What does it mean to imagine a nation without a state? This talk draws on my broader research in Kurdish studies to examine how Kurdish political life has repeatedly been organized around forms of authority and belonging that do not depend on, or wait for, a state. Taking my recent article "The Making of Online Kurdistan," co-authored with Barış Öktem, as its empirical center, the talk asks how Kurdish Generation Z constructs national belonging through digital platforms — building a transnational field of community through hashtags, online seminars, and digitally organized movements, even as this same infrastructure exposes Kurdish youth to surveillance and repression across borders. I situate this case within a longer arc of my work on Kurdish politics and within a decolonial reading of Kurdish studies more broadly. Rather than offering a general theory of sovereignty, the talk uses the Kurdish case to think through a live and unresolved question in the study of stateless nations: what forms can political authority, legitimacy, and collective imagination take when territorial statehood is foreclosed, and what is gained and lost when that struggle moves online.

Mashuq Kurt is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Law and Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work sits at the intersection of Middle Eastern studies and the sociology of migration and diaspora, examining how Kurds and other marginalised communities construct political authority and belonging outside the institutions of the nation-state. He is the author of Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey: Islamism, Violence and the State (Pluto Press, 2017), co-editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly Special Issue: Decolonizing Kurdish Studies (2024) and the Contemporary Islam Special Issue: Islam, Critique and the Canon (2024), and has published in journals including Current Anthropology, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and Social Research: An International Quarterly. His recent article "The Making of Online Kurdistan" (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2026), co-authored with Barış Öktem, examines how Kurdish Generation Z constructs national belonging through digital platforms. He was a Marie Curie Global Fellow at the London School of Economics and Yale University, has held visiting positions at Stanford and Sciences Po CERI. A regular contributor to public and policy debates, he has organised panels and given talks at the UK Parliament, Chatham House, and RUSI, and his commentary has appeared in Foreign Policy, Le Monde, and The New Arab, among others. He is also an award-winning filmmaker: his documentary The Seven Doors received the Jean Rouch Award from the American Anthropological Association's Society for Visual Anthropology in 2020.

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