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The purpose of this study is to determine Turkish and refugee middle school students' views on their national belonging. The study employed the qualitative research approach aligned with the purpose; semi-structured interviews were conducted with Turkish and refugee students. Data were analyzed using the content analysis method. Results showed that the most important common features for national belonging of both Turkish and refugee students were the common language they spoke and the place they lived in and the difference of views regarding national belonging were in terms of discrimination. Regarding Turkish society's expectations of them, both groups emphasized universal values such as being hardworking and being a good person, but their perceptions of serving the state differed. As for what Turkish and refugee students should do for this society, Turkish students believed that they should be hardworking and refugee students thought that they should be good people. It can be said that the differences of opinion between Turkish students and refugee students who migrated to Turkey would decrease if both groups came together on the subject of universal values.

Over the past two decades, human geneticists have substantially embraced the concept of "biogeographical ancestry" to account for the racial, ethnic, and linguistic categories they use to analyze and interpret genetic difference. Understanding the ongoing role of these categories in human genetic research therefore requires attention to geneticists' representations of geography, particularly the geographic maps they use to illustrate gene distribution and migration. This article examines how the methods and imagery of international genetic geography and its major evolutionary narratives have reinforced or refashioned nationalist practices of geography in the Middle East. Geneticists simultaneously conceptualize the region's physical space as both a historical "crossroads" of human migration and the birthplace of distinct gene sequences and civilizations, alternately blurring and sharpening the boundaries between Europe and Asia. Focusing on genetic research in Turkey and Iran, this paper analyzes how geneticists draw and interpret geographic maps of the region while selectively erasing or highlighting state borders. These genetic maps negotiate between the idealized aims of international projects to reconstruct human evolutionary history, and the reality of practicing science under the constraints of nationstate politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of anti-fascist public education and debates, the marginalized majority, minority groups, and their political allies will continue to be brutalized in the region. Problematizing exclusionary politics is essential for recognizing the ongoing democratic struggles of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This article aims to stimulate more academic and public debates about fascism in MENA. Critically investigating the history of several waves of nationalism and their affinity with the first historical rise of fascism could enable us to better appreciate the challenges resistance movements in the MENA region have been facing. To that end, the persisting threat of fascism in Turkey, the Arab world, and Iran are examined critically. While the article applies the ideology form theory, a new critical theory of fascism, the soundness of the central argument regarding the significance of and the need for critiquing exclusionary, racist, and genocidal ideologies, movements, regimes, and politics does not rely on the theoretical application of the concept of fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kurds were late to the idea of nationalism in the 20th century, and when the borders were drawn in the region they became the largest stateless nation in the world, divided mainly between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. In an unlikely period when hope was fading, a Kurdistan regional government in Iraq was born as the former Iraqi regime was weakened after the first Gulf War and the subsequent no-fly zone. Two decades on, the region has become more assertive and been making many new friends, largely because of its newfound wealth, its influence in post-Saddam Iraq, and its stability when compared with the rest of Iraq. Oil has been a curse for the Kurds and Iraq as a whole, but now the Kurds appear to have found a way to use its resources for economic development, ensuring that the Kurdistan region remains stable and can establish itself as a self-governing and influential entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue in this article that the 'Azeri' question, that is, the reemergence of ethno-nationalism in Azerbaijan-Iran and in the Republic of Azerbaijan, has become a major factor in the politics of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus and in the Caspian Sea Basin countries during the past decade. This article situates the growth of Azeri nationalism and the Azeri question in its historical context and then focuses on those aspects that have most directly affected relations between Turkey and Iran during the past decade and particularly the first three years of the twenty-first century. The article then discusses the local, national, regional and international manifestations of the recrudescence of Azeri ethno-nationalism and the role that it has played in the ascendancy of Turkey vis-à-vis Iran in the two countries' bilateral relations and what this bodes in the future for the politics of the wider Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Kurdish collective movements and the impact of Kurdish ethno-nationalism on politics in Turkey, Iran and Iraq. It is stated that the Kurds, an ethnic minority numbering some 19 million people, are primarily concentrated in these three countries with residual communities found in Syria and the Soviet Union. It explores the origin of the Kurds from the tribe of Medes. Although the Kurds have never ruled for a sustained period over Kurdistan, Kurdish personalities have had a significant impact on the contours of Middle Eastern politics for centuries. The most notable Kurdish leader was the legendary Salah-ed Din Ayubbi who led the Islamic forces against the Crusaders.

Most Middle Eastern populations outside Israel have not been represented in Western-based international human genome sequencing efforts. In response, national-level projects have emerged throughout the Middle East to decode the Arab, Turkish and Iranian genomes. The discourses surrounding the 'national genome' that shape scientists' representation of their work to local and international audiences evoke three intersecting analytics of nationalism: methodological, postcolonial and diasporic. Methodologically, ongoing human genome projects in Turkey and Iran follow the population logics of other national and international genome projects, for example justifying research with reference to projected health benefits to their fellow citizens. Meanwhile, assumptions about and representations of ethnicity and diversity are deeply inflected by local histories of scientific development and nationalist politics. While Iranian geneticists have transformed this paradigm to catalog national genetic diversity through a discourse of 'Iranian ethnicities', Turkish geneticists remain politically constrained from acknowledging ethnic diversity and struggle to distance their work from racialized narratives of Turkish national identity. Such nationally-framed narratives of genomic diversity are not confined to their original contexts, but travel abroad, as demonstrated by a US-based genome project that articulates a form of Iranian-American diasporic nationalism.