Sulaymaniyah's Market Square. Image courtesy of the author.Tossing about on a broken bed in a cheap hostel in the centre of Sulaymaniyah, I was struggling to fall asleep. The sun hadn’t come up yet, but I could already hear the muezzin’s call to prayer drift through the window. My interest in socio-economic alternatives to capitalism had led me off the beaten track: this was my first night in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Kurdistan is the unofficial name of territories where Kurds form a majority of the population. These include large parts of modern-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Kurdish people are a fairly diverse ethnocultural group; the spoken dialects of the Kurdish language can be quite distinct from each other.
The development of national self-identities, which accelerated among many Asian peoples in the twentieth century, has given many people of starkly different social and cultural backgrounds who live in different parts of Kurdistan a sense of belonging to the same nation. This became an important factor in regional politics. Often, it has led to armed and occasionally deadly conflict. The pursuit of national self-determination by Kurdish organisations has shaped the fate of four separate states to a significant degree.
