Kurdish Movement Research Articles

Iranian - Syrian support for the Kurdish national liberation movement in Kurdistan Iraq

The foreign policy of countries and international relations are affected by a lot of factors such as ethnic diversity, national issues and political movements of ethnic groups which demand their rights. One of these issues and movements is the Kurdish nationalist movement and the Kurdish issue and its role in shaping international relations in the region. The Kurdish issue as a nation was divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria and these countries have not shown any signs of willingness to fulfill Kurdish national demands within their borders. However, some of these countries were trying to use the Kurdish issue as a means of pressure against the neighboring political system whenever there was deterioration in relations between them. In addition to that, they decided not to support the Kurdish movement as a condition of compromise between these countries in case of need. The leadership of the Kurdish movement in these countries became aware of this fact and now they believe that the Kurds do not have true friends. This study is an attempt to show how The Iranian - Syrian Support for the Kurdish National Liberation Movement in Iraqi Kurdistan 1980 - 1988 , and how did these two countries take advantage of the Kurds during Iraq - Iran war?. It also tries to find out if the Kurds had any role to cease fire in that war?.

The Global South as Foreignization: The Case of the Kurdish Diaspora in Europe

This article tilts the North/South axis of the Global South scholarship towards the East/West axis, specifically the Middle East and Kurds. I first re-visit the notion of the Global South by using the conceptual tools of translation studies, especially the notion of “foreignizing translation,” a strategy aimed at pushing the boundaries of the target language (and culture) rather than simply assimilating the translated text into it. Besides arguing that the Global South perspective concerns itself with questioning North-South relations temporally and spatially, I focus on the foreignizations diasporas can bring to the Global North. As both insiders and outsiders to Northern spaces, diasporas are uniquely placed both in terms of the foreignizations they bring to the Global North and the entanglements of the North and South which they expose. In this paper I examine the “Global South in the North” by taking the Kurdish diaspora living in European metropoles as a case study and conceptualizing the Kurdish movement as a transnational indigenous movement. I argue that through the foreignizations diasporas bring, the Global South is making claims not only in the North but also on the North. By focusing on the role of diasporas and the Middle East, areas which have received little attention within Global South scholarship, I seek to complicate and thus enrich our understandings of the Global South.

(1958-1963) موقف جريدة ميلّيت Milliyet التركية من الحركة الكوردية وثورة أيلول في العراق

(1958-1963) موقف جريدة ميلّيت Milliyet التركية من الحركة الكوردية وثورة أيلول في العراق

Water and counter-hegemony: Kurdish struggle in the Tigris and Euphrates in Turkey

Water issues are often related to general questions of justice. This article discusses Tigris and Euphrates water issues from the point of view of Kurds in Turkey. The goal here is not to discuss the entire landscape of power relations and interests in the recent history of these rivers inside the country or across borders, but to understand how opposition Kurds view the way in which Turkish authorities manage water resources, policies and politics within the basins, affecting local society and the environment. It has been found that beyond establishing hydro-hegemony over co-riparian states along the Tigris and Euphrates (Syria and Iraq), the Turkish state has sought to deploy its soft and hard power over Kurds. The opposition Kurdish movement has responded by developing its own counter-hegemonic measures. Their proposals seem to aim at winning over Kurds, but also Turks and other peoples. Their framing of a different type of stakeholder participation in decision-making calls for a model of direct democracy covering different aspects of life, including water management and environmental soundness. The research is based on academic and government literature and a number of semi-structured interviews with Kurdish municipal officials, faculty and activists.

The ambiguities of democratic autonomy: the Kurdish movement in Turkey and Rojava

This paper traces the ideology of democratic autonomy, as developed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from the libertarian and anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin, as an alternative to the authoritarian and centralist nation state, not only in the Kurdish-inhabited provinces, but in Turkey at large. It explores, first, the ideological underpinnings and second, the practical implementation of democratic autonomy both in south-eastern Turkey and in north-eastern Syria, or Rojava. Divergences between the two, I will argue, are not merely the result of contradictions between ideology and practice, or of the PKK’s enduring Leninist vanguardism, but also arise because the ideology itself remains ambiguous or implicit on the questions of party organization and the legitimacy of armed resistance. These ambiguities help to account for the apparent tension between grassroots anarchism and Leninist centralism in democratic autonomy, not only in practice but also in theory.

From constructive engagement to renewed estrangement? Securitization and Turkey’s deteriorating relations with its Kurdish minority

ABSTRACTOver the last several years, the political will of the governing AKP in Turkey to make the historic compromises necessary to complete the peace process with the Kurds has sharply declined. This paper will examine the causes of the breakdown in the Turkish-Kurdish peace process and the Turkish government’s lurch in a nationalist direction in its approach towards the Kurdish minority from the standpoint of ‘securitization’ theory. The key catalysts, it is argued, for the re-emergence of a securitization paradigm in Turkey’s handling of the Kurdish issue are: (1) Turkey’s stalled bid for accession to the European Union; (2) the intensifying electoral competition between AKP and the Kurdish movement parties, coupled with the instrumentalization of the Kurdish peace process to serve President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s quest to install a dominant presidential system and (3) the spillover effects of Syria’s civil war on Turkey’s relations with its own Kurdish populace.

Review

Review

Do the Kurds have ‘no friends but the mountains’? Turkey's Secret War against Communists, Soviets and the Kurds

ABSTRACTA Kurdish proverb says that the Kurds have ‘no friends but the mountains’. This was not what the Turkish authorities believed. Using new and previously unexploited archives both in English and Turkish, this article offers a new interpretation of Turkey's perception of the Kurds. By analyzing Kurdish activities and their alignment with Communist movements and Soviet activities, it shows how Turkey's threat perception was shaped by international contexts, especially through the Cold War. In addition, the Kurdish nationalist movement in the Middle East played a pivotal role in regional intelligence cooperation between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. This article argues that Soviet and Communist activities had an important role in shaping Turkey's threat perception of the Kurdish minority in the country. Turkey's perception of subversive threats involved an intertwining of Communists, Soviets and Kurds. This affected the Kurdish bid for independence for most of the twentieth century.

Princes, Pashas and Patriots: The Kurdish Intelligentsia, the Ottoman Empire and the National Question (1908–1914)

This article surveys the attitude of the Ottoman-Kurdish intelligentsia and the nascent Kurdish movement towards the issue of nationality in the period between the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The existing academic literature has tended to regard the Kurdish movement in this period as being primarily cultural and apolitical in orientation. However, while the majority of the Kurdish intellectual and professional classes were committed to the Ottoman polity, their activities were far from apolitical. This is not to suggest that the emergent Kurdish movement was unified. On the contrary, the often varied relationship between the Ottoman polity and different elements of the Kurdish elite resulted in a significant degree of factionalism. However, while some of this elite began to think of the Kurds as an oppressed 'minority' locked inside the Ottoman (read Turkish) 'prison house' of nations, most tended to regard the Kurds as both a distinct people and an integral part of the Ottoman 'nation'.

The Kurdish struggle and the crisis of the Turkishness Contract

In this article, inspired by Whiteness Studies, I propose two concepts that allow us to see the question of ethnicity as well as the history of the Turkish Republic through the lens of privilege: Turkishness and the Turkishness Contract. By Turkishness, I mean a patterned but mostly unrecognized relationship between Turkish individuals’ ethnic position and their ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and knowing – as well as not seeing, not hearing, not feeling and not knowing. These ways and states of Turkishness have been shaped by a set of written/unwritten and spoken/unspoken agreements (the Turkishness Contract) among the Muslims of Anatolia. However, during the last 40 years, the Kurdish movement, by creating a military and civilian resistance with mass support, has challenged the fundamentals of the contract and therefore caused a dramatic crisis of identity and selfhood for Turkishness.

Common Ground or Battlefield?: Deconstructing the Politics of Recognition in Turkey

This article examines the impacts that the embrace of diversity talk has had on identity and ethnic politics in Turkey that has evolved toward a relative and selective recognition. Based on the analysis of the cases of the Laze and Kurdish movements, the article argues that the politics of recognition are built conjointly by an array of actors, at different levels, with different aims, and through their very practices and interactions. The article shows that, although the embrace of diversity talk may mark a depolitization of the ethnonational claims, it still gives room to forms of resistance. These dynamics have shaped a noncoherent, multilayered recognition that does not allow the building of a common ground in the country but rather of a battlefield around discursive and policies choices.

Kurds and Their Cultural Crossroads

Kurds have come to occupy an increasingly important position in the contemporary Middle East, notably in the struggle against Islamic State (IS). This has brought about an increased presence of Kurds in global media. At the same time, the Kurdish media landscape in the Middle East and in the diaspora has developed rapidly. The timing is thus appropriate to reconsider Kurdish media and cultural production in the light of the recent political, cultural, social and technological shifts. In this editorial introduction to the special issue on Kurdish media and cultural production we reflect on this growing field of research, focusing on three questions: How do media and cultural production contribute to contemporary (discourses on) Kurdish movements, and vice versa? How can we explain the emergence of a Kurdish mediascape in the Middle East and Europe theoretically and methodologically? And, what is the relevance and potential effect of this emerging Kurdish mediascape for the existing politics of media at the national and international level? We give a brief overview of the current state of research on Kurdish media and cultural production and discuss the articles in this special issue and how they contribute to a stronger understanding of the relations between media, culture and society in the Middle East.

Democratic Economy Conference: An Introductory Note

In late 2014, a two-day conference devoted to establishing the basic principles of a democratic economy in Northern Kurdistan was held by the Democratic Society Congress in the city of Wan. The conference was organized to initiate a process of putting into practice the Kurdish movement's ecological, gender egalitarian, council communalist, socioeconomic vision. This brief note provides a sketch of the historical conjuncture of the conference and identifies the important assets of the movement as well as the challenges it is facing in its struggle to build a “new life” through the democratization of economy.

The Armenian Genocide in the Kurdish Novel: Restructuring Identity through Collective Memory

This article examines the recently increasing representation of the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in modern Kurdish literature in Turkey. This recent interest is argued to be nested within the “memory wave” in Turkey, but also motivated by both the pluralist ideological underpinnings of the dominant Kurdish movements in Turkey and a robust oral history transmission within Kurdish society. The memory of the genocide is shown to appear in Kurdish novels through a number of recurring themes, such as a nostalgic past cohabitation, Islamicized Armenians, and a redemptive continuity between Armenian and Kurdish suffering in consecutive decades. The article argues that the treatment of the genocide memory in Kurdish literature contributes to a wider-scale effort of establishing a non-negationist counter-memory, but that its potential for a genuine confrontation with the past is weakened by its selective treatment of the memory whereby issues of responsibility and guilt are often avoided.

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East

Reflections on the Kurdish diaspora: An interview with Dr Kendal Nezan

In this interview, Dr Kendal Nezan, the director of the Kurdish Institute in Paris, reflects on the development of the Kurdish diaspora, the current state of affairs concerning Kurdish movements in Europe and the past and present of the Kurdish Institute in Paris, first established in 1983. Nezan notes that the institute has been successful in creating a non-partisan public space open for Kurds from all corners of the world as well as to others interested in Kurdish history, language, culture and politics. Furthermore, the institute has been an important platform to raise awareness about the Kurdish cause in Europe. The continued functioning of the institute remains essential and, according to Nezan, not least for the second generation diaspora to be able to engage for the Kurdish cause. To this end, the institute has been negatively affected by the austerity policies of the French authorities and launched a donation campaign to draw contributions to ensure that it can continue to operate as an independent institute.

The Kurds in the Turkish–Armenian Reconciliation Process: Double-Bind or Double-Blind?

A century after the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial by the Turkish state, there has emerged a notable and unprecedented interest in the Armenian past and present both in civil society discourse and scholarship in Turkey, accompanied by various reconciliation iniatives at the state and society levels. Observers have suggested that this increased engagement with Turkey's suppressed past is an outcome of its EU candidacy, the democratization reforms of the early 2000s, and the shockwave among liberal segments of Turkish society caused by the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. I argue that this shortsighted analysis, which completely ignores the Kurdish movement's transformative challenge to Turkish denialism since the 1980s, echoes the key fallacy of present discussions of Turkey's engagement with its past:compartmentalizationanddisjunctionof interlinked state crimes.

Tailoring Strategies According to Ever-Changing Dynamics: The Evolving Image of the Kurdish Diaspora in Germany

Germany might be considered as the European country that has suffered the most from the spatial diffusion of Turkey's internal conflicts. It has received the highest number of Kurdish migrants in Europe and it became the core of Kurdish mobilization in transnational space. Germany's approach to the Kurdish Question on its own soil—combined with the strategies that the Kurdish activists used—determined the scope of opportunity structures for the mobilization of the Kurdish movement. This article explains how Kurdish activism has come to be perceived in Germany, and analyzes the German political environment by focusing on the criminalization and stigmatization of the Kurdish movement, especially during the 1990s. It then describes the discursive shift and change in framing strategies that the Kurdish diaspora experienced after the capture of the the Kurdistan Workers' Party's (PKK) leader in 1999. Lastly, it touches upon the recent developments in the Middle East, especially in Kobane, and their impact on the image of the Kurdish movement. The article is based on extensive fieldwork in Germany and includes testimonies of Kurdish diaspora activists, with a focus on their own perceptions about their situation and how they respond to securitization policies in the host country.

Hoybun Örgütü: Kürt Milliyetçiliğinde Yeni Bir Evre

This article aims to analyze the role, structure and activities of the Xoybun Organization in taking the Kurdish issue out to the international platforms. Despite the fact that organization did not achieve major gains during its lifetime, it provided a fresh breath and a great deal of experience to the Kurdish movements afterwards. Contrary to the Kurdish organizations that were set up before it, Xoybun Organization was structured around a military and administrative configuration. Further, believing that establishment of an independent Kurdistan depended on international support, they concentrated their efforts on international lobbying, and attempted to receive attention of the international community with various publications on the Kurdish issue. In doing so, they ushered a new era in Kurdish nationalism