Stateless People against the State - The Kurdish Autonomy

Since the birth of the modern state in Europe, Western political philosophers have dealt with the question how to limit state’s power. Thinkers like Bodin, Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu attempted to define modern state power with theories of sovereignty and at the same time produced arguments on how to limit the power of the modern state. Using the notions of ‘state of nature’ versus “civil society,” they started discussing sovereignty, state and power from the sixteenth-century onwards. Hobbes and Locke describe the “state of nature” as a permanent state of war, in which violence is the driving force, whereas in “civil society” the individual’s right to use violence is handed over to the sovereign state, so that peace would reign.