Return to Point Zero

Murat Somer

Description

How did the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict arise? Why have Turks and Kurds failed for so long to solve it? How can they solve it today? How can social scientists better analyze this and other protracted conflicts and propose better prescriptions for sustainable peace? Return to Point Zero develops a novel framework for analyzing the historical-structural and contemporary causes of ethnic-national conflicts, highlighting an understudied dimension: politics. Murat Somer argues that intramajority group politics rather than majority-minority differences better explains ethnic-national conflicts. Hence, the political-ideological divisions among Turks are the key to understanding the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict; though it was nationalism that produced the Kurdish Question during late-Ottoman imperial modernization, political elite decisions by the Turks created the Kurdish Conflict during the postimperial nation-state building. Today, ideational rigidities reinforce the conflict. Analyzing this conflict from "premodern" times to today, Somer emphasizes two distinct periods: the formative era of 1918–1926 and the post-2011 reformative period. Somer argues that during the formative era, political elites inadequately addressed three fundamental dilemmas of security, identity, and cooperation and includes a discussion of how the legacy of those political elite decisions impacted and framed peace attempts that have failed in the 1990s and 2010s. Return to Point Zero develops new concepts to analyze conflicts and concrete conflict-resolution proposals.
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Choices, Structures, and Politics in Creating and Solving Conflicts

2. The Three Dilemmas Explained

3. From Empire to Imaginable and Imagined Nations: How Did the Kurdish Question Arise?

4. How Was the Kurdish Conflict Created? A Nonstandard Explanation

5. The Changing Context of the 1990s: Seeing Kurds without Recognizing Them

6. Return to Point Zero: Why Did the Peace Initiatives in the 2000s Fail?

7. Ideational Bottlenecks

8. Return to Point Zero: New Political Choices Informed by New Ideas

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• International Relations
• Political Science
• 20th Century
• Middle Eastern
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Diplomacy
• Modern history
• History of the Middle East
• General officer
• Peace
• Middle East
• World
• General
• Diplomatie (homonymie)
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Paix

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438486734
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for Return to Point Zero
“In this highly original and sensitively written analysis, Murat Somer elucidates how the Kurdish Question became the Kurdish Conflict, and in doing so provides a cogent and clear-headed explanation for why the Kurdish-Turkish conflict has continued to persist and what needs to be done if it is to be transcended.”
— Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton University
“Somer’s deeply informed monograph puts emphasis on multiple and contradictory processes that determined and still determine the evolution of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and opens new theoretical avenues to understand dynamics of ethnic conflicts throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
— Hamit Bozarslan, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
“This is a major contribution to the understanding of nationalist politics. Eschewing reductionist or mechanistic explanations, Somer provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich account of the emergence of Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms and shows how the conflict is not historically inevitable or predetermined.”
— Michael Keating, University of Aberdeen
Return to Point Zero
Return to Point Zero
The Turkish-Kurdish Question and How Politics and Ideas (Re-)Make Empires, Nations, and States
MURAT SOMER
Cover image courtesy of Mr. Serdar Çömez.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2022 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Somer, Murat, author.
Title: Return to point zero : the Turkish-Kurdish question and how politics and ideas (re-)make empires, nations, and states / Murat Somer.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438486710 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438486734 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
I LLUSTRATIONS
P REFACE
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
C HAPTER 1 Introduction: Choices, Structures, and Politics in Creating and Solving Conflicts
C HAPTER 2 The Three Dilemmas Explained
C HAPTER 3 From Empire to Imaginable and Imagined Nations: How Did the Kurdish Question Arise?
C HAPTER 4 How Was the Kurdish Conflict Created? A Nonstandard Explanation
C HAPTER 5 The Changing Context of the 1990s: Seeing Kurds without Recognizing Them
C HAPTER 6 Return to Point Zero: Why Did the Peace Initiatives in the 2000s Fail?
C HAPTER 7 Ideational Bottlenecks
C HAPTER 8 Return to Point Zero: New Political Choices Informed by New Ideas
N OTES
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX
Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Summary illustration of the causal argument.
4.1 The formation of compatible and rival identity images.
4.2 The formation of the perception of the identity image favored by the state.
4.3 The formation of the dominant identity image between two groups.
6.1 The right to establish ethnic parties.
6.2 The content of national identity in pro-secular and pro-religious press, 1996–2004.
6.3 Normative views on nationalism, 1996–2004.
6.4 Normative evaluation of nationalism in individual newspapers.
6.5 References to “Kurds” in individual newspapers.
6.6 References to education and TV in Kurdish in the pro-secular and pro-religious press, 1996–2004.
Tables
2.1 Kurdish Population in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria
2.2 Percentage of Population in Various Regions in Turkey Who Report Their Ethnicity as Kurdish
4.1 The Rival and Compatible Images of Identities
5.1 Yearly Changes in Use of the Term Kurd in Reference to a Domestic Group
5.2 A Comparison of the Periods 1984–1990 and 1993–1998
5.3 Causal Mechanisms and Facilitating Conditions: Discursive Cascades
5.4 External Developments and Use of Kurd as a Domestic Category
5.5 Possible Consequences of Kurdish Category Entering Civil Discourse
5.6 Kurdish Identity Perceptions and Votes for Pro-Kurdish Political Parties
6.1 AKP, DEHAP (2002), and DTP (2007) Votes in the Eastern Provinces with Major Kurdish Populations
6.2 The Programs and Policies of Kurdish Parties
6.3 Cognitive Rifts between Turkish and Kurdish Actors
6.4 Identity Conceptions of DSİAD Members with Primary Identity of Kurdish
Maps
2.1 Percentage of Kurdish population in each statistical (NUTS-1) region of Turkey
2.2 Kurdish population in each statistical (NUTS-1) region as percentage of Turkey’s total Kurdish population
Preface
How did the Kurdish-Turkish Conflict arise? Why have Turks and Kurds failed for so long to solve it? How can they solve it today? How can social scientists better analyze this and other protracted conflicts and propose better conflict resolution methods for sustainable peace?
This book develops a novel framework for co-analyzing the historical-structural and contemporary-intentional causes of ethnic-national conflicts that highlights an understudied dimension: politics. It argues that longue durée structures present dilemmas that cannot be ignored by contemporary social and political actors. However, while these dilemmas must be addressed, political dynamics determine whether actors are in fact able to find successful solutions. Further, studying intramajority group politics can help better understand conflicts involving ethnic/national minorities than can be achieved by studying majority-minority differences alone.
Hence, I argue that the divisions among Turks are the key to understanding the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict. Though it was nationalism that produced the Kurdish Question during late-Ottoman imperial modernization, it was the political elite decisions that created the Kurdish Conflict during the postimperial (Turkish) nation-state building. During this process, the Muslim Ottoman imperial state identity was metamorphosed into modern Turkishness. Today, ideational rigidities, which are products of more recent periods, reinforce the conflict. In this book, I will analyze the evolution of the conflict from “premodern” times to today. While doing so, I will emphasize two periods and puzzles: how political elites inadequately addressed three fundamental dilemmas about security, identity, and cooperation during the formative era of 1918–1926, and why peace attempts have failed since the 1990s and since a re-formative period began in 2011. I will also develop new conceptual and theoretical tools to analyze ethnic/national conflicts and present concrete policy proposals for sustainable peace.
My discussion brings together my research and thoughts on the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict with my work and reflections on several other, broader topics. The latter include Turkey’s modern history with respect to religion, secularism, social and political transformations, polarizing politics, democratization, and, more recently, democratic breakdown. They also involve my interdisciplinary and comparative inquiries on topics such as identities and names, ethnic conflicts and conflict resolution, religious and secular politics, polarization, and processes of democratization and autocratization in the world at large.
The writing and publication of this book have followed an unusual path. The current book is an expanded, updated and substantially revised and developed version of my book Milada Dönüș , which came out in Turkish in 2015 and had a second printing in 2016. I started writing it in 2010–11, during my sabbatical year as a Democracy and Development Fellow at the Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University and later a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. One month into the writing, I decided to switch to my native language, Turkish. At that time Turkey’s government, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), was involved in what seemed to be an unprecedented peace initiative with the PKK ( Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan —Kurdistan Workers Party). The latter had fought the Turkish government and other Kurdish groups since the 1970s in a struggle to obtain Kurdish rights and self-rule. This was a conflict that had begun in the early twentieth century and had since cost millions of people their lives, homes, cultures, or welfare. The timing and the subject matter of the book deepened the unease I felt about the more usual publishing path for Turkish academics with international experience, such as myself, whereby a work is first published in English or another Western language before being translated into Turkish, leading to a time lag of several years or more. By the time the book would have been published in Turkish, the peace process would likely have been long over, concluding either in success, or, as I predicted based on my research, in failure.
But what primarily motivated my decision were my reflections on academia, social sciences, universities, and publishing. If, as I believe is needed, the social sciences are ever to become truly more universal, pluri-versal, or “decolonized” 1 than they are today, there should be more theoretical-conceptual contributions to social sciences that are originally conceived in languages other than the dominant languages. This implies that they should first appear in print in the languages in which they were created and then be translated into such languages as English—the language in which I, too, write, disseminate, and often also think most of my academic work. Even more impor