The Kurds are one of the largest stateless nations in the world, numbering more than 20 million people. Their homeland lies mostly within the present-day borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran as well as parts of Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Yet until recently the 'Kurdish question' - that is, the question of Kurdish self-determination - seemed, to many observers, dormant. It was only after the so-called Arab Spring, and with the rise of the Islamic State, that they emerged at the centre of Middle East politics. But what is the future of the Kurdish national movement? How do the Kurds themselves understand their community and quest for political representation? This book analyses the major problems, challenges and opportunities currently facing the Kurds. Of particular significance, this book shows, is the new Kurdish society that is evolving in the context of a transforming Middle East. This is made of diverse communities from across the region who represent very different historical, linguistic, political, social and cultural backgrounds that are yet to be understood. This book examines the recent shifts and changes within Kurdish societies and their host countries, and argues that the Kurdish national movement requires institutional and constitutional recognition of pluralism and diversity. Featuring contributions from world-leading experts on Kurdish politics, this timely book combines empirical case studies with cutting-edge theory to shed new light on the Kurds of the 21st century.

In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi's Tempavani, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The crisis in Israel/Palestine has long been the world's most visible military conflict. Yet the region's cultural and intellectual life remains all but unknown to most foreign observers, which means that literary texts that make it into circulation abroad tend to be received as historical documents rather than aesthetic artefacts. Rhetorics of Belonging examines the diverse ways in which Palestinian and Israeli world writers have responded to the expectation that they will 'narrate' the nation, invigorating critical debates about the political and artistic value of national narration as a reading and writing practice. It considers writers whose work is rarely discussed together, offering new readings of the work of Edward Said, Amos Oz, Mourid Barghouti, Orly Castel-Bloom, Sahar Khalifeh, and Anton Shammas. This book helps to restore the category of the nation to contemporary literary criticism by attending to a context where the idea of the nation is so central a part of everyday experience that writers cannot not address it, and readers cannot help but read for it. It also points a way toward a relational literary history of Israel/Palestine, one that would situate Palestinian and Israeli writing in the context of a history of antagonistic interaction. The book's findings are relevant not only for scholars working in postcolonial studies and Israel/Palestine studies, but for anyone interested in the difficult and unpredictable intersections of literature and politics.