This chapter explains the importance of the phase of pre-conflict mobilisation for insurgent groups subsequent development. The chapter empirically presents the fallout from the 1971 coup and the tumultuous decade that followed. It explains the various violent tendencies in 1970s Turkey: the Right, the Left, Kurdish movements and the state. It tracks the emergence of the PKK from the socialist revolutionary milieu in Ankara, through its return to Kurdistan and its eventual consolidation as one of the region's most dominant revolutionary groups. It gives a substantial empirical overview of the multitude of Kurdish movements’ mobilization in the late 1970s. It lays out how the PKK overcame its weaknesses (lack of local legitimacy and resources) through a patient strategy of recruitment and calculated use of violence against local enemies. It then explains the impact of the 1980 military coup and the brutal repression of the Kurdish region. It discusses the deployment of state torture and terror and how Diyarbakir prison and the resistance by PKK prisoners became a rallying point for the weakened PKK. It finishes by outlining the PKK’s steps to prepare for the 1984 insurgency.

This chapter discusses the changing role of tribes in Kurdish politics and society. It focuses mainly on Turkey but also considers ‘Kurdish situations’ in Iraq, Syria and Iran. It provides a historical overview of the developments and suggests that the tribal factor has been one of the major determinants of Kurdish politics throughout the twentieth century. It is thus no wonder that French and British Mandate officers, as well as Turkish, Iranian, Syrian and Iraqi authorities, have paid specific attention to tribes and tribalism in Kurdistan. The sociopolitical developments in the second half of the twentieth century that have significantly transformed their role in Kurdish politics and society are highlighted before an assessment of their role in the current period is provided.

Kurdish poetry is the predominant and the oldest Kurdish literary genre and continues to play a formative role in Kurdish cultural and political identity. An integral part of uprisings and revolutions, Kurdish poetry has been an active site of resistance and remembrance. Despite its cultural and political significance, however, it has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Against this backdrop, this chapter offers a brief history of classical and modern Kurdish poetry in the Kurdish dialects of Gorani, Kurmanji and Sorani. Starting with a detailed account of the development of classical poetry and its main trends and conventions, the chapter moves to present a new perspective on the emergence of modern Kurdish poetry, and challenges the established explanation of its emergence. The main stages of the development of modern poetry throughout the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries and its instrumental role in the dissemination of Kurdish nationalism are also discussed.

Taking a world historical perspective and postcolonial critique as its point of departure, this chapter goes into a survey of the state of the Kurds and Kurdish nationalism in the interwar period. The analysis is organized along the lines of the states under whose rule the Kurds came to reside; namely, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the USSR. The dissolution of empires and the emergence of nation-states that were politically, culturally and economically subjected to the Western-centred world economy since the nineteenth century was the main feature that characterized the interwar period. Kurdish reactions to the shifting borders comprised a wide array of responses ranging from assimilation to armed uprisings. Turkey and Iran adopted policies of Turkification and Persianization alongside the forced resettlement of the Kurds in interior regions. In Iraq, they were promised official recognition on paper yet it remained unfulfilled in reality. Syria under the French Mandate was home to Kurdish nationalist political and cultural activities. In the USSR, the earlier categorization of the Kurds as a ‘small nation’ later shifted to that of an ‘enemy nation’, which led to the first wave of their deportation in 1937. The chapter concludes that the interwar period in Kurdish history thus has a defining legacy in the formation of subsequent Kurdish nationalist discourses and movements.

Locating the emergence of Kurdish nationalism into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter examines the course of Kurdish nationalism and analyses the changes in its agents, objectives, vocabulary, instruments and spaces. More particularly, it provides an historical analysis of Kurdish nationalism in terms of the agents pioneered, targets pursued, discourses mingled, instruments employed and the spaces clung. It is shown that the course of Kurdish nationalism in these respects can be examined in terms of four periods: 1898–1930, 1958–80, 1984–99 and 1999–2015. The three defeats the Kurdish nationalists faced in 1930, 1980 and 1999, it is argued, generated four different periods in the history of Kurdish nationalism. The chapter ends with a brief remark on the last defeat of the Kurdish nationalist movement in 2015.