Intra-Ethnic Social Cleavages and its Political Consequences in Iran: a Case Study of the Kurds

The issue of the Kurds has been one of the most challenging ethnic issues in contemporary Iran. Most of researches that have been done in connection with the Kurds, have focused on how this ethnic relate to the sovereignty, and less has been done on the internal socio-political life of the Kurds. In other words,the main assumption of most of the researches related to the Kurds emphasizes the homogeneity of the Kurdish community, while from the point of view of this article, the Kurds are not a homogenous group like many other communities. The dynamics of Kurds' social transformation, which are based on the two distinctions of tradition-modernity and convergence-divergence, have led to the emergence of social cleavages among them. Therefore, in this regard, we have tried to examine the most important social cleavages and their political consequences among the Kurds with using the Historical Sociological approach, and the library studies and interview techniques. The results of this research showed a set of traditional and modern social construction cleavages such as tribal, religious, linguistic, generational, and gender cleavages along with some political cleavages such as ideological conflicts, political elites' competitions, and conflicts. Party and intra-party differences among the Kurds have caused the political identity of the Kurds to be a plural political identity and no political movement among the Kurds can ever become hegemonic.