TY  - JOUR
AB  - Two different sociopolitical projects of nation formation seem to be in praxis in Kurdistan simultaneously: The Kurdistan Region of Iraq aspires to be an independent nation-state, while the movement led by the Kurdistan Workers' Party advocates a democratic confederal project. How did this bifurcation arise? By putting Abdullah ocalan's interpretation of nationalism and capitalist modernity in dialogue with existing theories of nationalism, I argue that this bifurcation resulted from a difference in scaling the root causes of the Kurdish question: The former project imagines emancipation through state formation within capitalist modernity, while the latter problematises capitalist modernity itself. The modular and hegemonic expansion of nationalism and the nation-state along with capitalist modernity has been countered in Mesopotamia by politico-social multiplicity. This has given rise to the particular structural dynamics that underlie a "recurring failure" in state formation. The bifurcation in question here has emerged interactively against this background.
DA  - 2020
DO  - 10.1111/nana.12609
KW  - Abdullah ocalan
KW  - capitalist modernity
KW  - democratic confederalism
KW  - Kurdistan
KW  - nationalism
LA  - eng
IS  - 4
M2  - 979
PY  - 2020
SN  - 1354-5078
SP  - 979-993
T2  - Nations and Nationalism
TI  - The bifurcated trajectory of nation formation in Kurdistan: Democratic confederalism, nationalism, and the crisis of capitalist modernity
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29458441
Y2  - 2024-11-22T06:40:30
ER  -