This article analyses Turkey's responses to the Arab uprisings in the context of its larger foreign policy transformation and regional aspirations. The AKP government seized the uprisings as an ...opportunity to increase its influence in the region by assigning itself a central role in the transition processes in various countries. In the process, however, Turkey faced a number of setbacks and reversals. Comparing the cases of Libya, Syria, and Egypt, the paper argues that Turkey's efforts to advance regime change in these sites were marked by inconsistency and incoherence. Furthermore, the paper argues that this trajectory of reactions can be explained only by taking both ideational and domestic factors into account. Despite the shortcomings of Turkey's actions, however, the article concludes that Turkey has consolidated itself as a regional actor, albeit a controversial one.
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: compartmentalization and disjunction of interlinked state crimes.
The bulk of scholarship on EU-Turkey relations has focused mainly on intergovermental or state-society relations, while the larger literature on enlargement and Europeanization has hardly paid any ...attention to the role of diasporas and immigrant communities as relevant political entrepreneurs in Europeanization processes. In this article, I examine the role and impact of the Kurdish diaspora and the transnational politics of Kurds on recent policy changes in Turkey, with respect to Kurdish broadcasting. Until 1990, the Turkish state officially denied the very existence of Kurds, today Turkish state television broadcasts programs in the Kurdish language. Other reforms have taken place as well. This has often been explained as a result of EU conditionality, yet, no studies have explored the fact that all of these different aspects of Kurdish cultural and educational activities that have begun to take shape in Turkey were actually first developed and implemented in Europe, by Kurdish organizations themselves. The analysis of ROJ-TV in Europe shows that this Kurdish satellite channel is a paradigmatic example of how 'the diaspora strikes back'. I argue that the emergence of a state-sponsored Kurdish channel in Turkey is a further reaction by the Government to the existence of ROJ-TV in Europe, after initial efforts to shut down the station failed. I conclude that for a comprehensive understanding of Turkey's reform process the transnational activism of the Kurdish diaspora has to be taken into account.
On November 23, 2011, international news media reported an incident in the Turkish Parliament on what seemed to be a breakthrough in Turkish politics: Turkey's PM Erdogan apologizes for 1930s Kurdish ...killings. Ayata and Hakyemez argue that that not only did Erdogan not apologize to anyone in his statement, but the substance, context, and form of his statement amount to injury and assault demonstrating, if not exacerbating, the precarious and vulnerable position of minorities in Turkey. Perhaps, the misleading and affirmative international reporting about this incident is related both to the generally enthusiastic reporting about Turkish politics ever since it has been promoted as a democratic role model for the Middle East, as well as to the rather complex and unknown history of the 1938 Dersim Genocide that is referred to as the 1930 Kurdish killings by the international news media.
Der Begriff der kulturellen Diversität ist umstritten – besonders, wenn es um die Zukunft von Institutionen geht. Führen Diversitäts-Politiken zu einem höheren Maß gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe ...unterrepräsentierter Gruppen? Oder ist »kulturelle Vielfalt« nur ein beschwichtigendes Etikett, das die sozialen Ungleichheiten in Institutionen eher verschleiert als benennt? Dieser Band beleuchtet die affektiven Dynamiken kultureller Diversifizierung in zentralen institutionellen Feldern wie Gesundheit, Bildung, Medien und Kultur. Er zeigt, dass es bei kultureller Diversifizierung nicht nur um die Reform von Institutionen, sondern um eine gesamtgesellschaftliche Neuorientierung in einer stark polarisierten Öffentlichkeit geht. Dieses radikale Potenzial wird nur selten realisiert, aber es erklärt die affektive Aufladung der Kämpfe um Diversität, der dieser Band nachgeht. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Mapping Euro-Kurdistan Ayata, Bilgin
Middle East report (New York, N.Y. 1988),
07/2008, Letnik:
38, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Following a historical overview of Kurdish transnational activism, attention is given to the idea of "Euro-Kurdistan," a network of political, cultural, & social institutions given to nation ...formation & fostering new areas of political & cultural expression of Kurdish identity. Adapted from the source document.
»Heimat« ist ein ebenso schillernder wie problematischer Begriff, wenn er als politische Kategorie benutzt wird. Gegenwärtig in aller Munde, steht er in der Gefahr, als politischer Kampfbegriff ...missbraucht zu werden. Kann es in dieser Situation gelingen, ihn in einem aufgeklärten Sinne kulturpolitisch produktiv zu machen? Ist eine kulturelle Heimatpolitik möglich?Das Jahrbuch für Kulturpolitik 2019/20 versammelt Beiträge des 10. Kulturpolitischen Bundeskongresses 2019 »Kultur.Macht.Heimaten«. Die über 50 Expert*innen aus dem In- und Ausland, darunter namhafte Kulturpolitiker*innen und Kulturwissenschaftler*innen sowie zahlreiche Praktiker*innen aus Heimatvereinen, Kultureinrichtungen und Kulturprojekten, diskutieren die Risiken und Potenziale einer Kultur- als Heimatpolitik.
This dissertation undertakes a transnational analysis of conflict-induced displacement of Kurds from Turkey, by examining both their internal displacement within Turkey, as well as their external ...displacement to Europe as refugees. It conceptualizes displacement as a form of statecraft and explores its intended and unintended consequences in relation to Kurdish mobilization in Turkey and beyond. Based on fieldwork and documentary research both in Turkey and Europe, especially Belgium, Germany and the UK, the study provides a rich account of two decades of forced migration and transnational mobilization against the backdrop of a historical overview of the Kurdish population's role and place from the late Ottoman Empire onwards. The dissertation argues that the Turkish state, by deliberately displacing Kurds from their traditional region in the 1990s, not only caused them to migrate either to the peripheries of Turkish cities or to other parts of Europe, but also inadvertently enabled deterritorialized forms and transnational spaces for Kurdish mobilization. Particularly the recreation of Kurdish identity in and through Europe allowed for a mobilization of ideas and resources of the Kurdish diaspora that produced a “boomerang effect,” contesting and resisting the politics of displacement and its denial of the Turkish state. In the course of Turkey's EU accession bid, a number of democratizing reforms were passed that have also enhanced Kurdish rights. In contrast to existing scholarship, though, I argue that Kurds are not accidental beneficiaries of Turkey's EU accession bid but instead are active agents and political entrepreneurs whose transnational politics in Europe has succeeded in bringing the Kurdish recognition struggle at least periodically to the forefront of Europeanization. The study both draws on and contributes to the literature on international relations and comparative politics, forced migration research as well as to the burgeoning scholarship on transnationalism by applying insights from the study of transnational advocacy networks to the study of displacement and ethnic mobilization.
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