Online seminar "Beyond Centre-Periphery Approach: Inter-minority Tensions and Development of Contested Categories of Kurdish Mobilisation in Iran" will be held on Sunday, June 19th.

2022.06.01

Kurdish history in the last several decades represents their proclivity towards ethnic mobilisation. The identity politics that shape the incentive behind the mobilisation of different Kurdish subgroups are usually complex and occasionally serve contradictory political ambitions. To unfold such complexities, as this research suggests, shifting the lens of analysis from a common centre-periphery (state vs. Kurdish nationalist) approach to comprehending the identity politics in the local context is helpful. This research takes an interest in the ethnographic study of the social processes that shape the dynamics of Kurdish mobilisation in multi-ethnic Urmia city in northwest Iran, where Kurmanji-speaking Kurds live together with Azerbaijani Turks, and in close proximity to Sorani-speaking Kurds of Iran in neighbouring areas. It is argued that for the subjects of this study, the strategies for political mobilisation in the local field of Urmia often contradict each other, varying from denial of the Kurdish nation at the inter-ethnic level to dividing it at the intra-ethnic level and romanticising it at the transnational level. The broader contribution of this research is to elucidate that the contradictory ethnic mobilisation incentives could coexist independently from pursuing an exclusive political end when they all are characterised by an emancipatory force?a politico-symbolic struggle over power and prestige.