Abstract
Following Turkey’s recent military operation in Syria (Operation Peace Spring) against the YPG forces, the ‘Turks’ and the ‘Kurds’ have widely and discursively been dichotomized by the Western media outlets and political circles. The US President Donald Trump even claimed that the ‘Turks’ and the ‘Kurds’ have been fighting for hundreds of years, and that they are ‘natural enemies’. However, the complex historical relationship of the ‘Turks’ and the ‘Kurds’, as loosely connected social totalities before the age of nationalism, refutes such sloppy and feeble contentions. This work presents an identity-driven historical survey of Turkish/Turkmen societies’ and polities’ interrelations with Kurdish collectivities until the emergence of modern nationhood and nationalism. In doing so, this article provides an ideational and narrational context feeding the Turkish government’s contemporary relationship with the Kurds inside and outside of Turkey. The major complication in journalistic and academic literature is the lack or omission of historical background knowledge informing current policy choices influenced by how relevant actors historically perceive each other. Today’s incidents and facts such as ‘solution process’, ‘village guard system’ or different Kurdish collectivities’ positioning between Iran and Turkey are sometimes akin to precedent events in history. This work aims to be a holistic contribution to fill this gap and to provide a succinct historical overview of interrelations.
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