(Re)framing the ‘Kurdish Issue’ Through the 2014 Scottish Referendum: Reflections on Turkish Newspapers

Abstract

This paper lays out competing knowledge and opinion on the 2014 Scottish Referendum in Turkish mainstream newspapers. It investigates how allegedly pro-government (Akşam, Sabah, Milliyet) and opposition (Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Zaman) newspapers deliberated, reconstructed and reframed Turkey's key ‘internal others’ – Kurdish people – through the prism of the Scottish referendum. An open-coded review of 39 opinion columns written before and after the Scottish referendum reveals two main discussion points: (1) Turkey's conceptualisation of the Scottish referendum and (2) the (in)comparability of the Kurdish and Scottish cases. The concepts used by Turkish elites in their understandings of Kurds are used in the ‘negative’ reframing of the Scottish referendum by Turkish columnists. This negativity is historically rooted in concerns and fears about Kurdish claims for independence, allegedly supported by ‘foreign’ forces to dismantle the unity of the nation-state. The paper argues that columnists’ debates around the Scottish referendum feed from the longevity of statist discourses, which deny, ‘problematise’ and fear the Kurdish issue.