Download or read book Kurdish Politics in Turkey written by Seevan Saeed and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds were promised their own state. However, several factors meant that this dream never became a reality, and the land of the Kurds was divided. Amid a sense of a loss of identity, the Kurds started to fight for their social and political rights. ‘Kurdish Politics in Turkey’ argues that the Kurdish struggle has largely been a failure, and that the emergence of the Unions of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) has been a direct result of this. The book examines the success of the KCK and how it has transformed this Kurdish struggle in Turkey from a one-dimensional political movement, to a multi-dimensional social movement.

Download or read book Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics written by Zeki Sarigil and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kurdish Movement in Turkey’s growing alliance with Islam One of the fault lines of Turkish politics traditionally has been the divide between religious and secular movements. However, as Zeki Sarigil argues, the secular Kurdish movement in Turkey has increasingly become aligned with Islam. As a result, Islam has become part of the movement’s political discourse, strategies and actions. Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics traces the evolving relations between the leftist, secular Kurdish movement and Islam, from an apathetic and/or antagonistic attitude in the 1970s and 1980s to an increasingly Islam-friendly approach in the 1990s to an attitude of accommodation and the rise of Kurdish-Islamic synthesis in the early 2000s. Based on 104 interviews in several provinces in Turkey (primarily Ankara, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, and Tunceli) between 2011 and 2015 as well as ethnographic data, public opinion surveys and statements from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Kurdish leaders, Sarigil shows how the secular Kurdish movement increasingly has been endorsing Islam and Islamic actors. The reasons for this Islamic opening are global, national, and local; Sarigil demonstrates that a group of strategic and ideological factors have encouraged and/or forced Kurdish leaders to redraw symbolic and social boundaries of the movement. Namely, with the end of the Cold War support for Marxist ideas collapsed, creating increasingly more favorable responses towards religion. In addition, the movement’s need to expand its social basis and popularity; electoral politics; and legitimacy struggles against rival political actors were other major factors, which triggered the Kurdish movement’s boundary expansion (i.e. its Islamic opening). The study also shows that the Kurdish boundary making was not without any tension or contestation. The boundary expansion by Kurdish ethnopolitical elites triggered both internal and external boundary contestations. The movement’s embrace of Islam on a more widespread level has major ramifications for politics in Turkey and in the region. Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics has important insight into the PKK, modern Turkish and Islamic societies and highlights the increasing role of Islam in global politics.

Download or read book The Kurds and the Politics of Turkey written by Deniz Çifçi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kurds constitute the largest stateless nation in the world. Their position in Turkey attracts attention both within the country and internationally, particularly focusing on the demand for Kurdish independence. Yet since the 1990s, new Kurdish parties have formed within Turkey who have a variety of ideologies and demands that go beyond, and differ in opinion on, the question of independence. Much of the present literature on the topic looks at the Kurds of Turkey as a homogenous group with unified political demands, which over-simplifies their position within the political backdrop of Turkey. This book seeks to provide nuance and depth to the current debate on Kurdish political agency and presence in Turkey. Presently, the Kurds' political demands can be classified into four categories; democratic autonomy, their cultural rights to be granted, federalism (territorial autonomies) and independence (creation of a Kurdish nation-state). In a broad sense, these models can also be ordered into two categories; territorial political models (federalism and independence) and non-territorial political models (democratic autonomy and cultural rights). Considering the diversity within the Kurdish community - intertwinement of tribal, ethnic and national identity - and differences in their language, religion and ideology, there are several contributing factors for the emergence of the current varied political demands of Kurds. By explaining variation among the Kurds' political demands through close analysis of existing at emerging parties, this study challenges a deterministic approach to the Kurds which currently dominates the discourse.

Download or read book The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey written by Veli Yadirgi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the link between the economic and political development of the Kurds in Turkey, and Turkey's Kurdish question.

Download or read book Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey written by Marlies Casier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines some of the most pressing issues facing the Turkish political establishment, in particular the issues of political Islam, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalisms. The authors explore the rationales of the main political actors in Turkey in order to increase our understanding of the ongoing debates over the secularist character of the Turkish Republic and over Turkey’s longstanding Kurdish issue. Original contributions from respected scholars in the field of Turkish and Kurdish studies provide us with many insights into the social and political fabric of Turkey, exploring Turkey’s secularist establishment, the ruling AKP government, the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the Institutions of the European Union. While the focus of concern in this book is with the social agents of contemporary politics in Turkey, the convictions they have and the strategies they employ, historical dimensions are also integrated in their analyses. In its approach, the book makes an important contribution to a widening investigation into the making of politics in the contemporary world. Incorporating the importance of the growing transnational connections between Turkey and Europe, this book is particularly relevant in the light of the ongoing negotiations over Turkey’s membership to the European Union, and will be of interest to scholars interested in Turkish studies, Kurdish studies and Middle Eastern Politics.

Download or read book Activists in Office written by Nicole F. Watts and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of Kurdish politician-activists have been prosecuted and imprisoned, and hundreds have been murdered for espousing Kurdish political and cultural rights over the past twenty years. The risks are high, yet Pro-Kurdish political parties have made significant gains, as resources afforded by the political system have allowed them to challenge state rhetoric and policies to exercise power at the municipal level, which has helped legitimize and advance the pro-Kurdish movement. Activists in Office examines how these parties, while sharing many of the goals expressed by armed Kurdish groups, are using the legal political system to promote their highly contentious Kurdish national agenda in the face of a violent, repressive state. Nicole F. Watts sheds light not only on the particular situation of Kurds in Turkey, but also on the challenges, risks, and potential benefits for comparable movements operating in less-than-fully democratic contexts. The book is a result of more than ten years of research conducted in Turkey and in Europe, and it draws on a wide array of sources, including Turkish electoral data, memoirs, court records, and interviews.

Download or read book Turkey s Kurdish Question written by Henri J. Barkey and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kurds, one of the oldest ethnic groups in the Middle East, are reasserting their identity—politically and through violence. Divided mainly among Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the Kurds have posed increasingly sharp challenges to all of these states in their quest for greater autonomy if not outright independence. Turkey's essentially democratic structure and civil society_ideal tools for coping with and incorporating minority challenge_have so far been suspended on this issue, which the government is treating almost exclusively as a security problem to be dealt with by force. For the West the situation in Turkey is particularly significant because of the country's importance in the region and because of the economic, political, and diplomatic damage that the conflict has caused. If Turkey fails to find a peaceful solution within its current borders, then the outlook is grim for ethnic and separatist challenges elsewhere in the region. This study explores the roots, dimensions, character, and evolution of the problem, offers a range of approaches to a resolution of the conflict, and draws broader parallels between the Kurdish question and other separatist movements worldwide.

Download or read book The Kurds In Turkey written by Michael Gunter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the Kurdish problem in Turkey from the point of view of the Turkish authorities, as well as from the perspective of disaffected Kurds living in that state and abroad. It also analyzes the political instability and terrorism rampant in Turkey during the late 1970s.

Download or read book The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey written by Ramazan Aras and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey examines political violence, the politics of fear and the Kurdish experience of pain through an analysis of life stories, personal narratives and testimonies of Kurdish subjects in contemporary Turkey. It traces the physical and psychological impacts of the war between the state security forces and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas in the last three decades, in Kurdish populated areas in the south-eastern part of Turkey. Focusing on the instrumentalization of violence, the ensuing and manufactured culture of fear, gendered experiences of state violence, pain, incarceration, and corporeal punishment, Ramazan Aras argues that these phenomena have shaped contemporary Kurdish history and memory. Analysing occurrences of various forms of protracted state violence and fear not only as personal and differential markers experienced by individuals, but also as communally-felt phenomena which have engendered collective suffering, this book asserts that these traumatic experiences have marked the social body and produced a prevailing narrative of Kurdishness. Providing an anthropological study of political violence, fear, and pain amongst the Kurdish community in Turkey, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Kurdish Studies, Middle East Studies and Anthropology.

Download or read book Turkey s Mission Impossible written by Cengiz Çandar and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a work of excavation of the modern history of Turkey, with the Kurdish question at its center, unearthed and exposed in Çandar’s captivating narrative. The founding of a Turkish nation-state in Asia Minor brought with it the denial of the distinct Kurdish identity in its midst, giving birth to an intractable problem that led to intermittent Kurdish revolts and culminated in the enduring insurgency of the PKK. The Kurdish question is perceived as a mortal threat for the survival of Turkey. The author weaves a fascinating account of the encounter between Turkey and the Kurds in historical perspective with special emphasis on failed peace processes. Providing a unique historical record of the authoritarian, centralist and ultra-nationalist—rather than Islamist—nature of the Turkish state rooted in the last decades of the Ottoman period and finally manifested in Erdoğan’s “New Turkey,” Çandar challenges stereotyped and conventional views on the Turkey of today and tomorrow. Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds combines scholarly research with the memoirs of a participant observer, richly revealing the author’s first-hand knowledge of developments acquired over a lifetime devoted to the resolution of perhaps the most complex problem of the Middle East.

Download or read book The Kurds in Erdogan s Turkey written by William Gourlay and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the circumstances of the Kurds in 21st century Turkey, under the hegemony of the AKP government. After decades of denial, oppression and conflict, Kurds now assert a more confident presence in Turkey's politics - but does increasing visibility mean a rejection of Turkey? Recording Kurdish voices from Istanbul and DiyarbakA r, Turkey's most important Kurdish-populated cities, this book generates new understandings of Kurdish identity and political aspirations. Highlighting elements of Kurdish identity including Newroz, the Kurdish language, connections to religion, landscape and cross-border ties, it offers a portrait of Kurdish political life in a Turkey increasingly dominated by its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Within the context of Turkey's troubled trajectory towards democratisation, it documents Kurdish narratives of oppression and resistance, and enquires how Kurds reconcile their distinct ethnic identity and citizenship in modern Turkey.

Download or read book The Kurds in Erdogan s New Turkey written by Nikos Christofis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the AKP government since 2002 during which time the state’s approach to the Kurdish Question has undergone several changes. Examining what preceded and followed the failed putsch of 2016, it explains and critiques that situates the Kurdish Question in its broader context. It stands out with the main objective to avoid any ‘policy-oriented bias’ through an interdisciplinary and multi-thematic approach. The volume discusses the state and policies in the Kurdish region of Turkey, as well as counter-hegemonic discourses that seek to reform existing institutions. Some chapters focus on the domestic aspects and gender perspectives of the Kurdish Question in Turkey, which focus has been taken over by recent developments in Syria and the Middle East in general. Other chapters include a range of new aspects of Turkish society and politics, and the international aspects of Ankara’s policies and its implications not only inside Turkey but also internationally. Taking both domestic and foreign policy aspects into account, the book offers a set of innovative explanations for the state of crisis in Turkey and a solid basis for thinking about the likely path forward. Scholars, researchers and post-graduates, interested in political theory, Kurdish and Middle East politics will find this book invaluable.

Download or read book Kurds in Erdogan s Turkey written by William Gourlay and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the circumstances of the Kurds in 21st century Turkey, under the hegemony of the AKP government. After decades of denial, oppression and conflict, Kurds now assert a more confident presence in Turkey's politics - but does increasing visibility mean a rejection of Turkey? Recording Kurdish voices from Istanbul and DiyarbakA r, Turkey's most important Kurdish-populated cities, this book generates new understandings of Kurdish identity and political aspirations. Highlighting elements of Kurdish identity including Newroz, the Kurdish language, connections to religion, landscape and cross-border ties, it offers a portrait of Kurdish political life in a Turkey increasingly dominated by its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Within the context of Turkey's troubled trajectory towards democratisation, it documents Kurdish narratives of oppression and resistance, and enquires how Kurds reconcile their distinct ethnic identity and citizenship in modern Turkey.

Download or read book The Kurdish Question and Turkey written by Kemal Kirişci and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a comprehensive examination of the Kurdish question in Turkey, tracing its developments from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the present day.

Download or read book The Kurds and the Politics of Turkey written by Deniz Çifci and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Kurds constitute the largest stateless nation in the world. Their position in Turkey attracts attention both within the country and internationally, particularly focusing on the demand for Kurdish independence. Yet since the 1990s, new Kurdish parties have formed within Turkey who have a variety of ideologies and demands that go beyond, and differ in opinion on, the question of independence. Much of the present literature on the topic looks at the Kurds of Turkey as a homogenous group with unified political demands, which over-simplifies their position within the political backdrop of Turkey. This book seeks to provide nuance and depth to the current debate on Kurdish political agency and presence in Turkey. Presently, the Kurds' political demands can be classified into four categories; democratic autonomy, their cultural rights to be granted, federalism (territorial autonomies) and independence (creation of a Kurdish nation-state). In a broad sense, these models can also be ordered into two categories; territorial political models (federalism and independence) and non-territorial political models (democratic autonomy and cultural rights). Considering the diversity within the Kurdish community - intertwinement of tribal, ethnic and national identity - and differences in their language, religion and ideology, there are several contributing factors for the emergence of the current varied political demands of Kurds. By explaining variation among the Kurds' political demands through close analysis of existing at emerging parties, this study challenges a deterministic approach to the Kurds which currently dominates the discourse."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Download or read book The Political Representation of Kurds in Turkey written by Cengiz Gunes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey relentlessly persecuted any form of Kurdish dissent. This led to the radicalisation of an increasing number of Kurds, the rise of the Kurdish national movement and the PKK's insurgency against Turkey. Political activism by the Kurds or around Kurdish-related political demands continues to be viewed with deep suspicions by Turkey's political establishment and severely restricted. Despite this, the pro-Kurdish democratic movement has emerged, providing Kurds with a channel to represent themselves and articulate their demands. This book is timely contribution to the debate on the Kurds' political representation in Turkey, tracing the different forms it has taken since 1950. The book highlights how the transformations in Kurdish society have affected the types of actors involved in politics and the avenues, organisations and networks Kurds use to challenge the state. Based on survey data obtained from over 350 individuals, this is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of Kurdish attitudes from across different segments of Kurdish society, including the elite, the business and professional classes, women and youth activists. It is an intimate portrait of how Kurds today are dealing with the challenges and difficulties of political representation.

Download or read book The Kurdish Question in Turkey written by Cengiz Gunes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost three decades have passed since political violence erupted in Turkey’s south-eastern regions, where the majority of Turkey’s approximately 20 million Kurds live. In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) initiated an insurgency which intensified in the following decades and continues to this day. Kurdish regions in Turkey were under military rule for more than a decade and the conflict has cost the lives of 45,000 people, including soldiers, guerrillas and civilians. The complex issue of the Kurdish Question in Turkey is subject to comprehensive examination in this book. This interdisciplinary edited volume brings together chapters by social theorists, political scientists, social anthropologists, sociologists, legal theorists and ethnomusicologists to provide new perspectives on this internationally significant issue. It elaborates on the complexity of the Kurdish question and examines the subject matter from a number of innovative angles. Considering historical, theoretical and political aspects of the Kurdish question in depth and raising issues that have not been discussed sufficiently in existing literature, this book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Nationalism and Conflict, Turkish Politics and Middle Eastern politics more broadly.