The Kurds of Damascus in the 1930s: Development of a Politics of Ethnicity

Abstract

In the 1930s, certain Kurds in Damascus mobilized in support of Kurds from the Jazira, the remote north-east of Syria (then under French mandate), who were demanding the establishment there of a Kurdish autonomous zone. Why did they do this? Rather than assuming that it was a political action flowing from a self-evident sense of Kurdish identity, this article explores the micropolitics of Damascus under French rule, and the effect of the development of the nation-state form in Syria, to account for the origins of a new politics of ethnicity.