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Since the 1960s, Turkish policymakers have developed a distant attitude towards the Kurdish movement in Iraq and they have been concerned about the possibility of similar developments taking place in Turkey. However, in the early 1990s, and then from 2007/2008 onwards, Turkey left its distant attitude towards northern Iraq and pursued an active policy developing close relations with the Iraqi Kurds. This paper explores to what extent Turkey's foreign policy change towards northern Iraq in these two periods constituted leader-driven change and to what extent these changes resulted from structural/environmental factors. Keywords: Turkish Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy Change, Northern Iraq, Tayyip Erdogan, Turgut Ozal 1960'lardan itibaren Turk politika yapicilari Irak'taki Kurt hareketine karsi mesafeli bir tutum takinmis ve benzer olaylarin Turkiye'de de yasanmasindan kaygi duymuslardir. Fakat, Turkiye, oncelikle 1990'larin basinda, sonra da 2007/2008 yillarindan itibaren, Kuzey Irak'a karsi mesafeli tutumunu bir tarafa birakarak, aktif ve Irakli Kurtlerle yakin iliskiler gelistirme odakli politikalar izlemistir. Bu calismada, soz konusu iki donemde Turkiye'nin Kuzey Irak politikasi degisikliklerinin ne kadar lider kaynakli oldugu ve ne olcude yapisal/cevresel unsurlarin etkisiyle gerceklestigi sorularina yanit aranmaktadir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Turk Dis Politikasi, Dis Politikada Degisim, Kuzey Irak, Tayyip Erdogan, Turgut Ozal, 1960'lardan itibaren Turkiye'nin Irak'a yonelik baslica ilgi alani Kurt etnik uyanisi olmus, Turk karar alicilari benzer olaylarin kendi sinirlari icerisinde de gerceklesmesinden kaygi duymuslardir. Bu nedenle, Turk politika yapicilari Irak'taki [...]

In this article, I consider one aspect of the larger linguistic-political project of rendering Kurdish an 'equivalent' language in a world of standard languages: the material contours of text artifacts, and their commensurating capacities. In Turkey, where Turkish has long been the sole officially sanctioned code of public life, the project of asserting equivalence takes place in no small part as a function of an increasingly textualized and widely circulating Kurdish. Inserting Kurdish, both spoken and printed, into ever more arenas--disrupting the expectations of which code goes with which context--has become a central plank in a Kurdish political project. Yet relatively few people actually read the texts in question. The circulation of largely unread Kurdish texts allows us to investigate how material qualities of text objects--shape, sheen, heft, etc.--contribute to the assertion of particular forms of linguistic commensurability. I examine how textual forms anchor affiliations of loyalty and allegiance to language community, even without necessarily transforming speech practices and norms of pragmatic usage. In the Kurdish project of commensurating codes, the circulation of textual artifacts--stacked newspapers, glossy street signs, hefty dictionaries, paperback novels--works to signal the presence of the genres they are presumed to contain. At least three commensurating processes are at play here: between spoken Kurdish and its textual equivalent; between 'Kurdish' and 'Turkish' as the orienting codes of their respective language communities; and between 'Kurds' and 'Turks' as members of those communities, participants in a fiercely contested struggle over sovereignty and resources. At stake in these assertions of linguistic equivalence--the normative purchase of a would-be newly commensurate Kurdish--are politically and socially consequential mappings of groupness, polity, and political legitimacy. [Keywords: Commensuration, language community, textualization, Kurdish, Turkey] [Tegehen sereki: hevrejeyikirin, cemawere zimani, bideqkirin, kurdi, Tirkiye] [Anahtar kelimeler: orantisallastirmak, dilsel topluluk, metinsellectirme, Kurtce, Turkiye] [Palavras-chave: Comensuracao, comunidade linguistica, textualizacao, curdo, Turquia], On a cloudy afternoon in early November, 2010, an MP from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Baris ve Demokrasi Partisi) in Turkey stood on the steps of the Turkish [...]

A study was conducted to examine the experience of Kurds during the rise of violent forms of nationalism in Turkey. The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, and their experience is situated within the contemporary politics of neighboring societies in the post-Ottoman world.

Despite the claim that Kurds intend to remain part of Iraq, it is highly unlikely that they will remain within the country's borders. For the past 80 years or more, Iraq's centralized system of control has failed to accommodate the Kurds, and it is apparent that federalism, too, is a form of government that will fail to satisfy them. The Kurdish goal of independence is apparent in the system they have developed within their state, and this could challenge any future plan for further integration back into Iraq. This goal is also evidenced in popular demands for independence in Kurdistan and in Kurdish politicians' warnings that they will separate if violence, intolerance, or tyranny continue in Iraq. The nature of Iraq's divided society constantly produces civil war and intolerance, and the reality is that it is a nation dominated by ethnic-nationalism and clashing ideologies and interests, but lacking a unifying national identity. Therefore, it is not Kurdish secession that causes continuing communal violence; it is the forced unification of people with different interests and ideologies. Key Words: Kurds; Kurdistan; Kurdish role vis a vis Iraq; Kurdish independence; Iraq and federalism.

Import factors like mistrust between Kurdish and Turkish, continued terrorist activity, failure in government's reform measures and divided leadership of the Kurdish community are some of the obstacles that stand in the way of developing a democratic solution of Turkey's Kurdish problem. Civil action training for Turkish military and security personnel and open-ended conversation between moderate Turks and Kurds to define area of accommodation are some of the immediate solutions for the problem.

This article addresses the ways in which Turkish nationalism has perceived the Kurdish question. It is shown that both Turkish nationalism and the Kurdish question have passed through some paradigmatic moments in the twentieth century. This, I argue, has shaped the way that the Kurdish question has been perceived by Turkish nationalism. While the Kurdish question had been seen by Turkish nationalism mostly in terms of a fatal rivalry between the backward, pre-modern and tribal past and the prosperous present in the first half of the century, it was perceived in terms of a tension between the peripheral economy and national market in the fifties and sixties. In the 1970s, the Kurdish unrest was believed to be a product of communist incitement. Despite this impurity in perception, one thing has remained nearly unchanged for Turkish nationalism: Kurds could become Turkish. In other words, Turkish nationalism of the republican era has principally perceived Kurds as future-Turks. However, the signs in circulation at present indicate that the confidence of Turkish nationalism as to Kurds' potential of becoming Turkish is not as firm as it used to be. At present, Turkish nationalism seems to be getting prepared to abandon its contention that Kurds are future-Turks. Keywords: Turkish nationalism; Kurdish question; Republican period of Turkey.

ABSTRACT In this paper we provide an analysis of Kurdish women's organizing in the diaspora, highlighting the tension between 'homeland' and 'host-land' nationalisms, patriarchy, and feminism. This is the first [...]

INTRODUCTION It has been almost half a century since I left my little village in Kurdistan. And yet it is still my refuge from the hustle and bustle of the [...]

One can understand why governments and chancellors respond to the lack of fraternal allies with realpolitik, but it is a scandal that liberal, left-wing opinion, supposedly motivated by humanistic and universal values has traditionally ignored the case of Kurds. With the toppling of Saddam Hussein, former President of Iraq, Kurds will have a place of their own and this self-determination would be due to the questionable politics of the Bush administration.

The citizenship ideal of the Turkish republic has taken shape through the logics of alterity, defined by and through both a paradoxical understanding of Turkishness and the rise of Kurdish identity politics. Citizenship in Turkey represents an uneasy marriage between ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity and belonging. This article develops an analysis of citizenship and everyday spatial practice in Istanbul through the narratives produced in focus group discussions with Kurdish-identified, migrant women. Their stories explore how citizenship, as a hegemonic process that assembles identities, fixes power relations, and disciplines space, is encountered and contested through the spatial practices of everyday life, through what Michel de Certeau calls the tactics of 'making do.' Viewing dominant discourses and practices of citizenship as techniques of spatial organization ('strategies,' in de Certeau's terms), this study focuses on how participants narrate their own spatial stories of resistance to and appropriation of dominant codings of 'the citizen' and 'the stranger' in the Turkish context. This analysis brings to the fore the ways in which focus group participants encounter discourses and practices that position them as strangers and citizens, their use of tactics of anonymity and strategies of identity as they traverse city spaces, and the moments in which they situate themselves as political subjects in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces in Istanbul, through the spatial enactment of the strategies of citizenship and the tactics of everyday life. Key Words: citizenship, urban geography, Kurdish identity, Turkey, Michel de Certeau.

Data from the 1998 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey are used to gain insight into the characteristics of the non-Turkish speaking individuals in Turkey and in the socio-economic consequences of not speaking Turkish for them. The very large majority of non-Turkish speaking individuals turn out to be Kurdish and Arabic women, living in East Turkey and in the countryside. The data indicate that of the married women aged 15-49 in Turkey, about 4 per cent, or one in 25, is not able to speak Turkish. More than 90 per cent of these women has not finished primary education. Regarding their social background, our results suggest that they were more under the influence of traditional cultural values, that their access to the public domain was limited, and that they were more heavily controlled by their family. Regarding the consequences of not speaking Turkish, we found the non-Turkish speaking women to be less employed in the formal economy, to have husbands with lower educational levels and occupations and to have lower family incomes. This result is in line with the predictions of linguistic capital theory. Keywords: Linguistic capital; women; Turkey; Kurds; Arabs; speaking Turkish; patriarchy.

Introduction 'It is a long time that I have waited for a proper situation, full of quietness and loneliness, in order to be able to write down some of my [...]

They were sitting on the terrace in the sun. Bafrine was leaning against the chest of her mother who was holding her tightly between her knees. Beneath the teeth of [...]

Abstract This article proposes that the research area of refugee studies can benefit from contemporary discussions about the concepts of transnationalism and diaspora. It is argued that the concept of [...]

Although many travelers have passed through this portion of the Ottoman dominions, there is still a good deal of it the geography of which is but imperfectly known. Kurdistan is [...]

Now that the excessively imperialistic claims of Armenia are officially known, I may venture to define more accurately before the Peace Conference the legitimate claims of the Kurd Nation. The [...]

April 25, 1849 -- Leaving my home at Seir, at 7 o'clock A.M. I started for Mosul. I rode to the city, and remained there till 1 o'clock, P.M. engaged [...]

Some Kurdish proverbs are probably very ancient, others quite recent in origin. Like any other part of a living language, new proverbs may emerge over time and old ones may [...]

Following are proverbs and commentary reprinted from an article written more than eighty years ago. It appeared in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, London Institution (Vol. I: [...]

Proverbs always bring to mind the Euphrates--its awe, the sound of its running water, its snow white waves, its antiquity, and its murmur reminding man of his humanity. For me, [...]

One of my favorite books is Haim's Persian-English Proverbs. A reader can browse through it endlessly, and one of its peculiar qualities is that it doesn't simply translate the proverbs: [...]

Cet article examine les demarches pour etablir un reseau europeen et nord-americain d'etudes feminines kurdes. A gulf of two centuries separates the first declaration of women's rights (by Olympe de [...]

One of the most common mistakes of those who have championed more warmly than wisely the successive nationalist regimes in Turkey is their assumption that Armenians and Greeks, by failing [...]

Today is the 11th of June in the year 2004. Only yesterday, in Turkey four Kurdish parliamentarians were released from prison pending retrial, having served ten of fifteen-year sentences for [...]

Turkey is riven by the movements of fundamentalist Islamism, Kurdish nationalism and Kemalist Turkish nationalism. Turkish society is divided into different cultures and smooth government is unlikely in view of the country's chronic economic and foreign relations problems. The 1980 military coup led to a greater connection of church and state. The country's future depends on its ability to remain a democracy which can accommodate different cultures and religions.

Hundreds of academics and scientists are caught up in political crackdowns in the wake of petitions for peace. Hundreds of academics and scientists are caught up in political crackdowns in the wake of petitions for peace., Author Affiliations: Restore justice in Turkey Protests followed the arrest of members of the Turkish Medical Association. Credit: Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Turkish police clash with protestors in Ankara Peace is a [...]

An account is presented on the Kurds of Syria whose very existence is officially denied, display unprecedented confidence in disclosing their grievances towards the Government. All forms of opposition are encouraged in Syria by the weakened position of the government feeling many pressures.