International Journal of Conflict and Violence (IJCV - Universität Bielefeld)
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282 research outputs found
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Path Dependence from Proxy Agent to De Facto State: A History of ‘Strategic Exploitation’ of the Kurds as a Context of the Iraqi Kurdistan Security Policy
Full text linkThe scientific goal of this paper is to conceptualize the phenomenon of ‘strategic exploitation’ of Kurdish political entities and to investigate it as a process that triggered the change in Kurdish actorness from isolated non-state to de facto state. Covering two centuries, the contribution examines actorness and cases of patron-client relations between Kurdish political entities and sovereign states. It answers the question: What was the path of strategic exploitation of the Kurdish political entities and how does it affect the contemporary security policy of Iraqi Kurdistan? Combining the concepts of proxy war, de facto state, and path dependence, it argues that the persistent experience of strategic exploitation shaped the collective strategic thought of Kurdish political entities and has a visible impact on contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan security policy. It applies the process-tracing method based on an analysis of literature on the history of Kurds and Kurdistan to investigate patron-client relations and variability of actorness. The article concludes that the experience of ‘strategic exploitation’ has shaped the main direction of Iraqi Kurdistan security policy. It is expressed in practice as abstaining from an official declaration of secession and diversifying relations with external actors
“They Hear Us But They Do Not Listen to Us”: Youth Narratives on Hope and Despair in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Full text linkMost of the recent academic literature has focused on the macro politics of the Kurdish situation within Iraq and there is little scholarship about the younger generation of Kurds coming of age during the autonomous Kurdish rule. Unlike their forebears, they have no direct memory of the decades-long repression campaigns. For them, the history starts with the inception of a semi-autonomous Kurdish enclave and de facto self-rule after the first Gulf War in 1991. Studying ‘Generation 2000’, the Kurdish millennials who came of age in the aftermath of the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers vital insights into the dynamics of a region that experienced great socio-political transformation
Margins of Allegiance and Revolt: Relations between Kurdish Tribes and the State from the Late Ottoman Period to the Early Modern Republic
Full text linkThe political and social interaction between the Ottoman Empire and Kurdish tribes, which can be traced back to the first quarter of the 16th century, continued until the modern republic with various continuities and ruptures. This multi-dimensional and complex relationship was neither in the form of absolute loyalty to the sultan, and thus to the Islamic caliph on a religious basis, nor a constant revolt against the authority of the empire in order to preserve their autonomy. Until the beginning of the 20th century, tribes were not only structures used by the Ottoman, Safavid, and Russian empires for their own interests. They were also organizations capable of dominating a certain geographical area and had a vital potential to constantly generate violence and extend it to the empires and even between one another. Contrary to the state, which systematically and regularly perpetrated this violence and institutionalized and justified itself through the monopoly of violence, their inability to do so did not necessarily mean that they were not genuine political organizations and did not have their own agenda. This study, conducted largely in light of archival documents and Ottoman primary sources, aims to examine the boundaries of loyalty and rebellion in the oscillating relationship between Kurdish tribes and the Turkish state
Unobserved Heterogeneity between Individuals in Group-Focused Enmity
Full text linkGroup-focused enmity (GFE) and related research have mostly focused on variable-centred analyses such as structural equation modelling and factor analysis, implicitly assuming that the results apply uniformly to all participants in the sample. Person-centred research questions and analysis methods, which investigate unobserved heterogeneity in the sample, have been lacking in GFE research. Nonetheless, initial evidence exists from research on Islamophobia and GFE that various unobserved latent classes (i.e., subgroups) differing in their average prejudice can be identified within one dataset. In this manuscript, we applied factor mixture modelling to investigate unobserved heterogeneity using the data of the German GFE survey 2011. We found two latent classes of equivalent factor-analytical composition with consistently high versus low expressions of target-specific prejudice. No comparison of latent GFE means was possible. Membership in the high prejudice latent class was associated with higher age, right-wing political orientation, high right-wing authoritarianism and high social dominance orientation. Our findings demonstrate the importance of exploring unobserved heterogeneity in attitudes research and outline how person-centred research can complement variable-centred research in order to understand social-psychological phenomena
Civic Culture and Support for Democracy amongst Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey
Full text linkTheories of civic culture and democratization have tended to ignore stateless nations like the Kurds. This brings up the question of what civic culture looks like for these groups and whether the status of statelessness has influenced the civic culture of Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Analyzing the first merged large-N dataset including Kurds from Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, this paper shows that the last hundred years of Kurdish political movements have strongly influenced the civic culture of Kurds. Being Kurdish in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq has a significant effect on levels of political trust and support as well as the correlation of these indicators with levels of support for a democratic political system. Overall, this paper finds that being Kurdish has a strong positive effect on support for democracy versus autocracy in all three countries
The Politics of Negotiating the Kurdish Self-Determination Conflict: Failure by Design?
Full text linkThis study explores the long-standing conflict over Kurdish self-determination as it played out in three cases of negotiations conducted between the governments of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and the representatives of Kurdish movements from the 1970s onwards. Drawing on conflict and negotiations studies, the paper seeks to explain (a) why efforts at negotiating the conflict in question have not been successful and (b) what reasons account for this failure. To this end, the study first conceptualizes the Kurdish question as a constitutive conflict of self-determination grounded in a dynamic contest between direct rule and self-rule. Second, it systematically links the failure of negotiations to the absence of substantive commitments by the states involved, the lack of collective action on the part of the Kurdish actors, and negative third-party involvement. The objective is to provide a theoretically guided and empirically informed conceptual approach to the failed politics of negotiating the Kurdish self-determination conflict
The Road to Sèvres: Kurdish Elites and Question of Self-Determination After the First World War
Full text linkThis paper focuses on Kurdish elites and their quest for a Kurdish state during the Peace Conference that took place in Paris after the First World War. Cross-examining the British, French, Kurdish, and Ottoman sources, this paper shows that despite the failure to establish a Kurdish state in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire the Kurdish elites, with their diplomatic and political experience and networking had equal, sometimes better, capacity to the leaders of other delegations in the Peace Conference. To demonstrate this, I focus on Kurdish elites, who were experienced in the imperial statecraft, especially Şerif Pasha, Sheikh Abdulkadir, Emin Ali Bedirhan, and Süreyya Bedirhan, lay out the complex relations amongst them and describe their efforts to represent the Kurds from the beginning of the Peace Conference until ratification of Treaty of Sèvres on 10 August 1920. In spite of what the available literature suggests, Kurdish elites, using all the available tools at their disposal, negotiated effectively for a Kurdish state. The contribution shows that the Kurdish elites not only presented a series of arguments during the Peace Conference but also laid down the basis for the Kurdish nationalism of the decades to come, with a historical narrative and a cartographic imaginary
Kurdish Parallel Justice and Alternative Governmentality
Full text linkThis article focuses the emergence of and need for alternative governmentality and Kurdish non-state justice under a conflicted and authoritarian state. It analyses how and why Kurdish de facto judges operate and negotiate prevailing power relations, illustrating the practice of the Kurdish alternative court system before 2000, and the development of local justice in Kurdish towns and cities after 2000. The article maps out the diverse and varied scene of Kurdish parallel justice procedures and mechanisms. The gendered demands and activities of key actors and beneficiaries are analysed, and relations, tensions and political rifts beyond the actual court procedures explored. The article sheds light on the different obstacles and challenges facing women and men under local justice, while also paying attention to ethnic and religious diversities. In this article, the examination of the state and understanding the everyday life of regular people are mainly based on direct ethnographical accounts
Rethinking Internal Colonialism: Radicalization of the Kurdish Movement in Turkey
Full text linkThe thesis of internal colonialism offers a controversial center-periphery approach to the diffusion model when explaining the persistence of peripheral ethnic identities in Western nation-states. Associating persistent nationalist mobilization in the ethnically different peripheral regions with the cultural division of labor showed some potential in explaining the cases observed in the British Isles, Brittany and Quebec. In some other cases with solid peripheral national economies, such as Basque Country and Catalonia, however, the thesis of internal colonialism was considered paradoxical and became the target of criticism. This study examines the role of internal colonialism in the radicalization of the Kurdish movement in Turkey. The empirical field research based on in-depth interviews with PKK militants from three consecutive generations provides qualitative evidence regarding the impacts of colonial settings in this process. Social consequences emerging from internal colonialism constitute an essential motivation and justification expressed by actors involved in armed struggle against what they define as Turkish colonial rule
