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Kurdish Scholarship Comes of Age.

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Until recently, most books about the Kurds have simply stressed how they have been exploited victims and historic losers. Recently, however, Kurdish fortunes have begun to ascend. Turkey's candidacy for membership in the European Union (EU) has elicited a host of necessary democratic reforms that contain the admittedly tenuous promise of new political, social and cultural rights for more than 50 percent of the ethnic Kurds in the world. What is more, the two wars against Saddam Hussein have resulted in a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that has granted the Iraqi Kurds an autonomy bordering on virtual independence. Finally, the Kurds in Iraq have at last found their long-sought great-power protector in the United States. In The Kurds Ascending: The Evolving Solution to the Kurdish Problem in Iraq and Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), I analyze this evolving situation.

These positive developments for the Kurds are reflected in the maturity and sophistication of Kurdish studies. For example, Denise Natali's The Kurds and the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran (Syracuse University Press, 2005) is a nuanced analysis of state-building policies and their consequences for national-identity formation. Having lived in various parts of Kurdistan for many years and taught at Salahaddin University in the KRG capital city Irbil, Natali has been able to amass an impressive array of facts, which she has integrated into various interpretative explanations for the development of Kurdayeti, Kurdish national identity. As Natali notes, whether Kurdayeti "is directed by urban or tribal leadership, highly organized or weak, ethnicized or Islamized, or compromising or violent, [it] is determined by the political boundaries and opportunity structures that emerge in each state over time" (p. xviii).

David Romano's The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is also a refined theoretical attempt to explain why such ethnic minorities as the Kurds are mobilizing to demand recognition and rights from the states within which they reside. Well-versed in the complexities of social-movement theory, Romano proceeds to analyze the Kurdish national movement in terms of three approaches: opportunity structures, resource mobilization and rational choice, and cultural framing. He explains that "with mainstream political parties unwilling or unable to address the Kurdish issue [in Turkey] in anything but repressive terms, and with civil society crushed under the [1980] coup, the only form of dissent left was that which the PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party] adopted: violent subversion and guerrilla war" (p. 52). His bibliography illustrates that he has been able...

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