This book examines the development of Kurdish political economy and the emergence of collective Kurdish identity within a historical context through three main periods: the late- Ottoman Empire, the initial Republican Turkey era and then the post-1990s period.

This book discusses the idea that Arab cultural and political identity has been suppressed by centuries of dominance by imperial outsiders and by religious and nationalist ideologies with the result that present day Arab societies are characterised by a crisis of identity where fundamentalism or chaos seem to be the only available choices.