Identity, Ethnicity, and Everyday Space

Regional identity can translate into powerful political movements when a population perceives itself as culturally or historically distinct from the wider state that governs it. Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, has a long-standing regional identity built around the Catalan language and a distinct historical narrative, which culminated in a disputed independence referendum in October 2017 and a subsequent political crisis. Kurdistan represents a different case, a stateless nation of tens of millions of people whose population is divided across parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with varying degrees of autonomy, most notably in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, but without an internationally recognized independent state of its own. Quebec, in Canada, has pursued its distinct French-language identity through the political process rather than armed conflict, holding sovereignty referendums in 1980 and 1995, the latter narrowly rejected, while securing significant linguistic and cultural autonomy within the Canadian federation.