The Clements Department of History

at SMU invites you to a

A STANTON SHARP LECTURE

Iraqi Kurdistan:

Between Statelessness

 and State Building

Monday, March 30, 2009

Reception at 6 p.m. ■ Lecture at 6:30 p.m.

McCord Auditorium ■ 306 Dallas Hall

3225 University ■ SMU ■  Dallas, TX

Presented by Janet Klein

Assistant Professor of History

University of Akron

What do we make of a political entity that has state capacity when it is not, in fact, a state?  What exactly is the Kurdistan Region of Iraq?  It looks like a state, it acts like a state, but it is not certified as a state through international recognition.  The region’s current “state capacity” has been the result of a determined state-building project that began nearly two decades ago, and yet it remains somewhere between state and statelessness.  This Sharp Lecture will examine the Kurds’ current state-building project against the backdrop of historical memory and present-day geopolitics.

Professor Janet Klein, who earned her PhD at Princeton, is the author of Power in the Periphery: Kurdish Tribal Militias and the Ottoman State, 1890-1814 (a book manuscript in progress).

(photo J. Klein)

The Stanton Sharp Lectures are supported by a generous gift from Ruth Sharp Altshuler honoring her son, Stanton Sharp.  The lectures are free and open to the public.  Seating is not reserved.

Visitor parking is available in the parking garages at Ownby & Binkley ($1 per hour) or

at SMU Blvd. & Airline ($5 per day).
 

For more information, call 214-768-2967 or  e-mail hist@smu.edu.