Trapped Between the Map and Reality

Trapped Between the Map and Reality PDF Author: Maria Theresa O'Shea
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780415652902
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Kurdistan exists as a cultural and political concept on many levels of discourse. Despite Kurdistan's divisions, lack of definition and the absence of a unified struggle for a Kurdish state, the concept survives the reality as a powerful mixture of myths, reality and ambition. This thesis analyses geographical and historical factors, which have shaped Kurdish conceptions of their identity. Historically, Kurdistan existed in the heart of an ethnically and geographically complex region, a marginal buffer zone between rival regional and colonial powers. Kurdistan's location was the key to its political and cultural developments. Many resultant features were to militate against the formation of a Kurdish state.

Trapped Between the Map and Reality

Trapped Between the Map and Reality PDF Author: Maria Theresa O'Shea
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780415652902
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Kurdistan exists as a cultural and political concept on many levels of discourse. Despite Kurdistan's divisions, lack of definition and the absence of a unified struggle for a Kurdish state, the concept survives the reality as a powerful mixture of myths, reality and ambition. This thesis analyses geographical and historical factors, which have shaped Kurdish conceptions of their identity. Historically, Kurdistan existed in the heart of an ethnically and geographically complex region, a marginal buffer zone between rival regional and colonial powers. Kurdistan's location was the key to its political and cultural developments. Many resultant features were to militate against the formation of a Kurdish state.

Diplomacy and Displacement

Diplomacy and Displacement PDF Author: Onur Yildirim
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136600094
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This study presents a comprehensive, balanced and factually grounded narrative of the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations as a historic event that has been the subject of much distortion in the historiographical traditions of nationalist lore in Greece and Turkey, as well as in scholarly publications of various sorts elsewhere over the span of the past eighty years. Diplomacy and Displacement contributes to the general literature on the Exchange by incorporating into the broader picture the Turkish dimension of the event, particularly the Turkish side of the decision-making process, and the episode of the Muslim refugees that have been left outside the scope of the research agenda, thereby, breaking up the established notion of the Exchange skewed towards the Greek side. It thus sheds doubt on the success paradigm attributed to this event. By adopting a people-centered approach to the Lausanne Treaty and its consequences, the book offers a critique of official versions of the story and encourages people to consider policy decisions together with their huge and often devastating implications for the lives of ordinary people.

Making Home(s) in Displacement

Making Home(s) in Displacement PDF Author: Luce Beeckmans
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462702934
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.

The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey

The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey PDF Author: Veli Yadirgi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316857794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In recent years, the persecution of the Kurds in the Middle East under ISIS in Iraq and Syria has drawn increasing attention from the international media. In this book, Veli Yadirgi analyses the socioeconomic and political structures and transformations of the Kurdish people from the Ottoman era through to the modern Turkish Republic, arguing that there is a symbiotic relationship between the Kurdish question and the de-development of the predominantly Kurdish domains, making an ideal read for historians of the region and those studying the socio-political and economic evolution of the Kurds. First outlining theoretical perspectives on Kurdish identity, socioeconomic development and the Kurdish question, Yadirgi then explores the social, economic and political origins of Ottoman Kurdistan following its annexation by the Ottomans in 1514. Finally, he deals with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent foundation and evolution of the Kurdish question in the new Turkish Republic.

Kurdish Art and Identity

Kurdish Art and Identity PDF Author: Alireza Korangy
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110599627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Folklore has been a phenomenon based on nostalgic and autochthonous nuances conveyed with a story-telling technique with a penchant for over-playing and nationalistic pomp and circumstance, often with significant consequences for societal, poetic, and cultural areas. These papers highlight challenges that have an outreaching relationship to the regional, rhetorical, and trans-rhetorical devices and manners in Kurdish folklore, which subscribes to an ironic sense of hope all the while issuing an appeal for a largely unaccomplished nationhood, simultaneously insisting on a linguistic solidarity. In a folkloric literature that has an overarching theory of poetics – perhaps even trans-figurative cognitive poetics due to the multi-faceted nature of its application and the complexity of its linguistic structure – the relationship of man (and less frequently woman) with others takes center stage in many of the folkloric creations. Arts are not figurative representations of the real in the Kurdish world; they are the real.

Kurdish Identity, Islamism, and Ottomanism

Kurdish Identity, Islamism, and Ottomanism PDF Author: Deniz Ekici
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793612609
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
A major common misconception in scholarship on Kurdish journalistic discourses is that Kurdish intellectuals of the late Ottoman period cannot be portrayed as Kurdish nationalists. This theory prevails because of the belief that they not only endorsed and promoted Pan-Islamism and Ottoman nationalism instead of Kurdish ethnic nationalism, but also because they allegedly eschewed political demands and instead concerned themselves with ethno-cultural issues to articulate forms of “Kurdism” rather than “Kurdish nationalism.” Refuting this underlying misconstruction of the nexus between Pan-Islamism, Ottomanism, and Kurdish nationalism, this book argues, based on empirical findings, that the Kurdish periodicals of the late Ottoman period served as a communicative space in which Kurdish intellectuals negotiated and disseminated an unmistakable form of Kurdish nationalism. It claims that hegemonic Ottomanist and Pan-Islamist political thought were used in pragmatic ways in the service of burgeoning Kurdish nationalism, but were rejected altogether when they were no longer useful to fostering Kurdish nationalism.

Transnational Migration, Diaspora, and Identity

Transnational Migration, Diaspora, and Identity PDF Author: Ayar Ata
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031181697
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book explores a common but almost forgotten historical argument that positions the Kurds as powerless victims of the First World War (WW1). To this end, the book looks critically at the unfavourable political situations of the Kurds in the post-WW1 era, which began with the emergence of three new modern nation-states in the Middle East—Turkey, Iraq, and Syria—as well as related modernising events in Iran. It demonstrates the dire consequences of oppressive international and regional state policies against the Kurds, which led to mass displacement and forced migration of the Kurds from the 1920s on. The first part of the book sets out the context required to explain the historic and systematic sociopolitical marginalisation of the Kurds in the Middle Eastern region until the present day. In the second part, the book attempts to explain the formation of Kurdish diaspora communities in different European cities, and to describe their new and positive shifting position from victims in the Middle East to active citizens in Europe. This book examines Kurdish diaspora integration and identity in some major cities in Sweden, Finland and Germany, with a specific focus and an in-depth discussion on the negotiation of multiculturalism in London. This book uncovers the gaps in the existing literature, and critically highlights the dominance of policy- and politics-driven research in this field, thereby justifying the need for a more radical social constructivist approach by recognising flexible, multifaceted, and complex human cultural behaviours in different situations through the consideration of the lived experiences and by presenting more direct voices of members of the Kurdish diaspora in London, and by articulating the new and radical concept of Kurdish Londoner.

Domestic and Regional Uncertainties in the New Turkey

Domestic and Regional Uncertainties in the New Turkey PDF Author: Alessio Chiriatti
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896039
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Turkey has faced, in the last two decades, a number of critical events, like wars, conflicts and frictions in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, that have represented a huge challenge for its foreign policy and civil and economic interventions. Turkish multi-directionality and multidimensionality have been tested by these occurrences, demonstrating that what some scholars and experts had defined as a “model” contained failures as well as success. This book examines these dynamics through case studies of the humanitarian, cultural, economic and political dimensions of Turkey’s role in a diffuse neighbourhood, in which the country has tried to exert its power in recent decades. Starting from the questions that the Cold War and the arrival of the AKP in government have opened for Ankara, the volume illustrates two of the most important sides of the Turkish strategic repositioning in the international system. The first part is focused on the main humanitarian and political struggles in contemporary Turkish society, while the second explores the main fault-lines in Turkey’s regional policy and the development of the country’s foreign policy. As such, the book represents a valuable resource for both graduate and undergraduate students, academics and researchers in the areas of Turkish studies, foreign policy, regional politics, Middle Eastern studies, security, political economy and European studies as well as for the general public.

A People Without a State

A People Without a State PDF Author: Michael Eppel
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477309136
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Numbering between 25 and 35 million worldwide, the Kurds are among the largest culturally and ethnically distinct people to remain stateless. A People Without a State offers an in-depth survey of an identity that has often been ignored in mainstream historiographies of the Middle East and brings to life the historical, social, and political developments in Kurdistani society over the past millennium. Michael Eppel begins with the myths and realities of the origins of the Kurds, describes the effect upon them of medieval Muslim states under Arab, Persian, and Turkish dominance, and recounts the emergence of tribal-feudal dynasties. He explores in detail the subsequent rise of Kurdish emirates, as well as this people’s literary and linguistic developments, particularly the flourishing of poetry. The turning tides of the nineteenth century, including Ottoman reforms and fluctuating Russian influence after the Crimean War, set in motion an early Kurdish nationalism that further expressed a distinct cultural identity. Stateless, but rooted in the region, the Kurds never achieved independence because of geopolitical conditions, tribal rivalries, and obstacles on the way to modernization. A People Without a State captures the developments that nonetheless forged a vast sociopolitical system.

Orientalism and Imperialism

Orientalism and Imperialism PDF Author: Andrew Wilcox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350033804
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Using the work of Edward Said as a point of departure, this book dissects the concept of Orientalism through the lens of 19th century missionary impressions of Kurdistan. Wilcox argues that dominant interpretations of Said's work have a tendency to present Orientalism as an essentialist practice and instead offers an alternative manifestation in which the Oriental is perceived as the mutable product of cultural forces. The relationship between missionaries and imperialism has long been a contentious issue with many scholars highlighting their apparent ambiguity. This study reveals how Protestant missionaries can be identified as anti-imperialist in their rhetoric of ecumenical independence; yet through their preconceptions of Oriental inferiority, they contributed to a more subtle undermining of local forms of knowledge and identity. Wilcox argues that this apparent ambiguity is in part a consequence of the ways in which the term imperialism is frequently used to allude to diverse and even contradictory meanings; therefore it is not so much the missionaries who are ambiguous, as the ways in which they are judged by today's multivalent standards. The analysis also makes clear the complex discursive processes which can undermine the actions of altruistic individuals. By drawing threads from this 19th century example into the current geopolitical foreground of Middle East-West relations, this book not only sheds light upon a little-known historical case study but also illuminates larger questions of the present and future encouraging a more vigorous examination of contemporary Orientalist prejudices.