Professor Monshipouri: What Comes Next for Kurdish Referendum?

TEHRAN TIMES -- Mahmood Monshipouri, Ph.D., teaches Middle Eastern Politics at San Francisco State University and University of California, Berkeley. He wrote this opinion piece about the Kurdistan government’s decision to move to independence from Iraq. “The underlying tension in many post-colonial states between the right to self-determination and the principle of territorial integrity is once again manifested in the new move by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to go from autonomy to outright independence,” Monshipouri writes. “The same can be said about the October 1, 2017, Catalonia’s vote on independence from Spain. There is a need to find appropriate mechanisms that could peacefully and justly marry these two rights: the state rights to sovereignty and territorial integrity on the one hand and the rights of domestic ethnic groups to autonomy and self-determination on the other.”