Nations and Nationalism - 2023 - Matin - The Kurdish Janus The Intersocietal Construction of Nations PDF

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Received: 18 August 2021 Revised: 19 August 2022 Accepted: 20 December 2022
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12932
ARTICLE
The Kurdish Janus: The intersocietal construction

of nations
Kamran Matin1 | Jahangir Mahmoudi2
The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

1
The University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

2 Abstract
Existing accounts of Kurdish nationalism can be mapped
Correspondence
onto the main theories of nationalism, that is, primordialism,
Kamran Matin, The University of Sussex,
Brighton, UK. ethnosymbolism and modernism. These theories, however,
Email: k.matin@sussex.ac.uk suffer, respectively, from essentialism, circularity and aporia,
manifest in their common inability to digest the Janus-like
character of nations, that is, their display of simultaneous
modernity and antiquity. This paper develops an alterna-
tive account through a critical application of the theory of
‘uneven and combined development’ (UCD) to the Republic
of Kurdistan of 1946. The argument unfolds in three steps.
First, we argue that the failure of mainstream theories of
nationalism to explain the nation's historical ambiguity lies
in their ‘internalism’. Second, we show that UCD overcomes
internalism through its plural social ontology and enables a
retheorising of nations as interactive products of the geopo-
litical mediation of historical capitalism's expansion through
societal multiplicity. Central to this process was the emer-
gence of nationalism as a defensive and emulative ideology
of geopolitical self-preservation. This involved reversing the
sociological and political moments of the originary forma-
tion of the British imperial nation. We argue that this histori-
cal reversal underpins the Janus-like form of nations, includ-
ing the Kurdish nation. Third, we substantiate the argument
through a brief case study of the Republic of Kurdistan.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2023 The Authors. Nations and Nationalism published by Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and John Wiley &
Sons Ltd.
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2 MATIN and MAHMOUDI
KEYWORDS
internalism, Kurdish Nationalism, Republic of Kurdistan, societal
multiplicity, uneven and combined development
1 | INTRODUCTION
January 22, 1946 is a momentous day in Kurdish history. On this day, the Republic of Kurdistan 1 was officially
proclaimed in the town of Mahabad in north-western Iran. 2 The republic was founded under the auspices of the
newly established Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP). It was the Kurds' first experience of de facto modern sover-
eignty, ruling over the Northern third of Eastern (Iranian) Kurdistan (henceforth ‘Rojhelat’, its common Kurdish name).
The republic lasted only 11 months. But during this short period, areas under its control experienced unprecedented
developments. The Pahlavi state's coercive political centralisation and cultural homogenisation launched in the early
1920s were sharply reversed. Modern Kurdish schools were founded; primary and intermediate education was made
compulsory (Saleh & Saleh, 2007, p. 72); a local Kurdish press emerged; Kurdish language, literature and art were
cultivated; women's participation in politics and civic life was encouraged; party politics grew; and Kurdish national-
ism, the political genesis of the republic, was organisationally and discursively further consolidated.
The Republic of Kurdistan embodied the idea of Kurdish national sovereignty. As such, it was a decidedly modern
phenomenon. And yet, it emerged in one of the most backward regions of Rojhelat, namely, Mukriyan. Mukriyan was
dominated by precapitalist social relations and premodern forms of collective identity and political loyalty. Economic
and commercial infrastructure were rudimentary at the time, most of the population was illiterate and the urban
bourgeoisie was minuscule and largely dependent on the central government. The dominant forces in the region were
tribal and feudal landlords. They owned around 87% of arable land (Ghassemlou, 1988, p. 16). As modern-day vassals
of the Pahlavi autocracy, they ruled over a large class of landless peasants living in semi-servile conditions.
How did a national republic, the emblematic form of modern sovereignty, emerge in a premodern social context?
The answer is logically bound up with the broader question of the origins and dynamics of Kurdish nationalism, the
founding force of the Republic of Kurdistan. However, despite its remarkable longevity, political potency and global
significance, Kurdish nationalism remains theoretically understudied. Indeed, seminal texts of nationalism studies
either completely ignore Kurdish nationalism or mention it only in passing (Maxwell & Smith, 2015, p. 772). By
contrast, the relevant branches of area studies are home to a growing literature on Kurdish nationalism. This litera-
ture, however, tends to uncritically deploy canonical theories of nationalism, namely, primordialism, ethnosymbolism
and modernism, and in so doing reproduces their explanatory problems.
‘Primordialism’ assumes nations' givenness and antiquity (Armstrong, 1982; Gat, 2013). Accordingly, primordialist
accounts of Kurdish nationalism presuppose the existence for centuries, if not millennia, of a Kurdish nation cohering
around a common language, ancestry, territory and customs (e.g., Edmonds, 1971; Izady, 1992). Thus, they arguably
mirror, albeit in a resistive mode, unhistorical conceptions of the Arab, Turkish and Iranian nations whose sovereign
domination of the Kurds involves the denial of Kurdish nationhood. However, attributing primordiality to the Kurdish
nation contradicts the historical fact that as late as the early 20th century, Kurdistan, like the Ottoman and Qajar states
enveloping it, was marked by a multiplicity of sub-national (tribal and kinship) and supra-national (religious) collective
identities and decentralised political loyalties (Hassanpour, 1992, p. 55; van Bruinessen, 1992, p. 6). 3 Primordialist
accounts of Kurdish nationalism, therefore, assume the very phenomenon they are supposed to explain. As such,
they mirror primordialism proper in being ‘unsociological, unanalytical and vacuous’ (Eller & Coughlan, 1993, p. 183).
‘Modernism’, by contrast, considers nations as ideological by-products of modernity (Anderson, 2006;
Breuilly, 1993; Gellner, 1983). Modernist accounts of Kurdish nationalism, therefore, foreground the Kurdish reac-
tion to the centralisation of the Ottoman and Qajar empires during the 19th century and the subsequent formation
of the centralised unitary nation-states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria during the early 20th century (Ozoglu, 2004).
However, they rarely interrogate the sociological assumptions of the modernist theories that frame their analyses of
MATIN and MAHMOUDI 3
the Kurdish case (cf. Vali, 2003a). Such an interrogation would reveal that these theories' derivation of nationalism,
and hence the nation, from the practical or ideological requirements of capitalism, industrialisation or functional divi-
sion of labour (Breuilly, 1996; Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 2000) flies in the face of the empirical fact that in the major-
ity of cases nationalism has preceded capitalist development or industrialisation (cf. Breuilly, 1993, pp. 413–414).
In other words, almost all nations have emerged in social contexts where what modernist theories of nationalism
consider their fundamental causes were absent (Matin, 2019, p. 2).
Meanwhile, ‘ethnosymbolism’ occupies an intellectually liminal position between primordialism and modernism.
It views the nation as a modern reconfiguration of ancient ethnies by nationalism (Smith, 1979, 1991). It thus appears
to avoid both primordialism's essentialist undertones and the disjuncture between theory and history that besets
modernist approaches. It also ‘satisfies the emotional gap that primordialism's collapse has left behind’ (Maxwell &
Smith, 2015, p. 784) and therefore appeals to many Kurdish scholars and researchers sympathetic to the Kurdish
national movement who have deployed ethnosymbolism implicitly or explicitly (e.g., Ghassemlou, 1988; Hassan, 2013).
In some accounts, ethnosymbolism is combined with modernism (e.g., Koohi-Kamali, 2003), in other accounts (e.g.,
Bajalan, 2013; Hassan, 2013; Hassanpour, 1992; Koohi-Kamali, 2003; Romano, 2006) with some form of stagist peri-
odisation inspired by Miroslav Hroch (1985). Invoking the late 17th century epic of Mem u Zin by Ahmad Khani, many
of these accounts posit the existence of a precocious Kurdish nationalism, albeit ‘feudal’ (Hassanpour, 1992, 2003),
predating European nationalism. However, Khani's lament for Kurdish political disunity and call for a unifying Kurdish
king arguably indicates a dynastic conception of rule whose decline, along with that of religion, formed the basis on
which the nation could actually be imagined (Anderson, 2006, p. 7) as an ‘abstract community’ (James, 1996) of hori-
zontal solidarity and formal equality embodied in popular sovereignty. These paradoxes of ethnosymbolist accounts
of Kurdish nationalism reflect ethnosymbolism's circular argument that ‘nationalism’ constructs the ‘nation’ from
pre-existing ‘ethnies’ (Smith, 1991). This turns explanandum (i.e., nationalism) into explanans and displaces the antiquity
of nations onto ethnies as their historical precursors hence teleologically concatenating them (cf. Soleimani, 2016, p. 7;
Vali, 2003a, p. 2). This has earned ethnosymbolism the title of ‘soft primordialism’ (Joireman, 2003, p. 28).
The analytical problems besetting the main theories of nationalism and their Kurdish iterations are, we argue,
ultimately rooted in the inability of these theories to explain the nation's differentium specificum, that is, its simultane-
ous modernity and antiquity. This historical ambiguity has been best captured in Tom Nairn's (1977) famous phrase,
‘the modern Janus’. Nations are Janus-like in both cultural and sociological senses. First, they combine the modern
idea of impersonal, territorial, popular rule (modern sovereignty) with an ancient, culturally coherent collective identity
(national identity). And second, almost all nation-formation processes have begun in tributary states hence combining
the political form of modern sovereignty with premodern social structures. It is this twofold condition of historical
ambiguity that existing accounts of Kurdish nationalism, and by implication the Republic of Kurdistan, have failed
to digest because the main theories of nationalism they deploy have themselves failed to conceptualise the hybrid
nature of the nation. Primordialism elides the question by denying nations' modernity altogether. Modernist theories
deny the nation's antiquity theoretically only to be confronted by its ideological facets empirically. Ethnosymbolism
irresolutely sits on the fence. It temporally stretches nations' Janus-like form rendering their modernity and antiquity
empirically separate and analytically distinct but leaves their relationship sociologically untheorised. None of the
canonical theories of nationalism is therefore able to adequately explain the nation's Janus-like character.
Against this intellectual background, our intervention has necessarily a dominant theoretical aspect. We
argue that the difficulty faced by the main theories of nationalism arises from their ‘internalism’. Internalism refers
to the assumption that phenomena and dynamics internal to a given social formation have theoretical and meth-
odological primacy in explaining phenomena within that social formation (Tenbruck, 1994; cf. Rosenberg, 2006;
Matin, 2013, pp. 5–9). Internalism presupposes a singular social ontology that theoretically obscures the intersocietal
dimension of historical change and hence the resulting condition of developmental hybridity of which the nation's
Janus-like character is a prime, but by no means the only, example. This circumstance marks all three approaches to
nations and nationalism. Primordialism's essentialism is incompatible with the intrinsically relational character of the
formation and evolution of collective identities. The internalism of modernist theories of nationalism is, on the other
hand, manifest in their search for ‘objective’ predicates of nations inside their claimed or actual boundaries. This search
inevitably fails because of the pre-modern nature of social structures from and through which most nations have
emerged. And ethnosymbolism's circular argument that nationalism politically and institutionally upgrades primordial
ethnies into nations is a result of its intellectual internalism inherited from Weberian sociology. Weber's ‘ideal-types’
are ‘logical’ (as opposed to historical) constructions formed through an intellectual procedure that involves imputing
internal coherence and autonomy to units (Matin, 2013, pp. 7–8). This underlies ethnosymbolism's reproduction of
primordialism at the anterior level of ethnies and the related inability to offer a sociological account of the historical
transformation of ethnies to nations.
Our alternative account of Kurdish nationalism, therefore, involves a prior retheorisation of the rise and expan-
sion of the nation around a critique and supplanting of ‘internalism’. Here, we draw on the theory of ‘uneven and
combined development’ (UCD). UCD rests on a plural social ontology that underpins an intrinsically interactive and
multilinear conception of socio-historical change (Matin, 2007; Rosenberg, 2006). 4 Thus, we demonstrate how
processes of uneven and combined development involve the mutual constitution of the societal level (where the
modern sociological basis of the nation was absent but nationalism arose) and intersocietal level (where this modern
sociological basis was present through the effects of its geopolitical mediation). This thesis, therefore, unlocks the
problem of nations' Janus-like character. It retheorises the emergence of nationalism as a political ideology and praxis
that is rooted in modern capitalist sociality but articulated through nonmodern social structures. Kurdish nationalism
is, as we shall show, an important case in point.
Our argument involves an intellectual sublation (Aufhebung) of two influential accounts of Kurdish nationalism devel-
oped by Amir Hassanpour (1992, 2003) and Abbas Vali (2003a, 2003b, 2014). It incorporates Hassanpour's dialectic of
class power and political power and his implicit recognition of the causal significance of the intersocietal in its account of
the geopolitically charged self-comparison of stateless Kurds with the surrounding non-Kurdish states in the epic poem
of Mem and Zin by Ahamd Khani (1650–1707). But it avoids his ahistorical attribution of nationalism or nationhood to
the 16th-century Kurds. Our argument also integrates Vali's dialectic of (Turkish, Persian, Arab) ‘sovereignty’ and (Kurd-
ish) ‘statelessness’ as the key dynamic of Kurdish nationalism. But it avoids the tension between its poststructuralist
and Marxist moments of analysis. It does so through integrating Vali's mesolevel account of Kurdish nationalism into a
broader, theoretically explicit account of extra-discursive, historically specific and intersocietally overdetermined condi-
tions of the possibility of the modern (capitalist) sovereignty as the differentium specificum of the nation and nationalism.
The remainder of the paper is divided into two main steps. First, we introduce the theory of uneven and combined
development and show how it overcomes internalism. This enables a coherent theorisation of the historical ambiguity
of nations and nationalisms as the effect of the intersocietal—rather than internal or global—development of capitalist
modernity. 5 In the second and final step, we recast the rise and fall of the republic of Kurdistan in the theoretical
framework of uneven and combined development. In the conclusion, we recapitulate our argument and briefly reflect
on its wider implications.
2 | BEYOND INTERNALISM: THE UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT OF THE

NATION
As noted above, internalism is a product of an ontologically singular conception of the social (Matin, 2013, p. 8;
Rosenberg, 2016, p. 140). Overcoming internalism, therefore, requires a plural social ontology, that is, the basic
assumption of the interactive coexistence of multiple societies. 6 Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined devel-
opment’ is premised on precisely such an assumption. It begins from the recognition of the fundamental ‘unevenness’
of social reality (Trotsky, 1985, p. 27). Unevenness theoretically foregrounds societal multiplicity and developmental
difference. From the basic premise of intersocietal unevenness flows the second premise of ‘combined develop-
ment’, that is, ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam
of archaic with more contemporary forms’ (Trotsky, 1985, p. 27, emphasis added). This amalgamation, we recall, is the
socio-historical content of nations' historical ambiguity, its Janus-like character.
Combined development takes place through three key mechanisms: ‘the privilege of historical backward-
ness’, ‘the whip of external necessity’ and ‘substitution’ (cf. Matin, 2013, pp. 17–19). 7 ‘The privilege of historic
backwardness’ ‘… permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date,
skipping a whole series of intermediate stages’ (Trotsky, 1985, pp. 26–27). ‘The whip of external necessity’ involves
geopolitically shaped conditions of ‘coercive comparisons’ (Barker, 2006, p. 78) and ‘defensive modernisation’ (cf.
Matin, 2013, pp. 56–57). And ‘substitution’ refers to the mobilisation of various replacements, native and foreign, in
backward societies, for the agency, institutions, instruments, material or methods of earlier processes of capitalist
development (Matin, 2013, p. 19).
The intrinsic unevenness and combination of the historical process means that ‘development’ is an inherently
interactive and multilinear process. Uneven and combined development, therefore, captures—at the level of a
‘general abstraction’ (Rosenberg, 2006, p. 319)—the interlocking of different societies' patterns of development such
that their interactive coexistence is constitutive of their individual existence and vice versa (Matin, 2013, pp. 16–17).
It, therefore, captures key consequences of societal multiplicity, that is, ‘difference, coexistence, interaction, combi-
nation, and dialectical change’ (Rosenberg, 2016, pp. 135–141).
At this point, it is important to note the basic difference between the theories of ‘uneven and combined devel-
opment’ and ‘uneven development’. The latter, which implicitly informs some modernist theories of nationalism (e.g.,
Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 2000), is derived from the internal dynamics of capitalism. It therefore excludes the causal
significance of societal multiplicity (unevenness) and sociological hybridity (combination), which are central to the
theory of uneven and combined development.
Framed by the theory of uneven and combined development, our alternative explanation of the nation's
historical ambiguity traces the modernity of the nation to its ‘sovereignty’ (Anderson, 2006, p. 6; Matin, 2019):
the specifically modern form of rule rooted in ‘primitive accumulation’ as the historical genesis of capitalism
(Marx, 1990, pp. 873–907). Primitive accumulation had two crucial, interrelated consequences. First, it created
abstract individuals by unravelling precapitalist webs of inter-personal relations of ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) and
replanting its uprooted concrete persons in the commodity-mediated relations of ‘society’ (Gesellschaft). The violent
abstractions involved in this process generated both the possibility and the necessity of the nation as a re-integrative
real abstraction, one that reenchants capitalism's disenchanted world (Weber, 1970, p. 51) by offering formal equal-
ity, collective identity, individual dignity, horizontal solidarity and common destiny (cf. Greenfeld, 2012, p. 2).
The second consequence was the depoliticisation of the immediate relations of accumulation through trans-
forming exploitation into a contractual process that re-posited the exploiter and the exploited as juridically equal.
This entailed the institutional ‘separation of the economic and the political’ (Wood, 1981), hence the possibility of the
modern state as an impersonal, abstract political state (Marx cited in Sayer, 1991, p. 72) separate from ‘the market’
as the purportedly autonomous arena of private and competitive accumulation. The two consequences are politically
embodied in the modern sovereign state, which forms the basic unit of the modern world order marked by substan-
tive hierarchy and formal anarchy (Rosenberg, 1994). The modern sovereign state is also the historically distinct
political form of the nation (Matin, 2019).
However, a repetition of this sequential process of capitalist development preceding sovereign nationhood was
pre-empted by English capitalism's prior emergence, which endowed it with a ‘logic of priority’ (Nairn, 1977, p. 14).
This consisted in the fact that English capitalism itself had emerged out of a complex process of uneven and combined
development in which imperial and colonial accumulation abroad coincided with primitive accumulation at home
(Nairn, 1977; cf. Anievas & Nişancıoğlu, 2015). Indeed, Marx defined colonial plunder, enslavement and exploitation
of non-Europeans as ‘chief moments of primitive accumulation’ (Marx, 1990, p. 915). This circumstance delayed
the political completion of the English bourgeois revolution, hence leaving in place a political order simultaneously
both representative and patrician (Nairn, 1977, pp. 41, 246). 8 It also created a strategic need for deemphasising
ethno-linguistic markers of collective identity in favour of the more abstract ideas of the ‘civilizing mission’, the ‘white
man's burden’ and ‘loyalty to institutions, not a people’ (Kumar, 2000, pp. 580, 591, 589). The second implication was
reinforced by the fact that in its metropolitan home too, the British state was a multinational empire involving the de
facto hierarchy of the English, the Scottish, the Irish and the Welsh. These two circumstances gave a developmental
idiosyncrasy to the British imperial nation that precluded its replicability or ‘modularity’ (Anderson, 2006, p. 4).
Nevertheless, despite its sui generis and non-replicable configuration of modern sovereignty and imperial nation-
alism, British capitalism exercised mounting and irresistible geopolitical pressure on non-capitalist polities coexist-
ing with it, above all France. France responded by mobilising and regimenting its populations through political and
cultural centralisation. This was exemplified in revolutionary France's Levée en masse (the citizen-soldier) and the Code
Civil. The French substitution of the ‘impersonal collective’ of the nation for Britain's abstract individual rooted in the
processes of primitive accumulation thus became the blueprint for geopolitical survival in non-capitalist polities, from
Japan and Russia to the Ottoman and Qajar empires. These tributary states therefore confronted the geopolitical
pressures and colonial encroachment of modernising European states through building culturally and linguistically
unitary nations. This process excluded, otherised and hence antagonised those peoples within these non-capitalist
polities whose culture and language were different from those with which the ‘nation’ was coercively constructed.
These ‘minoritised’ peoples responded with their own nationalist projects. Kurdish nationalism is a product of this
wider process of uneven and combined development of capitalist modernity in Eurasia. 9
3 | THE UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF

KURDISTAN
The Republic of Kurdistan combined modern sovereignty with premodern sociality. This reflected Rojhelat's strategic
location at the intersection of wider international and regional processes of geopolitical competition and capitalist
development. To delineate the contours of this interactive process, we present our alternative account of the rise
and fall of the republic in three interlinked sections based upon the structural sequence of ‘uneven and combined
development’, that is, unevenness, combination and development.
3.1 | Unevenness: Developmental peripheralisation and geopolitical liminality
This section articulates the multiple and differential spatio-temporal dynamics whose intersection in Mukriyan
formed the generative context of the Republic of Kurdistan as an amalgamated political form. The republic was
founded in the town of Mahabad in the Mukriyan region of Rojhelat in January 1946. Located in the north-western
Iran, Mukriyan forms the northern tip of Rojhelat. It gradually fell under the Safavid empire's suzerainty following
the battle of Chaldiran in 1514, which is often seen as the first division of Kurdistan. During the long 19th century,
Kurdistan lay at the intersection of three vectors of unevenness. A West–East vector extending from Western Europe
to West Asia demarcated the spatio-temporally staggered ordering of political and economic modernisation. At the
Eastern end of this vector lay Russia (Soviet), Ottoman (Turkish) and Qajar (Iranian) states. A second vector of uneven-
ness captured a centre-periphery space of unequal development in which Kurdish regions were peripheralised within
the wider political economies of the states encompassing them. These states had themselves become peripheral
zones to the modern world-system. The third vector of unevenness consisted of geopolitical dynamics arising from
the location of Mukriyan at the intersection of the Turkish, Russian and Iranian borders. This multi-vector unevenness
strategically shaped the political economy and developmental dynamics of Mukriyan and Kurdistan more generally.
Up until the 19th century, Kurdistan was dominated by tribal and semi-feudal 10 social relations, politically organ-
ised in semi-independent principalities under the suzerainty of either the Ottoman empire or the Safavi (later Qajar)
empire (Yadirgi, 2017, p. 65). Persistent ideological and geopolitical rivalry between these empires had enabled Kurd-
ish principalities to use the possibility of switching their loyalty as an effective leverage to gain levels of local auton-
omy considerably higher than regions closer to the imperial centres (cf. Yadirgi, 2017, pp. 70–71). This decentralised
political configuration, 11 rooted in these empires' tributary modes of production, began to rapidly transform from the
early 19th century under the whip of external necessity generated by industrial and political revolutions in Britain and
France, respectively. These revolutions had altered the pre-existing balance of power in Western Eurasia in favour of
European empires that had successfully halted, and subsequently reversed, the Ottoman and Qajar empires' ‘geopo-
litical accumulation’ (Teschke, 2003, pp. 95–115; cf. Marx, 1994, p. 491) in central and Eastern Europe and in the
Caucasus. This geopolitical reconfiguration operated as a whip of external necessity under which the Ottoman and
Qajar empires embarked on projects of ‘defensive modernisation’ (Matin, 2013, p. 55). Central to this was political
and administrative centralisation geared towards augmenting imperial revenues required for the military modernisa-
tion on which their geo-political survival increasingly depended. Emblematic of this circumstance was the Ottomans'
reform project of Tanzimat (Reordering) of which the Qajar Nizami Jadid (New Order) reform agenda was a more
limited emulation. A casualty of these reforms was the last vestige of Kurdish political autonomy, which had already
been steadily weakening since the mid-17th century (Yadirgi, 2017, p. 74) following the conclusion of peace treaties
between the Ottoman and Safavid empires.
The disintegration of the Kurdish principalities led to a political vacuum. It provided fertile soil for the rise of reli-
gious leaders who increasingly acted as the arbiter of communal and inter-communal conflicts. Given the trans-kinship
character of religious identities, prominent Kurdish religious leaders, especially those affiliated with the organisation-
ally and ideologically powerful Sufi brotherhoods such as Naqshbandi, also tended to act as de facto political leaders
vis-à-vis external forces and in the collective interest of the Kurds who were otherwise fragmented along tribal and
kinship lines. This geo-politicisation of religious leadership is exemplified in the Kurdish movement led by Sheikh
Ubeidullah during 1879–1880. At the helm of the newly established Kurdish League, Sheikh Ubeidullah sought to
merge Ottoman and Qajar Kurdistans into a single independent Kurdish state led by himself (Jwaideh, 2006, p. 80;
Soleimani, 2016). This uprising took place in an historical context that was domestically charged by socio-economic
impact of Tanzimat and externally by the geopolitical implications of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–1888. The
former combined Jacobin and capitalist logics embodied in the Land Laws of 1856 and 1867 and the Conscription
and the Nationality Laws of 1869 (Duzgun, 2017, pp. 267–268). Tanzimat's juridical assault on pre-existing feudal
and tribal privileges had the unintended consequence of the discursive sharpening of a universal Kurdish political
subjectivity. The Russo-Ottoman war, for which the Ottomans had armed thousands of Kurds, geopolitically artic-
ulated the territorial and political implications for the Kurds of the Russian-backed Armenian ascendancy on the
fragile frontiers of Russian, Ottoman, and Qajar empires. Article 61 of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which guaranteed
Armenian security against Circassians and Kurds, deepened the Kurdish fear of Armenian predominance in the region
(Jwaideh, 2006, p. 83) and highlighted the need for a trans-communal Kurdish political strategy.
Even though Sheikh Ubeidullah's uprising originated from within the Ottoman territory, its geopolitical spear
quickly targeted the weaker, Shi'a dominated, Qajar empire against which political mobilisation invoking Sunni sectar-
ianism was easier. Ubeidullah's revolt pierced the Qajar state in Urmia and Savojbolagh (Sablagh or Mahabad), the
future birthplace of the Republic of Kurdistan. This revolt was, however, short-lived. It was defeated by a de facto
alliance between the Ottomans and the Qajars (Ateş, 2014, p. 754) backed by Britain. Nevertheless, and despite the
Sunni sectarian discourse that overlaid Sheikh Ubeidullah's struggle for Kurdish statehood, his movement left a deep
imprint on Mukriyan where ‘only few tribes were not the sheikh's subjects’ (Ateş, 2014 p. 785). It prepared the politi-
cal ground for the subsequent growth of Kurdish nationalist discourse in two main ways: directly, through articulating
and prosecuting an explicit project for pan-Kurdish statehood, albeit one based on premodern, dynastic form of
sovereignty; and indirectly, through accelerating the ongoing attempts at a conclusive demarcation of Ottoman–Qajar
border, which extended and consolidated Tehran's direct rule over Kurdish borderlands (Ateş, 2014, pp. 743–744).
This process of Turco-Persian slicing of the Kurdish communal spatiality sharpened the Kurds' sense of territorial divi-
sion. This, in turn, involved the cultivation of the logically prior assumption of the Kurds' cultural unity and distinction
and Kurdistan's spatial boundedness.
It was within this wider context that Kurdish nationalist thought further evolved during the late 19th and early
20th century in tandem with, and in reaction to, the uneven and combined development of Turkish and Iranian nation-
alisms during the same period. In the late 19th century, the semi-colonial status of Ottoman and Qajar states had
solidified. It was embodied in the European-governed Ottoman Public Debt Administration (Keyder, 1987 pp. 39–42)
and the Qajar state's sale of commercial and economic concessions to European capitalists to the detriment of the
native bazaar bourgeoisie. The Ottoman and Qajar states' formalised economic colonialism exacerbated the psycho-
logical impact of their earlier military defeats by European empires and the subsequent territorial losses had had on
their intellectual and political elites. These interrelated circumstances led to the development of a ‘consciousness of
backwardness’ (Shilliam, 2009, pp. 6–7) among Ottoman and Qajar elites, forcing them into critical reflection on the
sources of their polities' geopolitical weakness and socio-economic backwardness, and on how to overcome them.
In so doing, they increasingly turned to the Jacobin strategy of modernisation whether in its original French variety
or in its politically qualified iterations in Prussia, Russia and Japan. The Ottoman and Qajar elites also drew on each
other's experiences (Tüyloğlu, 2021). The cumulative impact of their activities was a radical reconfiguration of the
state-society relations towards ‘progress’ and ‘development’. The key ingredient of this project was a nationalising of
both state and society (Marashi, 2008, pp. 12–13). This involved the political centralisation of the former and the
cultural homogenisation of the latter. This twin process gave the emerging nation-state the character of a ‘surrogate
colonial state’ (Marashi, 2014, p. 18), which acted as a whip of external necessity on Kurdistan. Mukriyan's triple
unevenness therefore provided both the developmental dynamics and historical, ideological and political ingredients
for the formation of the Republic of Kurdistan as a political Janus.
3.2 | Combination: Grafting national sovereignty onto a feudal society
This section charts the broad trajectory of the process of combined development that resulted from Kurdistan's uneven-
ness and which transplanted a modern state-form, that is, the Republic of Kurdistan, into a premodern social context,
that is, feudal Mukriyan. This process was interactively driven by a strategic and consequential substitution that under-
pinned both the Iranian and Turkish nation-state building projects. This substitution involved the replacement of the
abstract individual of English capitalism, with the impersonal collective of a purportedly ‘organic’ and ‘authentic’ nation
based on a singular and homogenous cultural identity with a purportedly linear history reaching back into time imme-
morial. In other words, Turkish and Iranian versions of volkish nationalism emulated the French revolution's politicisation
of the Enlightenment project's substitution of divinely ordained dynastic rule with the notion of a people with natural
rights (Birken, 1994, pp. 133–134). But in this case, ‘the people’—as the modern subject of history and sovereignty—did
not pre-exist. It was defined and constructed by nationalist elites around ‘Turkish’ and ‘Persian’ cultures and languages.
It therefore ipso facto excluded the Kurds and other non-Turkish and non-Persian communities. In the case of Turkey,
this exclusion took the form of an outright denial of Kurdish existence. In the case of Iranian nationalism, it involved
placing the Kurds at the bottom of a racially charged cultural hierarchy on top of which sat Persian culture and language
as the core of Iranian national identity (cf. Zia-Ebrahimi, 2011). These experiences of discursive and political denial
and exclusion through inclusion more or less immediately elicited a Kurdish proto-nationalist resistance that emerged
concurrently and interactively with Turkish and Iranian, and later Arab, nationalisms. The immediacy of this emergence
was partially due to the historical proximity, hence the fresh memory, of substantive Kurdish autonomy under the
earlier decentralised political structure of the Ottoman and Qajar empires. Ardalan, the last major Kurdish principality in
the Qajar realm, lost its autonomous status to Tehran only in the late 1880s (Bakhash, 1981, p. 37).
The main platforms of this emergent Kurdish proto-nationalism were newspapers, political parties and to a lesser
extent modern artistic productions. Kurdistan, the first Kurdish newspaper, was launched in 1898 in Cairo. The first
Kurdish political organisation, that is, The Kurdish Society for Mutual Aid and Progress, was founded in Istanbul in 1908
(Ekici, 2021, p. 4). These platforms established a discursive political field around a distinct Kurdish identity and rights
for the Kurdish intelligentsia, which grew in scale and impact through cross-border interactions between Kurdish
intellectuals and political activists in different parts of Kurdistan. This contextual process set the stage for the subse-
quent development of Kurdish nationalism proper.
Several other Kurdish nationalist parties were founded in the ex-Ottoman domain of Southern (Iraqi) Kurdistan,
which during the British mandate (1921–1932) and later under the rule of King Faisal II (1939–1958) enjoyed compar-
atively higher levels of social, political and cultural freedoms. These included Hiwa (Hope) in 1935 and Hizbi Rizgari Kurd
(The Kurdish Liberation Party) in 1945. Under the influence of its communist faction, Shorsh (Revolution), the Kurdish
Liberation Party sought ‘to unify and liberate Greater Kurdistan’, to implement comprehensive social, economic, polit-
ical and cultural reforms and to ‘combat imperialism and reaction’ (Jwaideh, 2006, p. 241).
Modern theatre also provided a potent medium of artistic articulation for Kurdish nationalism (Rostami, 2019).
This modern nationalist discourse filtered into Mukriyan through a steady stream of Kurdish activists and newspapers
and periodicals such as Galawej (August), Jiyan (Life) and Hawar (Clamour) (cf. Mulla Izzat, 2001, p. 72). Its message
resonated with the Kurdish intelligentsia in Mukriyan, which was already politically supercharged by Ismail Simko's
uprising (1918–1922).
Simko's movement had emerged from the intersection of the collapse of central authority in north-western
regions of the Qajar state during the First World War and the political impact of Kurdish nationalist discourse in
the Ottoman Empire that had emerged against the late Ottoman and Young Turks' centralisation policies (cf.
Soleimani, 2017; Vali, 2014, p. 12). Simko's movement had revived Sheikh Ubeidullah's project of Kurdish independ-
ence 40 years earlier through a more openly secular discourse. Helped by Abdulrazzaq Badrkhan, Simko published
the Kurdish language newspaper Roji Kurd (Kurdish Sun/Day), opened Kurdish schools and established political
organisations such as Komalay Jihandani (The Society for Knowing the World) and Komalay Istixlasi Kurd (The Society
for the Kurdish Salvation) founded in Khoy and Urmia in 1912 and 1913, respectively (Haji-Aghaei, 2015, p. 316;
Gohari, 2004, p. 22). Thus, like Ubeidullah's movement, Simko's political and military power was also based on tribal
forces. But Simko's was nevertheless significant as the first Kurdish movement against political centralisation in Iran
and one that already showed signs of secularisation of leadership and discourse. Indeed, in a letter to the Iranian
authorities, Simko's chief advisor, Sayyed Taha Nehri, the grandson of Sheikh Ubeidullah, drew an analogy between
Kurdish demand for self-rule and that of European nationalities. 12
Meanwhile, Bolshevik ideas crossed the border and reached Kurdistan directly or via Azerbaijan. Qazi Moham-
mad, the future leader of the Republic of Kurdistan, was reportedly in contact with Bolshevik officers of Russian
army occupying northern Mukriyan and Azerbaijan during the WWI (Bazyar, 2020, pp. 44–45). Following the 1917
Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the subsequent formation of The Soviet Republic of Iran in the northern region of
Gilan in 1920, Hama Bolshevik, a radical anti-feudal group named after its leader, was formed in Mukriyan in 1937
(Hessami, 1996, p. 141). Hizbi Azadi Kurdstan (The Kurdistan Freedom Party) also appeared in Mukriyan in June 1938
(Bazyar, 2020, p. 53). These political organisations' membership came largely, though not exclusively, from the small
social stratum of educated Kurds and urban (petty-)bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, they heralded the gradual replacement
of tribal and religious figures by the nascent intelligentsia and urban petty bourgeoisie as the leading social strata of
Kurdish political movements. This conflictual process was largely completed by the mid-1960s.
Thus, by the late 1930s, Mukriyan's multi-vectoral unevenness had led to the combination of nationalist and
communist ideas in a broadly leftist form of Kurdish nationalism, which pursued Kurdish sovereignty in a greater Kurd-
istan. This broadly left-leaning Kurdish nationalism struggled against religious conservatism, tribalism and feudalism
as the sources of Kurdish socio-economic backwardness and political subordination (Karimi, 2008). It found organ-
isational expression in The Society of the Revival of Kurdistan, or Komalay Jianaway Kurdstan in Kurdish, better known
as Komalay J. K., which published the seminal Kurdish nationalist periodical Nishtiman (Homeland). 13 Komalay J. K.
was founded in 1942 following the 1941 Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran. This removed Reza Shah Pahlavi from
power, leading to the collapse of the central government's authority in Kurdistan. Komalay J. K. set up branches in
Hawler (Erbil) and Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan (Shahpasandi cited in Saleh, 2007, p. 22) and in several Iranian cities
(Hawrami, 2008, p. 120). The radical-modernist orientation of Komalay J. K. was reflected in its domination by intel-
lectuals, merchants, urban petty bourgeoisie and civil servants working in the central government's bureaucracy in
Kurdistan (Mulla Izzat, 2001, pp. 76–80; Gohari, 2004, pp. 30–40). Indeed, initially, Komalay J. K. had an explicit policy
of denying membership to tribal chiefs, feudal landlords and religious figures. This membership policy was, however,
relaxed once Komalay J. K. stopped being a clandestine organisation and began operating publicly in 1945.
Komalay J. K.'s change of tack resulted from a fundamental dilemma that Kurdistan's uneven and combined
development had posed to the emerging Kurdish nationalism, that is, how to carry out national mobilisation in a
pre-national social context. This dilemma was bequeathed to Komalay J. K.'s successor party, that is, The Democratic
Party of Kurdistan (KDP), which was founded in Mahabad on 24 October 1945. 14 The KDP's political programme
attempted a conservative solution. Rather than seeking direct peasant mobilisation through a policy of land redistri-
bution as a surrogate for ‘primitive accumulation’, the KDP allied with feudal and tribal landlords as the political and
military bedrock of the Kurdish nationalist project embodied in the republic of Kurdistan. In so doing, it avoided, or at
least deferred, the sociological consummation of the republic as a specifically modern form of sovereignty. In other
words, in the absence of the abstract individuals of capitalist relations—the modern subjects of nationhood—the
republic came to rely on the concrete persons of precapitalist social relations whose political loyalty and collective
identity were by definition sub-national and impervious to any direct appeal by Kurdish nationalist discourse.15 The
road to their support passed through their direct and immediate rulers, that is, the tribal chiefs and feudal landlords
who commanded both material resources and the manpower, which the KDP and the republic sorely needed. The
ideological expression of this circumstance was a class-blind and explicitly primordialist conception of the Kurdish
nation that rested on ancient, if not timeless, cultural and linguistic traits of the Kurds. Thus, the KDP's and the repub-
lic's main organ, the newspaper Kurdistan stated that ‘since time immemorial, the Kurdish nation has participated in
the waves of human developmental stages and has evolved accordingly’ (reproduced in Saleh & Saleh, 2007, p. 255).
This self-subordination of the nationalist elite to pre-nationalist power and interest was reflected in the fact that
of 73 signatories of the KDP's founding declaration, 44 were either large landlords or tribal leaders, and three were
religious figures. The majority of the remaining 26 signatories came from a (petty-)bourgeois background. The leader
of the party however was an urbanite lawyer, Qazi Muhammad (cf. Bazyar, 2020, pp. 420–421). Tribal and feudal land-
lords had joined the cause of the republic for two basic reasons: recovering their political power, which Reza Shah's
autocratic modernisation had undermined, and avoiding the Soviet-desired administrative subsumption of Mukriyan
under the Tabriz-centred and communist-led Azerbaijan National Government whose radical socio-economic policies
(cf. Rossow, 1956, p. 19) were anathema to the Kurdish privileged classes. Thus, Article 1 of the KDP's founding
declaration demands that ‘The Kurdish nation in Iran should be free in administrating its own affairs and enjoy auton-
omy within the borders of Iran’ (Bazyar, 2020, p. 88). 16 The political dominance of feudal-tribal landed classes within
the KDP and the republic was signified in the vague and conservative nature of the KDP's agrarian policy. Article 5
of the KDP's founding declaration stipulated that ‘a compromise between landlords and subjects should be reached
such that it secures the future of both’ (Bazyar, 2020, p. 88).
The class affiliation of the republic's leading personnel and its socio-economically conservative orientation
reflected the strategic contradiction of early Kurdish nationalism. This consisted in the fact that it had emerged in a
precapitalist sociological context inhospitable to ‘the nation’ as an abstract community of juridically equal individuals,
the hallmark of capitalist sociality. In this, Kurdish nationalism was similar to its enemies, that is, Iranian and Turkish
(and later Arab) nationalisms. However, Kurdish nationalism lacked the crucial political, economic, military and diplo-
matic resources that a pre-existing state had offered Iranian and Turkish nationalists in their nation-state building
projects. Thus, the combined development of the Republic of Kurdistan had a structural constraint built into it that
was insurmountable within Mukriyan's developmental resources. The very circumstances that had enabled the rise
of the republic pre-empted its longevity.
3.3 | Development: Victory in defeat
This final section is a brief account of the political results of the parallelogram of non-synchronous historical
forces that Mukriyan's developmental liminality had welded together. Despite its inner contradiction, the Repub-
lic of Kurdistan exercised formal Kurdish self-rule for almost a year thanks to the Soviet military presence in
northern Iran, a presence that provided the republic with de facto protection against the superior army of the
central government in Tehran. But the premodern resources on which the republic rested structurally arrested the
development of the modern nationalist agenda beyond cultural and educational reforms. Militarily, the republic
rested on tribal armies, including that of Mulla Mostafa Barzani who had taken refuge in Mukriyan following a
military offensive by the Iraqi army in the summer of 1945 (Eagleton, 1963, pp. 91–92). In fact, the republic relied
on loyal tribal military forces not only in resisting the central government but also in dealing with hostile tribes
and landlords who were angry at their loss of revenue from selling tobacco to the central government in Tehran
following the formation of the republic. They were also loth to accept the political leadership of Qazi Muham-
mad, an intellectual, ‘by the rather unusual means of party machinery and the support of the urban population’
(Jwaideh, 2006, pp. 258–259).
Under these circumstances, the republic's nationalist project of military, cultural and administrative modernisation
and centralisation came to rely on taxation. Indeed, Kurdistan, the republic's main newspaper, described taxation as
the ‘spirit of the nation’ (reproduced in Saleh & Saleh, 2007, p. 25). But taxes were directly collected by the republic's
tribal backers who had no appetite for sharing them with the republic. They also found the administrative and political
secularisation and rationalisation that centralised taxation was intended to finance a threat to their traditional author-
ity. This underlay the hostility of Mangoor, Mamash and Debokri tribal leaders towards the republic, which the central
government in Tehran fully exploited in weakening and eventually destroying the republic (Mulla Izzat, 2001, p. 311).
Another strategy that the republic pursued in its attempt to economically bypass feudal and tribal landlords was the
promotion of trade and agriculture. A key step in this direction was the formation of ‘The Kurdistan Progress Company’
with the help of several Mahabadi merchants. It was intended to facilitate export of tobacco, cotton and tragacanth
to, and the import of manufactured goods from, the Soviet Union (Sardashti, 2011, p. 149). However, Mukriyan lacked
its own logistical infrastructure to directly trade with the Soviet Union. And to make matters more difficult, the Soviet
Union insisted on conducting its dealings with the Republic of Kurdistan via the Azerbaijan National Government.
Thus, in the short run, the republic remained deeply dependent on The Azerbaijan National Government based in
Tabriz (Mulla Izzat, 2001, p. 350). Moreover, the Kurdistan and Azerbaijan governments had a territorial dispute over
the towns of Maku, Salmas, Urmia and Miyandoab. The republic's economic dependency on Tabriz blunted its political
edge in countering Azerbaijan's territorial claims, which were tacitly supported by the Soviet Union.
The Republic of Kurdistan therefore remained an essentially elite nationalist project. It had emerged in the
absence of Kurdish abstract individuals as the social basis of its modern sovereignty. This process was a direct result
of Kurdistan's uneven and combined development that had bestowed on it a politically potent form of the privilege
of historical backwardness. This contradictory circumstance was, however, also the republic's political Achilles' heel.
For it forced it to rely on precapitalist forces of tribal and feudal landlords who depended for their social reproduction
on formally hierarchical social relations incompatible with the formally horizontal relations of solidarity central to the
modern phenomenon of the nation. The republic was therefore fundamentally vulnerable to external shocks.
This vulnerability was on fatal display when, under American diplomatic pressure in the United Nations, and
enticed by Iran's (never implemented) offer of the establishment of a joint Soviet-Iranian oil enterprise, the Soviet
Union evacuated its troops from northern Iran in April–May 1946. In December 1946, the Iranian army overran Azer-
baijani forces and destroyed the Azerbaijan National Government in Tabriz. Qazi Mohammad negotiated a peaceful
surrender of himself and Mahabad to the Iranian army in return for Iranian forces' respect for the life and property
of the Kurdish people. An informal agreement was made. Iranian troops entered Mahabad in mid-December 1946.
Shortly afterwards, Qazi Mohammad, his brother Sadr-i Qazi and his cousin Sayf-i Qazi were arrested. Following trial
in a secret military court, they were hanged in Mahabad's central Chuwar-Chra (Four Lights) square on 31 March 1947.
The Republic of Kurdistan thus ended. It became one of the first casualties of the emerging bipolar order and the Cold
War. But this was a victory in defeat, for the collective memory of the republic's rise and fall very quickly became,
and remains, a politically and symbolically potent driver of Kurdish nationalism, which has gained in momentum and
influence in tandem with the growth of capitalist social relations in Kurdistan (Matin, 2020). The rise and fall of the
Republic of Kurdistan therefore ought to be seen as a strategic nodal point in the history of Kurdish nationalism, one
that furnishes it with an ideological genealogy and a discursive coherence in shaping the Kurdish political imaginary.
4 | CONCLUSION
How could the Republic of Kurdistan as a modern form of national statehood emerge in a socio-economically premod-
ern context? We have argued that addressing this question requires a solution to the basic problem of ‘internalism’
in the main theories of nationalism that inform existing accounts of Kurdish nationalism. Internalism obscures the
interactive dimension of social development, including the formation of nations and nationalisms, and therefore fails
to explain the Janus-like character of the nation, its combination of modern and premodern features. We have shown
that thanks to its plural social ontology, the theory of uneven and combined development overcomes internalism and
enables a retheorisation of the nation as an abstract community whose modernity lies in its political form of capitalist
sovereignty embodied in an abstract, impersonal form of state. This modern form of sovereignty was based on the
abstract individual generated by capitalist development whose first systematic form occurred in England.
However, geopolitical and geo-economic pressures generated by the rise of English capitalism precluded
a linear repetition of England's historical experience of capitalist development and modern sovereignty. Under
English capitalism's whip of external necessity, non-capitalist countries launched top-down projects of defensive
self-modernisation that involved selective importation and the ‘substitution’ of capitalist forms and products by
native, non-capitalist material. This process created hybrid socio-political forms irresolvable to either capitalism or
pre-existing pre-capitalist contexts. The most consequential instance of this dialectical process was French ‘Jacobin-
ism’ (Duzgun, 2017; cf. Shilliam, 2009). Jacobinism politically codified the formal equality of the citizens who collec-
tively formed the subject of modern sovereignty as the exclusive property of ‘the nation’. Unlike the British imperial
nation that rested on the abstract individual born out of a prior process of primitive accumulation, the French form
of the nation was formed as an ‘impersonal collective’ politically constructed in law and defined in terms of a singular
culture. This geopolitically driven redefinition of capitalist sovereignty around a singular culture obviated the need for
the prior production of the abstract individual through a radical transformation of non-capitalist property relations,
which would fatally undermine the dominant power of precapitalist ruling elites. It therefore created a national form
that unlike British imperial nation was ‘modular’, that is, ‘capable of being transplanted … to a great variety of social
terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations’
(Anderson, 2006, p. 4).
Crucially, the construction of the nation(-state) from above based on a single culture and language in multi-cultural
contexts entailed the formation of subalternised ‘minorities’ (Mamdani, 2020) who launched their own nationalist
projects. The Kurdish case is one of the historically and internationally significant instances of this wider process of
uneven and combined development.
More specifically, we have argued that the development of Kurdish nationalist politics in the Mukriyan region of
Rojhelat and the foundation of the Republic of Kurdistan in Mahabad were the result of Mukriyan's intense geopo-
litical and developmental liminality. Lying at the intersection of the interactive transformation of Russian, Ottoman
and Qajar empires into modern states, Mukriyan was particularly hospitable to the combinatory dynamics of uneven
and combined development. This condition underpinned the confluence in Mukriyan of three main political and
ideological currents: Kurdish independence politics in the Ottoman empire (Iraq and Turkey post-WWI) developed
in interaction with Turkish Jacobinism, Russian communism and the Persian-centred Iranian volkish nationalism. The
resistance against the latter politically propelled Kurdish nationalism in Iran. Thus, like the French case, and Turkish,
Iranian and Arab nationalist projects that more immediately animated it, Kurdish nationalism was also a modern
Janus. It emerged within and through a wider process of uneven and combined development central to which is the
production of contradictory hybrid phenomena combining modern and premodern forms. The Republic of Kurdistan
of 1946 was the first institutional expression of this process.
Our argument has also wider implications. It extends the explanatory reach of uneven and combined devel-
opment to nationalism studies and demonstrates the way in which IR's basic premise of ‘societal multiplicity’
(Rosenberg, 2006, 2016) can shed a new light on the analytical limits of canonical theories of nationalism. In so doing,
it also contributes to reviving theoretical debates on nationalism studies' foundational topic of nations' genesis, which
has been overshadowed by the recent focus on the discursive construction (e.g., Wodak, 2009), performative repro-
duction (e.g., Billig, 1995) and ‘gender’ and ‘racial’ dimensions (e.g., Mulholland et al., 2018; Nagel, 2003) of nation-
alism. Moreover, our argument's deployment of the historical experience of a non-Western people to retheorise the
nation also contributes to decolonising Area Studies as an academic field that has traditionally been a consumer of
Eurocentric theories based on the false universalisation of European experiences. And finally, our argument also
contributes to a better understanding of the historical interlocking of Capital-State-Nation into a ‘Borromean knot’
(Karatani, 2014, p. 27) and therefore advances the international historical sociology of capitalist modernity and the
challenges faced by counter-hegemonic projects seeking a post-capitalist and post-nationalist world.
ACKNOWLE DG E ME NTS
We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their constructive comments.
O RC ID
Kamran Matin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7675-4242
END NOTE S
1
Also known as ‘The Kurdish Republic of Mahabad’ and ‘The Mahabad Republic’.
2
Our main consideration with regard to the transliteration has been to convey the phonetic structure of Arabic, Kurdish,
Persian and Turkish words according to their current usage in Rojhelat. We have omitted all diacritical remarks. All English
translations from non-English sources are ours. Non-English sources are furnished in the bibliography with an English title
only and are marked by [Persian] or [Kurdish].
3
We use the terms ‘tribe’ or ‘tribal’ in a purely sociological sense of kinship-based communal association devoid of any
normative connotation (cf. Mohammadpour & Soleimani, 2019).
4
For an extensive bibliography on uneven and combined development visit www.unevenandcombined.com
5
The distinction between ‘global’ (or ‘transnational’) and ‘intersocietal’ (or ‘international’) phenomena is important here. The
former arise and operate despite ‘societal multiplicity’ and the latter because of societal multiplicity (we owe this formula-
tion to Justin Rosenberg).
6
Here, ‘societies’ are broadly understood as ‘all historical forms of social coherence in mutually recognized integrities’
(Matin, 2013, p. 3). The ‘societal’ emerges when these ‘integrities’ acquire political definition through their interactive
development (Rosenberg, 2010).
7
Our use of the term ‘backwardness’ involves no moral judgement whatsoever (cf. Knei-Paz, 1978, p. 63). Like Trotsky,
we use it to demarcate a highly dynamic and generative condition of socio-historical uniqueness unconveyable through
terms such as ‘less developed’ or ‘under-developed’. For an analysis of European modernisation in terms of the concept of
‘backwardness’, see Shilliam, 2009.
8
Our argument critically draws on Nairn's incisive work. However, our framework differs from his, for Nairn never fully
explored the wider theoretical implications of his observation that political multiplicity (existence of many states) ‘calls the
very essence of the Marxist world-view into play’ (Nairn, 1977, p. 88). We argue that ‘uneven and combined development’
involves the dialectical incorporation of a third intersocietal dimension to historical materialism's premise of ‘double rela-
tionship’ (Matin, 2013, pp. 153–154).
9
This argument also sheds a new light on the phenomenon of ‘elite nationalism’ (Whitmeyer, 2003). By virtue of occupying
liminal political and intellectual spaces, precapitalist elites and literati had direct political-bureaucratic and/or indirect
ideological-discursive exposure to, or interaction with, ‘other’ polities and communities. Consequently, they tended to
develop a precocious conception of collective identity more expansive and abstract than that held by ordinary members
of their communities. Nonetheless, the transformation of elite nationalism into popular nationalism is primarily shaped
not by its discursive robustness but by the growth of the sociological conditions subtending modern sovereignty as the
historical kernel of nationalism.
10
‘Semi-feudal’ because unlike European feudalism peasants were not tied to the land (cf. Matin, 2007).
11
As late as 1907, Article 90 of The Supplementary Fundamental Laws drafted following the constitutional revolution of
1906, which is commonly seen as the foundational moment of the Iranian nation-state, contains the phrase ‘protected
realms’ (Foundation for Iranian Studies, https://fis-iran.org/en/resources/legaldoc/iranconstitution [accessed 30 July
2021].
12
http://www.ekurds.com/english/Simkioyesikak2.htm [accessed 16 August 2021].
13
Komala is the Kurdish word for ‘society’ or ‘league’.
14
Komalay J. K.'s de facto dissolution and renaming as KDP had reportedly been recommended by its Soviet interlocuters to
align it with the post-WWII prominence of the discourse of democracy (Eagleton, 1963, p. 45).
15
Less than a decade later, Mohammad Mosaddeq's movement for nationalising oil industry in Iran suffered from the
precisely same condition of ‘nationless nationalism’ (Matin, 2013, Chapter 4).
16
This autonomist articulation of the republic is in tension with independist elements of the KDP's constitution. Articles 16
and 17 stipulate the right of the Kurdistan Autonomous Government to establish international cultural and economic rela-
tions. Article 18 states that the Kurdish government must have the authority to grant licences for mining and extraction
of Kurdistan's natural resources' (Bazyar, 2020, pp. 422–423).
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How to cite this article: Matin, K., & Mahmoudi, J. (2023). The Kurdish Janus: The intersocietal construction
of nations. Nations and Nationalism, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12932

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14698129, 0, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12932 by Cochrane Netherlands, Wiley Online Library on [12/03/2023].

The Kurdish Janus: The intersocietal construction

Kamran Matin1 | Jahangir Mahmoudi2

The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

The University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran

Nations and Nationalism. 2023;1–16. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nana 1

2 | BEYOND INTERNALISM: THE UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT OF THE

3 | THE UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF

3.1 | Unevenness: Developmental peripheralisation and geopolitical liminality

3.2 | Combination: Grafting national sovereignty onto a feudal society

3.3 | Development: Victory in defeat

Izady, M. (1992). The Kurds: A Concise Handbook. Taylor and Francis.

Smith, A. D. (1991). National Identity. Penguin book.

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