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Approaches to Kurdish Autonomy in the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2019

Cengiz Gunes
Cengiz Gunes*
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences & Global Studies, The Open University, London, UK.
*
*Corresponding author. Email: c.gunes@open.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article focuses on the approaches and challenges to Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Accommodation of Kurdish rights via autonomy arrangements has a long history as an idea but negotiating actual autonomy agreements was often a fruitless task. However, the weakening of state power in Iraq since 1991 and in Syria since 2011 has created opportunities for Kurdish movements in these states to develop and consolidate their autonomous administrations. Consequently, in recent years, the debate on Kurdish autonomy in the Middle East has taken center stage in the regional political discourse. This article first discusses the literature on approaches to autonomy to set out the main models and assess their strengths and weaknesses. It then provides accounts of the models of autonomy that are either practiced or proposed by Kurdish actors or entities in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. The final section assesses the ability and suitability of the proposed or practiced models for the accommodation of Kurdish rights and demands and develops insights into how the current difficulties preventing the accommodation of Kurdish rights in the Middle East may be overcome.

Keywords

KurdsKurdish autonomyIraqSyriaTurkey

Information

Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 48 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue on National Cultural Autonomy in Diverse Political Communities: Practices, Challenges, and Perspectives , March 2020 , pp. 323 - 338
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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