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Kurds and the State in Iran. By Abbas Vali. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011.215 pp. $90.
Kurdish historiography has always been uneven. While scholars have written tomes about the history and politics of the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, government repression and an inability for outside scholars to work in either Syria or Iran have left those Kurdish communities largely unrepresented in the literature. Happily, Vali, a political theorist at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, works to rectify this in Kurds and the State in Iran.
He begins by focusing on the development of Kurdish identity in early twentieth-century Iran. Initially, a nationalism based on some aware- ness of ethnicity...