Kurdische Frage und europäisches Recht. Aus der Beschwerde an den Europäischen Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte

Abdullah Öcala

Prospects for Kurdish ecology initiatives in Syria and Turkey: Democratic confederalism and social ecology

This paper surveys the nascent experiments in political ecology underway in predominantly Kurdish areas of south-eastern Turkey, known as Bakûr, and Rojava (northern Syria). The Kurdish freedom movement is attempting to consolidate a social revolution with ecology at its heart in a most unpromising context, given its ongoing struggle against Islamic State and regional embargoes. This greening of its ideology can be significantly attributed to the influence of American social ecologist Murray Bookchin, an inspiration for Kurdish attempts to implement democratic confederalism, which comprises principles of direct democracy, gender equality and ecological well-being in a needs-based economy. The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement has emerged from activist campaigns opposing dam construction, climate change and deforestation in the region, to inform ecology councils tasked with formulating policies that reflect this philosophical paradigm shift. The essay considers the prospects for the ecological initiatives in Turkish and Syrian Kurdistan. It argues that, confronted by formidable challenges, expansion of the democratic confederal model beyond the heartlands of Bakûr and Rojava, and international solidarity, are preconditions for their endurance

Gendering resistance: multiple faces of the Kurdish women's struggle

The article explores the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey by bridging two forms of resistance: those of guerrilla women fighters and of activist women. Based on my extensive ethnographic and archival research, I ask how women under conditions of war engage in different modes of resistance. In what ways does the "heroic resistance" of guerrilla women resonate with and/or contradict the everyday, "ordinary" struggles of activist women? The potent image of the Kurdish guerrilla woman that emerged in the early 1990s is constitutive of many other modes of political subjectivities, even among women who do not or cannot become guerrillas. One of those subjectivities is that of the activist woman. My analysis suggests that women's activism opens up a middle ground of action between "heroic" and "ordinary" resistance by reconciling revolutionary politics with everyday activism around gender-based violence, democracy, and human rights. Although both revolutionary movement participants and scholars of revolutionary resistance often contrast the "ordinary" with the realm of armed resistance, this article challenges this dichotomy. I take the two realms of resistance-the ordinary and the heroic-as the core constituents of revolutionary resistance, and I reconsider the gendered interplay between them.WOS:000500125000005Scopus - Affiliation ID: 60105072Social Sciences Citation IndexQ2ArticleUluslararası işbirliği ile yapılmayan - HAYIRAralık2019YÖK - 2019-2

Multiculturalism, Recogntion and the 'Kurdish Question' in Turkey: The Outline of a Normative Framework

Despite the ever-growing literature on various aspects of the Kurdish question in Turkey, there are practically no normative discussions of Kurdish demands for the public recognition of their identities. This is all the more startling given the ascendancy of philosophical accounts in the literature on minority rights. This article will try to redress the balance by proposing a normative framework that could be used to justify Kurdish demands for recognition, drawing on the broader debates that revolve around Charles Taylor’s seminal conceptualization of ‘the politics of recognition’. In this context, I will identify nationalism, a strategy used both by the state to suppress demands for recognition and by the minorities to put forward these demands, as the most serious hurdle in the way of the democratic resolution of the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey and promote a form of recognition-based multiculturalism that (a) respects the basic rights of all citizens, not only those in whose name the said claims are made, but also those of the members of the majority against which the claims are voiced; (b) leaves room for alternative values or conceptions of the good life