The burden of Sisyphus: a sociological inventory of the Kurdish question in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the contradictory transformation process the Kurdish movement has been experiencing over the last two decades and discusses its structural paradoxes and political shortcomings from a critical sociological perspective. Based on participant observation and interviews with activist researchers, the paper argues that the moral and ideological unity of the movement is challenged by ever-increasing social and mental divisions that are in turn prompted by forced displacement, rapid urbanization and diversified forms of social and symbolic inequalities within the Kurdish society. The fundamental division is between the emerging educated middle-class subjectivity, which has become the prime intellectual force leading the democratic political institutions, and the socially impoverished and radicalized urban youth, who have been active in contentious politics. This social division manifests within the dual organizational structures of the movement as twin and frequently contradictory dispositions. This schism also prevents the movement from building a much broader popular subjectivity to decolonize the social and political life.     

De-Europeanisation of Civil Society and Public Debates in Turkey: The Kurdish Question Revisited

Abstract

This study discusses the dynamics of de-Europeanisation and the changing impact of Europe on the politically mobilised civil society involved in the public debates concerning Turkey’s Kurdish question. The article first critically assesses how and in what ways the legal and constitutional reforms on the freedom of assembly required by the European Union (EU) changed the political structure in which civil society organisations (CSOs) operate in Turkey. It then examines the views of CSOs on the potential roles and limitations of the EU in the Kurdish question and the peace process which lasted between March 2013 and July 2015. It also delineates the reasons why the political context of Europeanisation is not seen as instrumental by these CSOs to framing and justifying their arguments.     

Resistance to centralisation in the Ottoman periphery: the Kurdish Baban and Bohtan emirates

Modern Kurdish historiography, which examines resistance to provincial centralisation in Ottoman Kurdistan, focuses largely on Bedir Khan’s Bohtan emirate and his revolt in the 1840s, while ignoring the rest of the other Kurdish emirates such as Baban emirate. While both states, Qajar Iran and Ottoman Empire, were endeavouring to solve their conflicts in the 1840s (a process which culminated in the treaty of Erzurum in 1847) the future of the Baban emirate and its territories emerged as one of the major issues during the course of negotiations. The Baban emirate was the last emirate to give up its struggle against the Sublime Porte’s centralisation reforms. The legacy of the Kurdish emirates is important to understand better the relations between the centre of the Ottoman Empire and its eastern periphery, a much less studied subject in Ottoman historiography. This article will highlight the impact of the centralisation policies in Kurdistan, more specifically on territories of the Bohtan and Baban emirates. It will be demonstrated that the changes wrought by the Tanzimat reforms were partially successful in transforming the Kurdish notables, who later became a part of the state bureaucracy. However, the reform-minded officials, who were appointed after the Kurdish emirs were removed from the region, failed to persuade the locals in favour of the new administration thus transforming their lives.     

Communal violence and ethnic polarization before and after the 2015 elections in Turkey: attacks against the HDP and the Kurdish population

Given its duration and intensity, the decades-old civil war in Turkey between the Turkish state and the PKK has resulted in relatively low levels of lethal inter-communal conflict between Kurdish and Turkish populations. However, around the June 2015 elections an unprecedented wave of systematic anti-Kurdish violence swept across western Turkey. The paper will assess these events in relation to literature on communal riots and electoral violence. It will consider the impact of state led anti-Kurdish discourse and the growth of the HDP, as potential factors that aggravated the dormant tensions and laid the groundwork for widespread inter-communal violence.     

The Kurdish image in statist historiography: the case of Simko

This article focuses on the uprising in 1918–1922 of Ismail Agha of Shikak (a.k.a. Simko) in Iranian Kurdistan and how he has been portrayed in Persian historiography. Painting Simko simply as another Kurdish rebellious chief with no nationalist aspirations leaves important questions unanswered. Simko introduced a number of firsts in Kurdish political history to Iranian Kurdistan, yet his innovations have generally been overlooked. Simko was conscious of, informed by, and founded his politics upon the communal distinctions deemed to legitimize varying degrees of Kurdish self-rule. In addition to his political and military activities, Simko co-founded the first Kurdish school in Iran, published the first Kurdish–Persian newspaper, and made Kurdish the official medium of his reign. This article draws on memoirs, personal accounts, and other unexplored primary documents to show a more complex picture of Simko's resistance, problematizes some idées reçues about Simko and his ethno-nationalism, and explores inconsistencies in the existing literature on the subject.     

The fundamental characteristics of the Kurdish nationhood project in modern Iraq

The protracted Iraqi-Kurdish conflict has plagued the country since the creation of Iraq in the 1920s. Iraqi-Kurdish relations are dominated by the clash of two contradictory nationhood projects: Kurdish and Iraqi. The Kurdish nationhood project was constructed with the perspective that the Kurds as a nation, could qualify for but is deprived of, achieving nation-state status. Based on the Kurdish project, Kurdistan and Iraq consist of two separate homelands: the Arab part of Iraq, which is part of the greater Arab homeland, and Iraqi Kurdistan which is part of the Greater Kurdistan region.     

Female Cousins and Wounded Masculinity: Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Ottoman Middle East

This article scrutinizes a highly gendered nationalist discourse shaped by a group of Kurdish nationalist men who sought to break with their Ottoman past while exiled in Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on a critical reading of publications edited by Jaladet and Kamuran Bedirkhan, this study elaborates how the vision of Kurdish nationalism put forward by the Bedirkhan brothers, despite its emphasis on the emancipation of women, held the same patriarchal aspects of their rival Kemalist Turkish counterparts. A gendered approach is clearly discernible in Kurdish nationalists' views regarding major issues such as the failure of recent Kurdish nationalist rebellions and the prescribed national duties of women and men. Their reflections on the Second World War during the war years reveal another aspect of the Kurdish nationalist discourse. Kurdish nationalists, admirably watching the Allied European soldiers' sacrifices and victories, unwittingly expressed a crisis of masculinity emanating from their perceived inability to do anything for their own country.     

De-Europeanisation in Turkey: The Case of the Rule of Law

Abstract

This article investigates the political dynamics shaping the post-2010 ‘de-Europeanisation’ of Turkey’s judicial system, particularly regarding judicial independence and rule of law. The analysis suggests the limits of conventional Europeanisation accounts emphasising causal factors such as European Union (EU) conditionality and the ‘lock-in effects’ of liberal reforms due to the benefits of EU accession. The article argues that the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP’s) bid for political hegemony resulted in the reversal of rule of law reforms. De-Europeanisation is discussed in terms of both legislative changes and the government’s observed discourse shift.