Writing Statehood into Existence: Explanatory International Relations, the War against ISIS & Discourses on Kurdish National Self-determination: a talk by Dr Hannes Černy

There is a disconcerting tendency in explanatory IR scholarship to represent ethnic groups and nations in modernist and groupist terms and to analytically equate them with states. This normative essentialist portrayal, it is argued in this talk, contributes to the reification and substantialization of the strategic essentialisms of ethno-nationalist elites, and legitimizes those elites’ claim to national coherence and territorial control as well as their authority to speak on behalf of the nation, thus often rendering scholars co-protagonists in the ethno-national conflicts they set out to describe.