity and conflict in the Middle East and beyond. It will therefore be a valuable resource for anyone studying ethnicity and nationalism, International Relations or Middle East Politics.

Part I

1 Explaining ethnic and ethno-nationalist conflict

Ethnic groups and nations

Since the Gulf War of 1991 sparked global interest in their fate of the Kurds, most writers, both scholarly and popular, have denoted the Kurds as the world’s largest ethnic group without a state and the world’s largest stateless nation.¹ This designation seems to rest on two presumptions: first, that Kurds from the four parts of what is subjectively or colloquially called Kurdistan are one organic, substantive, distinct, homogeneous, bounded group, identifying themselves and perceived as a social unit. Second, it suggests – how implicit or legitimate, whether active or symbolic is debatable – a claim to statehood. Within academia, such normative presumptions are erroneously thought to be the preserve of scholars of an essentialist or primordialist view on ethnic groups and nations, which is claimed to be largely démodé and obsolete today (Özkirimli 2010). Primordialists hold ‘that nations [are] around “from the first time” and [are] inherent in the human condition, if not in nature itself … Nations [are] seen as forms of extended kinship and as such [are] ubiquitous and coeval with the family’ (Smith 2009: 8). In the Kurdish case this can be illustrated by one scholar contending that the thousand year span from the fifth century BC until the sixth century AD, ‘marks the homogenisation and consolidation of the modern Kurdish national identity, [t]he ethnic designator Kurd is established finally, and applied to all segments of the nation’ (Izady 1992: 34, emphasis in original). Given such extravagant claims unaffected by historical facts, it is hardly surprising that Anthony Smith comes to the conclusion, ‘primordialism has either a flawed theory or none, and little or no history, being reductionist or largely speculative and ahistorical’ (Smith 2004: 61). And yet, despite its obvious ontological flaws, primordialism, contrary to some claims (Brubaker 1996; Wimmer 2008; Özkirimli 2010), has not altogether fallen out of favour in the social sciences. On the contrary, primordialism or, what it is often referred to in contemporary parlance as essentialism (Varshney 2002), still enjoys considerable popularity in the social sciences, in particular in the discipline of IR. In addition to the socio-biologist approach (van den Berghe 1978, 1981, 1999), one of the key texts on ethno-nationalism (Connor 1993),² and, with some restrictions, today’s most widely referenced work on ethnic conflict, Donald Horowitz’ Ethnic Groups in Conflict (2001), either directly advocates or can be associated with an essentialist understanding of ethnicity and nation. Here, ethnic groups are viewed as organic, static, substantive, distinct, homogeneous and bounded units whose objective characteristics or identity markers that simultaneously define them and set them apart from other groups are observable and, to a certain extent, empirically measurable. Consequently, an essentialist definition of ethnicity ‘embraces groups differentiated by colour, language, and religion; it covers “tribes”, “races”, “nationalities”, and “castes” ’, and membership within these groups ‘is typically not chosen but given’ (Horowitz 2001: 95, 96). This notion of kinship ‘makes it possible for ethnic groups to think in terms of family resemblances’ (Horowitz 2001: 57), and the cohesion of such a group is usually measured through the variable of inner-group solidarity among its members. In addition to its prominence among a wide range of scholars, primordialist/essentialist portrayals of ethno-nationalist conflict dominate the popular and political discourse in the media and among policy makers, and, naturally and most significantly, are the preserve of nationalist elites:

For the nationalists, nationality is an inherent attribute of the human condition…. They believe that humanity is divided into distinct, objectively identifiable nations. Human beings can only fulfil themselves and flourish if they belong to a national community, the membership of which overrides all other forms of belonging. The nation is the sole depository of sovereignty and the only source of political power and legitimacy. This comes with a host of temporal and spatial claims – to a unique history and destiny, and a historic homeland.

(Özkirimli 2010: 51)

In the Kurdish case, such essentialist claims by nationalist elites to the unity, cohesion and destiny of the nation, irrespective of the divisions that modern nationalizing states have imposed on its members, are illustrated by, for example, the prominent Kurdish politician and human rights activist Leyla Zana (2009) claiming the Kurdish nation to be represented by three leaders: Abdullah Öcalan, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. This triumvirate of nationalist leaders is declared to control the fates of all Kurds, whether they hail from Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria or the diaspora. Those leaders are averred to authoritatively speak on behalf of all Kurds, as, for example, when Masrour Barzani, groomed to one day succeed his father Massoud as President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, recently declared:

If I tell you that you can find a Kurd that doesn’t have a dream of having his own state, I think I wouldn’t be telling you the truth. And I think the Kurds deserve to have their own independent state, like any other nation.³

Yet, contrary to what we are told in the literature, where in the social sciences we are made to believe that ‘we are all’, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘constructivists now’ (Brubaker 2009: 28), primordialist/essentialist understandings of ethnicity, and consequently ethnic and ethno-nationalist conflict, not only survive in the public and political but also in the scholarly discourse. This persistence of essentialism in the study of ethno-nationalist conflict, I argue, can to no small degree, be ascribed to the dominance of explanatory IR in explaining issues of war and peace in the international domain and to its pre-eminence in informing policies in response to ethno-nationalist conflicts. To trace and deconstruct these narratives of ethno-nationalist conflict in explanatory IR is the prime objective of this study.

For presumptions about the unity, social cohesion, solidarity, and ultimately destiny of a nation are not limited to a primordialist view of ethnicity. As will be shown, they also feature prominently in the paradigm that is imputed to be the diametrical opposite of primordialism/essentialism: modernism. Modernism as applied to these questions can be understood as a very loose umbrella term for a variety of quite diverse perspectives on ethnicity and nationalism (Nairn 1981; Brass 1985, 1991; Giddens 1985; Hobsbawm 1990; Breuilly 1993; Mann 1993; Kedourie 1994; Hechter 1998, 2001; Anderson 2006; Gellner 2006), many of which will be discussed in turn. Suffice it to say here, even at the risk of gross simplification, that for modernism ‘nationalism, in short, is a product of modernity … and so [are] nations, national states, national identities, and the whole “inter-national” community’ (Smith 2004: 46–47, emphasis in original). Individual scholars’ perspectives may differ on nuances, on whether nationalism can be understood as a reaction to the uneven development and class divisions that accompany the novel form of production that is industrial capitalism; whether nationalism is an expression of an increasingly liberal, literate and educated bourgeoisie that oppose the ancien régime of absolutist monarchies, which then makes it inseparably interlinked to the idea of the modern, sovereign and inevitably democratic state based on a constitutional order rather than royal prerogative; whether it can be traced to the Kantian principle of self-determination within the larger context of the European Enlightenment propagating individual and societal freedoms; or whether nations are a product of social engineering of modern elites in an attempt to homogenize and control the masses, but what they all share is ‘a belief in the inherently national, and nationalist nature of modernity … in this view, modernity necessarily took the form of nations and just as inevitably produced nationalist ideologies and movements’ (Smith 2004: 47–49). The modern era is therefore inseparably linked to the new ideology of nationalism, to this new form of humans organizing themselves in communities and polities grounded in a new kind of collective identity, and thereby creating a new global order.

The final point made here is of particular importance in the context of how explanatory IR explains identity and state formation: the concomitance, almost equation of the modern, sovereign state with the nation, where one is contingent on the other in an almost symbiotic relationship. This view is distinctly expressed in the definition of nationalism of Ernest Gellner, who famously declared, ‘nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (Gellner 2006: 1). It is even more explicit in the works of Anthony Giddens (1985), Michael Mann (1993), and John Breuilly, where the latter stipulated that nationalisms are ‘political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such action with nationalist arguments’ (Breuilly 2001: 32). For him the principal of these nationalist arguments, that ‘the nation must be as independent as possible, [t]his usually requires at least the attainment of political sovereignty’ (Breuilly 1993: 2), is the defining criterion for a nation.⁴ Perhaps most explicit in his state-centrism is Anthony Giddens, when contending,

by a ‘nation’ I refer to a collectivity existing within a clearly demarcated territory, which is subject to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored by both the internal state apparatus and those of other states … A ‘nation’, as I use the term here, only exists when a state has a unified administrative reach over the territory over which its sovereignty is claimed.

(Giddens 1985: 116)

In the Kurdish case then, the Kurds failure to achieve statehood is seen as a result of their not having progressed far enough on the rocky but supposedly redeeming path of modernity. Authors such as Hussein Tahiri (2007) who repeatedly stigmatizes Kurdish society as ‘too backward’ and ‘not ready yet’ to constitute a nation, and Ali Kemal Özcan who identifies ‘ “treason” as an inseparable element of the Kurdish ethnic personality’ (Özcan 2006: 5), decry the tribalist segmentarization of Kurdish society and their political leaders’ petty particularisms that have led to birakuji, the interminable series of ‘fratricidal’ wars in which Kurdish NLMs are often reduced to proxies of external powers, as the root causes for the Kurdish failure to achieve statehood. These scholars, mostly, although not exclusively, Kurdish graduates of Western universities and thus, often part of the diasporic discourse, appear to vent their personal frustrations when they suggest that if only the Kurdish leaders adopt a more universalist outlook and the Kurdish people feel and act more in pan-Kurdish solidarity, they may eventually be rewarded with the ultimate prize modernity has to offer: statehood. Such normative determinism not only carries forward the Orientalism of which Western authors are usually accused,⁵ denying the Kurdish parties autonomous agency and condemning them to perpetual victimhood – victims of the tribalist structure they are too ‘backward’ to overcome, or pawns of external exploitations and machinations (Tahiri 2007); in the majority of cases analysed, they are claimed to be a combination of both. What is more, the nation’s sole destiny, one may even say its purpose, is reduced to acquiring and maintaining sovereign statehood. If it fails in this defining objective it is either because of external factors, such as when the forces opposing national self-determination prove overwhelming, or because it is deemed not sufficiently modern; that is, it consequentially does not merit the designation as a nation.

It seems then as if the major difference between primordialism and modernism lies in the question, ‘when is a nation?’, and related to that but to a lesser degree, ‘what is a nation?’, but that on the question ‘what is a nation’s raison d’être?’, in our present state-centric world, both major paradigms are in accordance: the quest for sovereign statehood defines the nation in our times. This congruence between primordialism and modernism in what the nation ultimately means cannot be emphasized strongly enough; it will form the basis for this study’s critical reading of how explanatory IR explains ethno-nationalist conflict as implicitly a conflict about national self-determination, about an ethnically defined nation acquiring sovereign statehood. Before developing this thought further though, one needs to turn to the other, related sociological concept that forms the theoretical basis of the ethnically defined nation in ethno-nationalist conflicts: the ethnic group.

With a concept as complex as ethnicity that has preoccupied the social sciences for at least the better part of the past century and in order to provide a solid theoretical foundation for the subsequent critical reading of how explanatory IR explains ethnic and ethno-nationalist conflict, it seems prudent to start with the origins of the concept, to return to the classic theorists who first discussed it. One of the founding fathers of modern sociology, Max Weber, famously defined ethnic groups as:

those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonisation and migration; conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.

(Weber 1978 [1922]: 389)

This definition is an unambiguous rejection of primordialism/essentialism that understands ethnic groups and nations as actual forms of extended kinship, as Weber explicitly states further on when clarifying that ‘it differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity’ (Weber 1978 [1922]: 389). What constitutes the ethnic group then in the truest sense of the word is the belief in common descent by the group, and without such belief there can be no ethnic group. Like an ideology,⁶ the group identity is sustained by this shared belief system, a belief in common ancestry and kinship bonds that is constantly reinforced, renegotiated and reconfirmed by collective memories, narratives, symbols, and importantly also political action.⁷ For, Weber continues, ‘ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere … it is primarily the political community, no matter how artificially organised, that inspires the belief in common ethnicity’ (Weber 1978 [1922]: 389). Weber seems to suggest here

that the belief in common ancestry is likely to be a consequence of collective political action rather than its cause; people come to see themselves as belonging together … as a consequence of acting together. Collective interests thus do not simply reflect or follow from perceived similarities and differences between people; the active pursuit of collective interests does, however, encourage ethnic identification.

(Jenkins 2008a: 10, emphasis in original)

This debate about causes and consequences will be revisited when discussing the major differences between the main paradigms of explanatory IR and how they conceptualize identity and the social group.

Since political action does not occur in a social vacuum, this emphasis on collective political action, directed inward and outward, as a defining criterion for an ethnic group leads to the second classic theoretical contribution to understanding ethnicity. In one of the key texts of modern anthropology Frederick Barth observes,

the critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff it encloses … If a group maintains its identity when members interact with others, this entails criteria for determining membership and ways of signalling membership and exclusion.

(Barth 1998 [1969]: 15)

Siniša Malešević highlights the importance and novelty of Barth’s approach:

Before Barth, cultural difference was traditionally explained from the inside out – social groups possess different cultural characteristics which make them unique and distinct … Culture was perceived as something relatively or firmly stable, persistent and exact. Cultural difference was understood in terms of a group’s property … Barth turned the traditional understanding of cultural difference on its head. He defined and explained ethnicity from the outside in: it is not the ‘possession’ of cultural characteristics that makes social groups distinct but rather it is the social interaction with other groups that makes that difference possible, visible, and socially meaningful.

(Malešević 2004: 2–3)⁸

Barth thus directs attention away from what he calls ‘cultural stuff’ as constitutive of an ethnic group to – drawing on Weber’s collective political action – the group setting itself apart from others through interaction with them, through interactive processes of differentiation that not only give meaning to the others but also to the group itself. ‘Cultural difference per se does not create ethnic collectives: it is the social contact with others that leads to definition and categorization of an “us” and a “them” ’ (Malešević 2004: 3). Thus, ethnic groups are ‘in a sense created through that very contact [with other groups]. Group identities must always be defined in relation to that which they are not – in other words to non-members of the group’ (Eriksen 2002: 10, emphasis in original). In this vein, ethnic identity is contextual and circumstantial. What is more constitutive for the process of ethnic identification is not the social and cultural features of a perceived group but external influences (Nagata 1981). They determine wheth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• References
• Index