The congress follows the first and second successful conferences (2006 and 2011), which were held in Erbil and Duhok and brought together a wide range of scholars working on Kurdish history, language and literature. The Third International Congress on Kurdish Studies will be held in a geopolitical context with tremendous social, political and economic upheavals, including the emergence and the defeat of ISIS, the Kurdish independence referendum, the autonomy in Syria’s Rojava, political turmoil in Turkey and the 40th anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran. While the congress seeks to address these dynamics and their implications as well as their representation in academic studies on Kurds and Kurdistan from different perspectives, the congress’s core aim is to present a state of the art of the Kurdish studies in different Western countries as well as in Kurdistan. In recent years, Kurdish Studies have experienced considerable developments with many PhD theses been successfully concluded on different topics related to the Kurdish history, language and society from social, political and gendered perspectives. Scholars in Kurdish studies have been motivated to look at different topics, ranging from new political opportunities in Rojava to constitutional rights in Iraqi Kurdistan, from forced displacement to gender relations and gendered violence and from the dynamics of urbanization to the formation of municipal authorities.