The Rise and Fall of Political Movements in the Late 19th Century and First Half of 20th Century Kurdistan (an Organisational Analysis)

Abstract

Kurdological literature has been mainly limited to mere historical descriptive discussions characterized by descriptive story telling about personal/private aspects of Kurdish political chiefs. This study tries to provide a new sociological analysis based on synthetic organizational model to examine the process and structure of political movement-making and the causes of their failure in all around Kurdistan in the late 19th century and first half of 20th century. Four organizational theories are employed in this paper: contingency, institutional, population ecology and resource dependency theories. In order to analyse the rise and demise of political movement-making in the late 19th century and first half of 20th century Kurdistan Macro level factors including exogenous factors i.e. the super-powers and central governments, Meso level factors containing socio-economic factors such as tribal-feudalism, regionalism and religion, and Micro Level factors composed of illiteracy and cultural poverty were analysed through aforementioned organizational theories. Our fundamental finding is that the endogenous and exogenous factors have mutually caused the rise and demise of political movement-making. But exogenous factors were the final determinant in shaping, reshaping, directing and finally collapsing on Kurdish movements. Finally it should be asserted that neither exogenous factors nor Endogenous factors were able to meet Kurdish political requirements; exogenous forces were temporal determinants that played their role according to their own economic and political logic and endogenous forces such as tribal-feudalism, regionalism and religion wasted political potential in challenging with the central governments.