Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Other Routes of Resistance -- 1 Early Routes: Conditions of Kurdish Electoral Mobilization -- 2 New Collective Challengers: The Institutional Trajectory of Turkey's First Pro-Kurdish Party -- 3 Resources of the System -- 4 Characteristics of Coercion: Obstructing Access to Resources -- 5 Producing Competing Truths -- 6 Creating a New Kurdish Subject -- Conclusions: Assessing a Challenger's Impact -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.

Thousands of Kurdish politician-activists have been prosecuted and imprisoned, and hundreds have been murdered for espousing Kurdish political and cultural rights over the past twenty years. The risks are high, yet Pro-Kurdish political parties have made significant gains, as resources afforded by the political system have allowed them to challenge state rhetoric and policies to exercise power at the municipal level, which has helped legitimize and advance the pro-Kurdish movement. "Activists in Office" examines how these parties, while sharing many of the goals expressed by armed Kurdish groups, are using the legal political system to promote their highly contentious Kurdish national agenda in the face of a violent, repressive state. Nicole F. Watts sheds light not only on the particular situation of Kurds in Turkey, but also on the challenges, risks, and potential benefits for comparable movements operating in less-than-fully democratic contexts. The book is a result of more than ten years of research conducted in Turkey and in Europe, and it draws on a wide array of sources, including Turkish electoral data, memoirs, court records, and interviews. -- Publisher description

This essay examines state-society relations in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq through a case study of the March 2006 protest in Halabja, during which protesters destroyed a memorial built to honor the victims of the 1988 chemical bombing of the city. The article suggests that contradictions between word and deed fueled local perceptions that the Kurdistan Regional Government was exploiting Halabja's symbolic and material legacy. The essay's main argument is that these contradictions, along with Halabja's symbolic capital, gave student protesters leverage for renegotiating the terms of the relationship between authorities and local people. They mobilized the politics of shame to pressure officials, transformed the monument site and the commemoration into a theater for conveying their challenge, and acquired influential allies capable of substantiating and institutionalizing their demands.

This paper contends that in some semi-democratic regimes the participation in electoral politics of ethnopolitical activists does not end overt conflict between the state and challengers. Instead, this activity, here called 'representative contention', in some cases constitutes an important form of social movement activism and can help explain how movements in semi-democratic regimes survive, consolidate and advance their agendas. As an example, the paper argues that pro-Kurdish participation in national and local politics between 1990 and 2005 provided the movement with a new institutional basis for public gathering, legal protection from prosecution, new access to domestic and international audiences, and new symbolic resources. Cumulatively, this consolidated the movement in relatively stable arenas and helped sustain it when the movement's armed flank was weak. (Ethnopolitics)

Preventing the development of an ethnic Kurdish cultural and political movement has been a priority of the Turkish state since the Kurdish-led Shaykh Said Rebellion of 1925.' Nevertheless, beginning around 1959 this effort was steadily if slowly undermined, and events of the past ten years suggest that it has indeed failed. Not only have Kurdish activists gained some measure of international recognition for themselves and for the concept of Kurdish ethnic rights,2 but promoting the notion of specifically Kurdish cultural rights has almost become a standard litany for a wide array of Turkish civic and state actors, from Islamist political parties to business organizations, human-rights groups, prime ministers, and mainstream newspaper columnists. Although the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its insurgency against Turkey have claimed a great deal of academic and popular attention, it is these diffuse but public re-considerations of minority rights taking place within legitimate Turkish institutions have contributed the most to the sense that past policies of coping with the "Kurdish reality" are ultimately unsustainable, and that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to return to the climate of earlier years, when discussions of ethnic difference were suppressed, limited to the private realm, or confined to the fringes of radical politics.

"This edited collection looks at how political parties in Turkey actually work, inside and out. Departing from traditional macro-level analyses, the book offers a new sociological approach to the study of political parties, treating them as non-unitary entities composed of many different groups and individuals who both cooperate and compete with one another. The central proposition of the book is that parties must be studied as clusters of relationships in specific locales rather than as unitary 'black boxes.' This ground-up approach provides new insights into the internal workings of political parties; why parties gain and lose elections and other political resources; and the ways in which power is negotiated and exercised in Turkey and beyond. Chapters include studies of Islamic and Islamist parties from the 1970s to the present, ethnic Kurdish parties, center- and extreme right parties, and the far left, as well as independent candidates. The authors pay particular attention to relations - and the blurry boundaries-- between parties and civil society groups, religious associations, non-governmental organizations, ethnic and socio-economic groups, and state institutions, and to the variability of external and internal party politics in different geographies such as Adana, Mersin, and Diyarbakir"--

In December 1977 an independent candidate named Mehdi Zana was elected mayor of Diyarbakır, one of the biggest cities in Turkey's southeastern region. His election was a striking event, upsetting the troika of class, party, and state that had maintained a tight hold over the local political apparatus in Diyarbakır since the 1940s. Unlike most prior mayors of Diyarbakır, Zana did not come from a prominent family of local notables but was a working-class tailor with a middle-school education. He was one of only two independent candidates who won electoral contests in Turkey's sixty-seven big-city races; his election therefore flew in the face of a national trend that favored candidates from the country's two main political parties. Zana was well known for his left-wing, Kurdist politics, and at the time of his election he already had spent several years in jail for his activism. In a system that suppressed collective expressions of Kurdish identity, he was thus a clear ideological interloper.