From Agrarian Experiments to Population Displacement: Iraqi Kurdish Collective Towns in the Context of Socialist ›Villagization‹ in the 1970s

This volume looks at territories such as reservations, model villages and collective towns as the spatial materialization of forced assimilation and "progress". These disciplinary spaces were created in order to disempower and alter radically the behavior of people who were perceived as ill-suited "to fit" into hegemonic imaginations of "the nation" since the 19th century.
Comparing examples from the Americas, Australia, North and East Africa, Central Europe as well as West and Central Asia, the book not only considers the acts and legitimizing narrations of ruling actors, but highlights the agency of the subaltern who are often misrepresented as passive victims of violent assimilation strategies.