A Necessary Alliance: Diplomacy and Resistance in Kurdish–Armenian Relations (1919–1930)

This article re-examines Kurdish–Armenian relations during the transition from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to the consolidation of the early Turkish Republic through the framework of a “necessary alliance.” Drawing on previously unused archival materials from the Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) archives, the study analyses diplomatic coordination, military cooperation, and institutional experiments between 1919 and the suppression of the Ağrı Uprising in 1930.The central argument is that Kurdish–Armenian cooperation emerged not from ideological convergence but from structural vulnerability in the post-imperial order. Kurdish demographic presence and armed capacity combined with Armenian diasporic diplomacy and international networks to produce an asymmetric but complementary alliance. However, chronic financial weakness, fragmented authority, tensions between diaspora strategies and local realities, and the expanding coercive power of the Republican state undermined its durability.The article further demonstrates that the Ağrı resistance constituted a modern political project rather than a localized rebellion, featuring a national assembly, declaration of a republic, symbolic state institutions, and transnational diplomacy. The Zilan Massacre is interpreted as a decisive rupture that generated a shared grammar of victimhood, linking Kurdish experiences to Armenian genocide memory and transforming trauma into political mobilization.Ultimately, the study situates forced alliances, fragile solidarities, and state violence as central dynamics of nation-building in the modern Middle East and repositions the Ağrı Uprising as a formative moment in Kurdish political modernity.