Description
Does the historical entanglement of nationalism and the nation-state with colonialism perpetuates the coloniality of power? This paper answers this question in the positive through a reflection on the regional “Kurdish question” as a colonial security conundrum. Conceptually, I define “colonial nationalism” as the ideology that naturalises homogenisation, minoritisation, and border-fixing, and I theorise the resulting “permanent limbo of (un)becoming” in which states pursue endless nation-building while Kurds confront cyclical denial, assimilation, and constrained avenues of self-rule. I trace three mechanisms of Kurdish question as a colonial security conundrum: (1) chronic ontological insecurity of states haunted by the permanently possible Kurdistan; (2) recursive Kurdish resistance that reopens the very insecurities states seek to close; and (3) cross-border coordination as well as external attempts at instrumentalisation of the Kurdish resistance that continually reproduce Western domination in the region despite the formal decolonisation. In short, the Kurdish question is not a local anomaly but a constitutive conundrum of the region’s problematic construction: a colonial-national order that organises power through the permanent confrontation of homogeneity-seeking states and minoritised polities resisting for existence. In this way, the article clarifies what prevailing lenses in security studies such as ethno-separatism, proxy warfare, regional security complexes, and ontological security miss due to a combined effect of their state-centrism or colonial blindness. It advances a decolonial security analysis that decouples decolonial possibilities of forming a political community from state-seeking nationalism as a standard path of imagined emancipation.
