Suchergebnisse

1. The role of the judicial system in the politicide of the Kurdish opposition / Derya Bayir -- 2. The representation of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) in the mainstream Turkish media / Derya Erdem -- 3. Mobilising the Kurds in Turkey : Newroz as a myth / Delal Aydin -- 4. State sovereignty and the politics of fear : ethnography of political violence and the Kurdish struggle in Turkey / Ramazan Aras -- 5. Re-defining the role of women within the Kurdish national movement in Turkey in the 1990s / Necla Acik -- 6. Taking to the streets! Kurdish collective action in Turkey / Kariane Westrheim -- 7. Repression or reform? An analysis of the AKP's Kurdish language policy / Welat Zeydanlioglu -- 8. Confederalism and autonomy in Turkey : the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the reinvention of democracy / Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden -- 9. The impact of the EU on minority rights : the Kurds as a case / Zelal B. Kizilkan Kisacik -- 10. Music and reconciliation in Turkey / Ozan E. Aksoy -- 11. Elimination or integration of pro-Kurdish politics : limits of the AKP's democratic initiative / Cuma Cicek -- 12. Political reconciliation in Turkey : challenges and prospects / Cengiz Gunes.

Kurdish Studies as a journal and a scholarly community has grown significantly in recent years. We pride ourselves on being able to create a venue for scholarly exchange for those interested in the field. Our dedicated editorial team works tirelessly with the collective aim of publishing high quality research and scholarship. Behind the scenes we offer constructive academic support to both new and established researchers in the field through a meticulous peer review and feedback process. Without ignoring the dilemmas, the pros and cons of academic indexes, we are also generating some interest from well-known indexing and abstracting services. Besides RePEc, Kurdish Studies is now indexed and abstracted by EBSCO. For this we would like to thank both the authors and the anonymous reviewers for their contributions to the journal thus far. As always, we welcome contributions from researchers in Kurdish Studies and also proposals for special Journal issues.

The aim of this paper is to examine the dominant ideology and official discourse in Turkey and its representation and exclusion of Kurdish identity and culture. We will attempt to do this in three parts. In the first part, we will look at the historical development and the implementation of the Turkish official discourse and its core element, that of Turkish nationalism. We will here examine the elimination of the Kurdish identity, language, and culture through the official Turkish discourse. In the second part we will focus on the Turkish official discourse today, in particular on the constitutional changes made in order to comply with EU legislation and on the differences between the new Turkish laws, their implementation and their violation by Turkish police and military. It is mainly in part three that the role of the European Union and its discourse will enter our analysis. This section will explore the clash between the Turkish official discourse and the discourse of the European Union on issues such as minorities, democracy and human rights. Such a clash provides the ideal platform to explore and examine the nature of Turkish official discourse today. Our discussion is based on Althusser's and Foucault's notions of ideology and discourse, and on Said's elaboration of Orientalism.

The three articles published in this issue cover a wide range of topics. Sociologist Joost Jongerden's article, "A spatial perspective on political group formation in Turkey after the 1971 coup: The Kurdistan Workers' Party of Turkey (PKK)", examines the Kurdistan Revolutionaries, the milieu from which the PKK emerged in 1978. The second article in our October issue shifts focus to the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. Psychologists Ruth Kevers, Peter Rober and Lucia De Haene in their collaborative piece titled "The role of collective identifications in family processes of post-trauma reconstruction: An exploratory study of Kurdish refugee families and their diasporic community", engage in the study of a group of five families in Belgium. The third article in our issue is titled "Kurds in the USSR, 1917-1956" and penned by J. Otto Pohl, a historian of the Soviet Union.