The Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran

Abbas Vali

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030160685
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030160692
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

This book investigates the forgotten years of Kurdish nationalism in Iran, from the fall of the Kurdish republic to the advent of the Iranian revolution. An original and path-breaking investigation of the period, it sheds light not only on the historical specificity of the phenomenon of nationalism in exile, but also on the political processes and practices defining the development of Kurdish nationalism in the post-revolutionary era. Although nationalist landmarks such as the Kurdish republic in 1946 and the resurgence of the movement in the revolutionary conjuncture of 1978-79 have attracted the attention of historians and social scientists in recent years, little is known about the three decades of Kurdish nationalism in exile between these two events. This analysis draws on contemporary poststructuralist theory to question the concept of the minority in democratic and constitutional theory, arguing that it is an effect of the discursive linkage between sovereign power and the dominant ethnic-linguistic identity in the nation-state. This text will appeal to a wide academic audience ranging from the fields of Kurdish, Iranian and Middle East Studies to ethnicity, nationalism, government, and political science.

© The Author(s) 2020

Abbas ValiThe Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in IranMinorities in West Asia and North Africahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16069-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Modernity and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat)

Abbas Vali¹

(1)

London, UK

Abbas Vali

End Abstract

The Kurdish Republic , which was established on 22 January 1946, was a turning point in the modern history of the Kurds in Rojhelat. Although short-lived, it had far-reaching implications for the development a democratic political culture and the national identity it nurtured in Rojhelat and other parts of the Kurdish territory in the Middle East. The Kurdish Republic marked the advent of popular politics in the Iranian Kurdistan. The emergence of the institutions of political representation, political parties, trade unions, civil defence organisations, women and youth organisations, and numerous other civic bodies signified not only the existence of a vibrant civil society and an active public sphere but also the entry of the people into the Kurdish political field (Vali 2011). The people were the ‘subject’ of popular politics in Kurdistan, which was expressed in terms of the articulation of popular demands for national rights and civil and democratic liberties in an expanding political field mainly defined by resistance to sovereign domination. The strategies of sovereign domination in Kurdistan presupposed the denial of Kurdish national identity and the suppression of its discursive representation, which, in effect, meant that Kurdish ethnicity and language were objects of sovereign violence, embedded in the founding act of the state and codified in its constitution—the ‘performative’ and ‘interpretative’ violence of the state respectively, to use Derrida’s analytics of sovereign violence (Derrida 1992). The violence against the Kurdish community was sanctioned by law, indicating that the Kurds existed outside the law, consigned to a murky zone of ‘juridical indistinction’ where sovereign power had a profoundly violent profile (Agamben 2005).

The Kurdish community under Pahlavi absolutism was the site of the formation of Kurdish national identity, which flourished under Kurdish rule in the Republic. The prominence of Kurdish ethnicity and language in the construction and representation of Kurdish identity in popular discourse meant that the boundaries of the people and the nation overlapped significantly. They were indeed largely coterminous, often used interchangeably in popular discourse in the nascent public sphere and in the community at large. In practice this unity of the people-nation was expressed clearly by the nationalist character of popular politics in Kurdistan during 1941–1946. Throughout this period the constituent elements of Kurdish identity, primarily Kurdish ethnicity and language, defined the boundaries of a political field in which the encounter with sovereign power took place. The fall of the Republic did not mean the disappearance of the Kurdish people from the political field. Nor did the politics of restoration of sovereign domination and the new waves of concentrated violence and repression mean the end of popular politics in Kurdistan. On the contrary, the concept of the people was reconstituted in the public discourse in a distinctly nationalist mould, denoting the subject of national resistance to sovereign domination.

The identity of the people/nation was reaffirmed by its persistent quest for the recognition of its civic and democratic rights under the ‘redeployed absolutism’ presided over by the second Pahlavi monarch in the 1950s. The following three decades, from the 1953 coup to the revolutionary rupture of 1978–1979, saw a decline in and suppression of popular politics in Iran in general and Kurdistan in particular. Aside from the brief period preceding the introduction of the royal reforms, the so-called White Revolution, in 1962, there was hardly any manifestation of popular democratic politics in Iran. It was only in the revolutionary rupture and the resumption of popular protests nationwide that the people resurfaced in the national political field, asserting themselves as bearers of rights, demanding recognition and justice. The events leading to the revolution in 1979 witnessed the re-emergence of the people as the subject of popular democratic politics. In Kurdistan too the resurgence of the people and the assertion of its pivotal role in the political field followed the same general pattern as the rest of the country, with some notable exceptions related to the historical specificity of Kurdish national identity. Here the boundaries of the political field were defined by Kurdish ethnicity and language, the objects of sovereign suppression and denial, and popular democratic opposition to sovereign power was articulated in the popular demand for the recognition of Kurdish national identity. I shall return to this point later in this study.

This brief account entails basic elements for the theoretical construction of the concept of the people/nation as the subject of popular politics in Kurdistan. The concept of the people is a political construct. It is constructed by the discourses and practices which define the terms and conditions of popular democratic opposition/resistance to sovereign power (Laclau 2007; Ranciere 1999). The people is the subject of popular democratic politics only in so far as it is the object of sovereign domination. It therefore owes its existence as the subject of popular politics to its opposition to sovereign power. The people as such is a counter-power, it is the other of sovereign, the constituent power, to use Negri’s concept (Negri 1999; Vali 2017). The argument that the people is a product of popular democratic politics is also at the same time the affirmation of its modernity, its modern identity as a political force, internally differentiated by social and economic relations but politically united by its opposition to sovereign power. This historical connection with modernity also reveals the identity of the sovereign power in opposition to which the identity of the people is defined. The sovereign in question, the object of the people’s opposition and resistance, is the juridical power historically associated with the constitution of the nation-state in Iran. In this sense therefore the emergence and the modality of the development of the people in Kurdistan were defined by the turbulent relationship between the Kurdish community and the Iranian nation-state after 1905, represented in terms of sovereign domination and Kurdish resistance. This relationship was articulated in the historical formation of modernity in Iran in its official guise: the discourse and practice of authoritarian modernisation (Vali 1998).

The emergence of the people and the formation of popular democratic politics in Iranian Kurdistan were defined by the historical specificity of the Kurdish community, and its interrelationship with the wider society in Iran. In this respect the decisive factor, the turning point in the relationship, was the advent of modernity in Iran, which culminated in the constitutional revolution, and after a lull lasting two decades re-emerged in the form of authoritarian modernisation carried out by Pahlavi absolutism . The historical specificity of Kurdish society, so deeply rooted in its class structure, was also influenced in no small measure by its complex relationship with the Iranian state. The relations of domination affected the wider political and cultural structures of Kurdish society far beyond the immediate domain of class relations, but above all they defined the boundaries of the political field and the configuration of the political forces and relations within them. The relations of domination as such always reflected the changing relationship of sovereign power with the Kurdish community at large. Modern Kurdish history in Iran bears witness to this argument (Vali 2011).

In the constitutional era Kurdish society was marked by the predominance of rural over urban life and a near to total absence of popular forces in the political and cultural fields. The latter was dominated by the landowning class, which, in collaboration with an underdeveloped and dependent mercantile bourgeoisie, defined and controlled the form and character of Kurdish participation in the new popular political processes initiated by the constitutional movement. The active participation of the bulk of the Kurdish tribal lords in the opposition to the constitutional movement and then in the failed attempts to restore Qajar despotism were more than conservative measures to safeguard their power and privilege in Kurdistan. It also signified the absence in the social structure of the Kurdish community of active forces to generate and engage in popular politics. In so far as the advent of popular politics and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Modernity and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat)
• 2. The Restoration of Sovereign Order and the Kurdish Resistance
• 3. The Revival of the Nationalist Movement
• 4. Coup d’État and Exile
• 5. Armed Action in Rojhelat
• 6. The Rise of the Left and the Search for a New Identity
• 7. The Formation and Structure of the Komalay Shoreshgeri Zahmatkeshani Kurdistani Iran (The Revolutionary Association of the Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan)
• 8. The Revolutionary Rupture and the Political Field in Kurdistan: A Brief Survey
• 9. Conclusions: Genealogy of Violence—Sovereign Domination and Armed Resistance in Rojhelat
• Back Matter