ABSTRACT
The Iraqi Kurdish ethno-nationalist parties were forced by external actors and events to put aside their differences and cooperate. Perhaps the most outspoken proponent for Iraqi Kurdish independence among this group of scholars, the so-called 'honorary Kurdistanis', is Peter Galbraith. For the Iraqi Kurdish ethno-nationalist parties, the prevalence of the principle of ethnic federalism that enshrined in the Iraqi Constitution their national self-governance in the three governorates of Dohuk, Erbil and Al Sulaimaniyah constitutes unquestionably the greatest accomplishment in their 70-year struggle for national self-determination. Central to the post-1999 Kurdistan Worker’s Party ideology are the concepts of 'radical democracy' and 'democratic confederalism' developed by nineteenth-century anarchist theoreticians Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. Groupism and state-centrism presuppose ethno-nationalist groups as organic, static, substantive, distinct, homogeneous and bounded units, ascribe social agency to them, reify and substantialize them together with their claims for national self-determination, which, in a state-centric world, is all too often equated with territorial sovereignty.
