Introduction: Modernity and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat).
Abbas Vali.
The Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran.
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, 2019.

The Kurdish Republic, which was established on 22 January 1946, was aturning point in the modern history of the Kurds in Rojhelat. Althoughshort-lived, it had far-reaching implications for the development a demo-cratic political culture and the national identity it nurtured in Rojhelat andother parts of the Kurdish territory in the Middle East. The KurdishRepublic marked the advent of popular politics in the Iranian Kurdistan.The emergence of the institutions of political representation, political par-ties, trade unions, civil defence organisations, women and youth organisa-tions, and numerous other civic bodies signified not only the existence ofa vibrant civil society and an active public sphere but also the entry of thepeople into the Kurdish political field (Vali 2011). The people were the‘subject’ of popular politics in Kurdistan, which was expressed in terms ofthe articulation of popular demands for national rights and civil and dem-ocratic liberties in an expanding political field mainly defined by resistanceto sovereign domination. The strategies of sovereign domination inKurdistan presupposed the denial of Kurdish national identity and thesuppression of its discursive representation, which, in effect, meant thatKurdish ethnicity and language were objects of sovereign violence, embed-ded in the founding act of the state and codified in its constitution—the‘performative’ and ‘interpretative’ violence of the state respectively, to useDerrida’s analytics of sovereign violence (Derrida 1992). [1]