Mass Violence and the Kurds: Introduction to the Special Issue

The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence is long and complex. Whereas Kurds lived under the Kurdish Emirates for centuries in pre-national conditions Ottoman Persian empires, advent of nationalism colonialism Middle East radically changed situation. World War I was a watershed most ethnic groups Empire, such as Kurds, some political minorities Armenians Assyrians suffered genocide – including at hands Kurds. Moreover, post-Ottoman order precluded from building nation-state their own. were either relegated to cultural subordination Turkish nation states, or precarious existence alternative orders (colonialism Syria Iraq, communism Soviet Union). system pre-national, imperial culturally heterogeneous territories into nation-states which began produce nationalist homogenisation by virtue various forms population policies.