Morad Roohi

Kurds are known as the biggest stateless nation around the world. Kurdish societies are divided between four nation states in the Middle East, naming Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria. In my PhD project,  under supervision of Prof. Salzmann, I concentrate on the modern history of the Rojhalat, Iranian part of the Kurdistan. As other part of the world, building modern nation states was a turning point in the history of the Middle East. Centralist modern nation states in the Middle East politicized and then securitized the kurdish "difference". Constructing  modern kurdish identity among the Rojhalatian, or Iranian Kurds, changing the nature of power from traditional empire into the modern centralist nation state in Iran, excluding Kurdish identity from the legal and formal sphere of the politics and the long history of the kurdish resistance against this exclusion are to be dealt in my PhD project.