Survivances of the stateless: on transregional Kurdish mobilization

Divided between four nation-states and dispersed across the world as a migrating community, the Kurds have been prominently known as the ‘largest nation without a state’. The focus on the absence of Kurdish statehood continues to dominate scholarly debates around a solution to the so-called Kurdish issue. However, in the past 40 years of Kurdish insurgency and cross-territorial mobilization, recent movement repertories demonstrate a paradigmatic shift away from state-seeking to society-building. By way of unpacking current revolutionary narratives and practices of autonomy, this paper explores how the contemporary Kurdish movement navigates the violent order that is constituted by a dialectical relation between statelessness and omnipresent states through the creation of radical spaces for self-determination. Looking at the intersection of survival, societal maintenance and resistance as modes of survivance, I argue that (1) the transregional Kurdish mobilization can be characterized by the creative use and/or evasion of state borders and not their reproduction, and (2) the shift in imagining liberation beyond the state made it possible for contemporary Kurdish mobilization to renew itself and grow into a transregional mass movement in the Middle East and its diasporas. This paper is based on the extensive fieldwork conducted for my doctoral dissertation.