REFLECTIONS ON KURDISH SOCIETY AND POLITICS IN ROJHELAT: AN OVERVIEW.
Abbas Vali.
The trilogy consists of the following:The Kurds and the State in Iran:The Making of Kurdish Identity (I.B. Tauris 2011) focusing on Kurdishhistory, society and politics in Rojhelat from 1905-1947: Plotting the Nation in Exile: The Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran(1947-1979)
(Avesta Istanbul, forthcoming): and In the Shadow of the Absolute Sovereign: Kurdish Question in the Islamic Republic of Iran (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming).

Situating the 'Reflections' In this chapter I offer a series of reflections on the historical specificity of the Kurdish community in Iran (Rojhelat). The focus of these reflections on the social forces and relations and their effects on the working of power and domination in contemporary Rojhelat, I believe, makes it a fitting tribute to Robert Olson's contribution to Kurdish studies, honored in this collection. Olson's scholarship has always involved the writing of political history with a keen eye for the social, and similar concerns underpin my discussion here. However the dynamics of my analysis seek theoretical answers to questions posed in the political domain. The discursive strategy deployed in the construction and presentation of the theoretical and political arguments of this essay is genealogical, an approach which (as I have explained in previous writings) tries to identify the key elements in the complex and multifaceted process of social transformations in the Kurdish community and to lay bare their structural dynamics, by focusing on the articulations of economic and political relations in the context of an ongoing struggle against sovereign domination. This struggle, as I have argued elsewhere in my writings on the historical specificity of the Kurdish question, constitutes the nexus of a dialectics of domination and resistance traversing Kurdish history in Rojhelat and has shaped the historical development of the Kurdish community in modern times. [1]