The Kurdish Case for Democracy - Political Culture in the Absence of a State
Abstract
The forthcoming monograph « The Kurdish Case for Democracy » (Palgrave Macmillan 2026) asks how democratic values and civic culture can take shape without equal rights, and even without a state. Focusing on the Kurdish experience across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, it draws on fieldwork, survey research, and historical analysis to explore how people respond to authoritarian rule and long-term statelessness. The first part offers a data-driven look at Kurdish attitudes toward democracy, autonomy, and authority. The second situates these patterns in a broader history of political resistance. Rather than turning to authoritarian or religious extremes, many Kurdish movements have embraced more egalitarian, inclusive models of resistance. The Kurdish Case for Democracy makes the case for bottom-up democratization in the Middle East and challenges the idea that universal values must follow Eurocentric templates. It contributes to wider debates on nationalism, resistance, and the political cultures shaping the region
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.