Designated terrorists: the Kurdistan workers' party and its struggle to (re)gain political legitimacy

The European Union designation of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) as an international terrorist organization has led to a profound distrust of the EU on the part of the PKK. This has resulted in a perception that the Kurdish organization has turned against the EU and withdrawn its support for Turkey's accession. The PKK activities and viewpoints as presented and discussed in this article, however, indicate that this is not the case. Politically squeezed at home and sidelined abroad, it is argued, the PKK is, in fact, primarily concerned to (re)gain recognition as a representative of Turkey's Kurds (upon which it is making its support for Turkey's accession conditional)

Turkey's kurds and the quest for recognition transnational politics and the EU-Turkey accession negotiations

The growing literature on transnationalism documents the ways in which immigrants and refugees stay connected with their communities and countries of origin, and shows how homeland governments reach out to their former constituents. Social, financial and political ties are extended across borders. We know little, however, about the specific ways in which oppositional transnational political practices are shaped and made effective. What is more, research on transnational political practices has often limited itself to investigations of the connections between nation states. This article illustrates how transnational political practices articulate different levels of policy making (local, national, supranational) in ways that multiply the effectiveness of engagement at any one site. It will be shown that homeland political activists can effectively shape the homeland political agenda through the mobilization of immigrants' and refugees' associations and institutions in multilevel constructions of networks, constituting a space of political engagement that needs to be considered in its own right

Building a Stronger Eastern Partnership: Towards an EaP 2.0

The European Union has been working to deepen the economic and political relationship with its Eastern neighbouring countries over the recent years. A set of formal agreements are intended for signature between the EU and Ukraine, Moldova and the South Caucasus states at the Eastern Partnership (EaP) summit scheduled for 28-29 November 2013. These agreements have provoked a response from the Russian Federation which is seeking to offer an alternative set of economic relationship to the exclusion of the EU. In the first Policy Paper to be published, the recently created Global Europe Centre (GEC) sets out a reform agenda that the EU needs to adopt towards the EaP states to enable a more binding relationship. The paper argues that the EU needs to define a ‘next generation’ objective for the EaPas it enters the implementation phase of the current set of Association Agreements (AAs). The proposal is that the EU should set a European Partnership Community (EPC) statusas a bilateral and multilateral goal for the EaP. The paper contends that there is urgency for the EU to think more strategically vis-à-vis its neighbourhood, and create a more clear-cut place for Russia to avoid the current situation of divisive competition. Further, the EU needs to reform aspects of its current EaP policy. The EU needs to define a clearer, and measureable set of objectives for its role in the resolution of the ‘frozen’ conflicts of its Eastern neighbourhood; refresh its policy towards Belarus; speed up visa liberalisation to ease travel for citizens of the EU’s neighbouring states; and deepen and broaden civil society engagement by investing more in deep democracy, linkage and people-to-people contacts

Fault management and service provisioning process model of next generation access networks

Network operators are nowadays upgrading their access networks to cope with the increasing number of users and the increasing bandwidth required by services. However, cost plays a crucial factor. In order to decide which next generation access network will be implemented, an accurate cost evaluation should be performed. This evaluation requires a total cost of ownership model including a detailed model of the most costly operational processes: fault management and customer provisioning. These models help identifying the most costly sub-processes, where network providers should improve their cost efficiency. This paper presents detailed models for these operational processes and gives an approach to use them for estimating future operational costs