Title: Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves
Author: Christopher Houston
Place of publication: Oxford, UK
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Release date: 2008

Kurdistan provides an introduction to and a succinct history of the idea of Kurdistan, the imagined homeland of the Kurds. Christopher Houston examines the historiography, ethnography, and changing political status of the Kurdish regions vis-à-vis the Ottoman and British empires, and considers the responses of Kurds to the nation-building missions of modern Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. These projects, driven by ambitious elites in the modernizing capitals of new nation-states, were accompanied by varying degrees of intolerance toward minority ethnic languages, political institutions, and regional autonomy.
This book provides a concise analysis of the making of Kurdistan, its peoples, historical developments and cultural politics. Under the Ottoman Empire Kurdistan was the name given to the autonomous province in which the Kurdish princes ruled over a cosmopolitan population. But re-mapping, wars and the growth of modern nation-states have turned Kurdistan into an imagined homeland. The Kurdish question is one that continually reappears on the international stage because of the strategic location of Kurdistan. In describing the ways in which Kurdistan and its history have been represented and politicized, the author traces the vital role of the nationalist States of Turkey, Iran and Iraq in the crafting of political actors in the region. [1]