Between February and April 2011 Kurds in the Kurdistan region of Iraq staged their own version of the Arab Spring. Thousands of activists in Sulaimaniya held mass daily protests for almost two straight months, calling for government reform and an end to corruption. Other demonstrations against the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) took place in Halabja, Rania, and other cities under KRG rule. In clashes between protesters and security forces, nine people died before the KRG forcibly ended the protests in early April. This paper examines two main questions. 1) How do we explain the size and durability of the protests? These constituted a significant turning point in state-society relations for Kurds under the KRG, not only because they constituted the largest and longest-lived protests in KRG history but because activists’ demands shifted from service-oriented, localized demands of past protests to national demands for systemic reform. 2) How do we explain the differential geography of protest, in which cities in Sulaimaniya governorate rose up, but other provinces – most notably, Erbil province where the capital is located -- did not? I suggest this case provides us insight into the differential value of symbolic capital. In Sulaimaniya governorate, the symbolic capital afforded by the democracy/legitimacy discourse of the Arab Spring resonated profoundly and translated into an increased capacity to mobilize. This is for two reasons: 1) because of the breakdown in state (party) legitimacy in Sulaimaniya governorate; and, 2) because of the growing organizational capacity to mobilize there (due to a less repressive political apparatus, governance- and service-related grievances, and, especially, the development of civic protest networks after 2006). However, the “illegitimacy” discourse of the Arab Spring did not afford activists much traction in Erbil governorate, where the state-society dynamic is profoundly different, and the symbolic legitimation provided by nationalism and governance still resonates with broad swathes of the population. We can thus view the protests as part of a growing but geopolitically differentiated effort to redefine Kurdish notions of what constitutes the national (Kurdish) interest and shift the basis of government authority in the KRG from a national-charismatic model to a more institutionalized form of legal-rational authority. The paper is based on a series of research trips conducted in the Sulaimaniya and Erbil governorates between 2009 and 2012 (including during the 2011 protests). The main sources include in-depth interviews, media (traditional and electronic), government speeches, and other qualitative sources.