Relative to the rest of Iraq, the Kurdistan region is peaceful, tolerant and prosperous. The region provided an anchor of stability over the 2006–7 period as the rest of the country teetered on the brink of all-out civil war. More recently, the emergence of the liberal political party the Movement for Change (Gorran) in 2009 has challenged the dominance of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), paving the way for a meaningfully competitive political system. Small wonder then that many view the Kurdistan region as the success story of the new Iraq and among the few unambiguously positive legacies of the 2003 US military intervention. Unfortunately, this success rests on precarious foundations. The more enduring legacy of eight years of US occupation is a constitution that fails to define the political ‘rules of the game’, leaving the Kurds’ autonomous status guaranteed by a founding document that is ambiguous, incomplete and currently unravelling at an alarming rate.

At the time that Iraq's constitution was drafted, few Arab Iraqis seriously questioned that a high level of autonomy for the Kurds was both justified and inevitable. What derailed the constitutional drafting process and has subsequently thwarted all efforts to clarify and complete this unfinished document was the refusal to limit this level of autonomy to the Kurds. The potential application of Kurdish levels of autonomy to an Iraq-wide system of federalism is deeply disturbing to many Iraqis and, so long as the constitution continues to allow for this eventuality, it cannot form the basis of durable sectarian reconciliation and a stable political order. There is no reason why a highly autonomous Kurdistan region cannot coexist with an otherwise unitary Iraqi state, or, for that matter, as one unit among many in a formally asymmetric system of federalism. There is no compelling necessity for a constitution to treat all groups in the same way. As shown below, there are many examples from around the world of ethnic groups being singled out for special protection via territorial autonomy in either constitutions or documents of equivalent legal standing. Most of these ‘ethnofederal’ arrangements work effectively. This chapter argues that this approach should have been, and should still be, applied to Iraq as a way to break a damaging impasse over the contents of the country's constitution.