An Interview with Ömer Tekdemir About Kurdish Question - Strategic Outlook
Mon, 4 May 2015
Home
Middle East
|
Turkish Foreign Policy
Africa
04/05/2015 14:14
Usbed | Experts | About SO | Executive Board | Advisory Board | Collaborating Bodies | Contact Us | CALL FOR PAPERS
Caucasus
Asia - Pasific
Europe
Issues
Publications
Interviews
Fedayi Revolution – The Lost Heritage in Armenia
AN INTERVIEW WITH ÖMER TEKDEMIR ABOUT KURDISH QUESTION
What is the Kurdish Question? What do you think about it?
Videos
Safari Power Saver Click to Start Flash Plug-in
It is a very problematic matter to explain in a short time, and even to start to define the subject as a ‘Kurdish question’ itself creates a difficulty. What makes it a question? The way the distinctive demands of the Kurds have been responded to has been given many names in the political history of Turkey (and the Middle East). Therefore, the framing of the issue is shaped according to the approach, identity and status of those involved on the national and international stage. Intrinsically, it has many dimensions ranging across the historical, cultural, economic, social, religious, identity and political. However the most dynamic aspect is the political side of it as, until recently, the cycle of violence was the centre of the so-called ‘Kurdish question’. While the Kurdish quest is
See all videos
embedded in the structure of the new modern, national(ist) and secularist Republic, which was established on the Ottoman legacy of a society that was supposedly multi-ethnic and multi-religious but was actually ‘imagined’ as a
Find us on Facebook
society that was homogeneous rather than diverse. Hence the notion of pluralism within a society based on equality and liberty became a vital part of Kurdish national demands.
Strategic Outlook Like
In this respect, the Kurdish issue is an outcome of the hegemonic struggle and antagonistic relations between different agents while the state’s homogenizing policy within a Jacobin modernist and laicist principles imposed to the society. Kurdish political and national demands, and its legal or illegal struggle, are horizontal hegemonic
6,792 people like Strategic Outlook.
articulations within this historical context. The characterization of the ‘question’ is conceptualized in a sui generis way at the particular historical moment and relations with the state, and has moved from the demands for an archaic de facto autonomy in Ottoman Empire to a postmodern radical democracy in modern Turkey. What is the current status of the peace-reconciliation process? Do you think that the process has moved forward? What do you think will happen in the following stages? I have an unorthodox and alternative Mouffeian idea on conflict resolution and the peace-building process.
Facebook social plugin
Therefore I am not expecting a grand consensus between the state apparatus and Kurdish political agents, and furthermore I encourage bringing the conflict into the centre of the reconciliation process. I also see that involving various actors in the dispute process is a great advantage that eliminates homogenizing the solution procedure.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Recently, the so-called peace process seems to have halted due the coming elections, but having a ceasefire is still better than armed clashes in terms of the country’s political life, as it precludes more deaths and a deeper fracturing of society which is pushing politics along far-right anti-democratic paths. Nevertheless, constructing a total consensus based on moral, which is an illusion of neoliberal democracy. This approach sustains an us/them or friend/enemy division. If this moral code and antagonistic relations between religion and ethnic values, which are sensible morals to negotiate in a democratic politics, lead the conflict resolution, they simultaneously create a ‘post-democratic’ organic crisis as both sides aim to eliminate or destroy the enemy or evil. Consequently, the politics needs the ‘political’, moreover an ‘agonistic debate’, that can temper the antagonistic relations changing them into agonistic adversary ones played out on symbolic democratic grounds where there is an hegemonic struggle on the understanding of equality and liberty based on ethical political principles. It is not possible to have complete consensus in such a polarized society and, in fact, it is not necessary; hence both sides should learn to live with conflict (but not violence) in a democratic politics while managing the consensus, what we call a ‘conflictual consensus’. In terms of the diaspora, Great Britain, the Netherlands and France have different policies on migration and they
http://www.strategicoutlook.org/africa/news-an-interview-with-omer-tekdemir-about-kurdish-question.html
Page 1 of 3
An Interview with Ömer Tekdemir About Kurdish Question - Strategic Outlook
04/05/2015 14:14
have as well a dense population of the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora. Are the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora supporting the peace-reconciliation process? For accurate knowledge about this question we require further research. On this point, I have just been awarded a post-doc scholarship by the state institution to focus on the London-based Turkish and Kurdish diaspora in order to identify and analyse this topic. In the first place we can easily say that the Kurdish or Turkish diaspora, and their institutions, are not independent of their home country in determining their position towards developments back home. If not all, certainly most of their political behaviour is formed in terms of their home country’s political life, while the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora’s role, representation and balance of power are different according to the policies of the each host countries. The transnational political and public sphere means these diaspora groups assess the progress in Turkey in a slightly different way. Sometimes the demands of the diaspora agents goes beyond (or is more radical than) the home country’s expectations as they make comparisons with cases in the political realm of the EU. For instance, the Kurdish diaspora compares the Kurdish national struggle with the situation in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland in Britain, or with the Basques and Catalans in Spain, Corsica in France, and so on. At the same time, in these new social and political spaces the dominant and ruling state identity that many Turkish groups had (in Turkey) no longer serves as an advantage over those in the EU. The sub-identities, such as Kurdish, Alevi or far
Tweet
leftists, are not ruled any more by the coercive state policy. Major Turkish identity also has become ‘outsider’ who
Strategic Outlook @StrOutlook
has been ‘otherised’ and excluded in the EU public sphere by nationalist players for a variety of reasons. This is a new experience for those who held a hegemonic Turkish identity. As a result, the diaspora’s attitude towards the peace process is an unpredictable praxis that depends on developments in the home country as well as on their political agenda and relations with each other in the host country.
Strategic Outlook @StrOutlook
alternative and oppositional movements? Could you share your opinion with us?
HADEP, DEHAP, BDP, DTP) but with a new politics and language. Hence new discourses such as Türkiyelileşme (Turkeyfication) and Yeni Hayat (New Life) have conceptualized the notion of radical democracy in a way that
7dk
Obama has always preferred collobaoration. As it is clear in the latest strategy document, president Obama... fb.me/7hrOR4y6k
One of the strategies of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) is to form alliances and solidarity with
The HDP emerged as a new political project that based on the pro-Kurdish political party culture (e.g. DEP, HEP,
Takip et
21 Nisan
The Armenian diaspora, launching an effective campaign to push Turkey into a corner, now puts pressure on certain... fb.me/1kPcEFC98
moves the HDP’s position beyond Kurdish national and regional politics. Strategic Outlook @StrOutlook
The HDP’s strategy is two pronged: national and international. On the national level, HDP performs two different manoeuvers: on the one hand, it develops synergies with leftists, secularists and new social movements (for example, feminists, ecologists, LGBT, religious minorities, etc.); and on the other hand, synchronies with ‘progressive’ Islamists and national Kurdistani (Kurdified) movements. In this new ‘political’ the HDP seeks to construct a new ‘collective will’ (or political identity) based on radicalized democratic demands through ‘stitching’
7 Nisan
The future of the region depends on numerous variables. It does Iran no good to persist in its own version of the... fb.me/53rpXcVVD
@StrOutlook adlı kişiye Tweetle
together different identities and constructing a counterhegemonic culture by a left-leaning populism. Therefore it creates a bloc that embraces all ‘otherised’, alienated and excluded sub-identities in the public sphere. This ‘common sense’ is founded on ethical political principles that offer equality and liberty for all. Despite the fact that on the international level, the HDP seeks solidarity, and to build psychological ties, with the EU’s new left or left-wing populist parties such as Syriza and Podemos, in order to further alternative projects for the EU, at the same time in the Middle East it ideologically identifies with the Kurdish canton regime. This regime runs a radical democratic political project in Rojava, northern Syria, in an area where there is a bloody battle against the very brutal so-called Islamic State militia. The HDP is also creating a new harmony with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) authority in northern Iraq with its desire to unite the Kurds against external threats and to become a medium power in the region. After all, it seems that the HDP’s new mission seeks to radicalize pluralism and citizenship in the existing democratic system of Turkey rather than seek to leave it. Yusuf Çınar, Analyst, Strategic Outlook Dr Omer Tekdemir is a visiting research fellow of Political Theory at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University. He was formerly a visiting academic of Political Economy at the Durham Business School, Durham University, UK. Omer has gained his PhD in Political Science and International Relations from School of Government and International Affairs and Ustinov College at Durham University, and previously he completed MA in International Relations and Contemporary Political Theory at Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. His research interest includes Political Theory; Political Economy; International Relation Theory; Social Constructivism; Poststructuralism; Antonio Gramsci; Karl Polanyi; Chantal Mouffe; Ernasto Laclau; Discourse Analysis; Democracy (Radical and Agonistic models); Populism; Identity; Citizenship; Conflict; Peace Process and Islamic; EU; Middle Eastern; Kurdish and Turkey Studies. E-mail:
[email protected] Tags : Kurdish Question Kurds Middle East Turkey HDP Syria EU
2.5.2015 - Hit : 278
0
http://www.strategicoutlook.org/africa/news-an-interview-with-omer-tekdemir-about-kurdish-question.html
Page 2 of 3
An Interview with Ömer Tekdemir About Kurdish Question - Strategic Outlook
04/05/2015 14:14
Add a comment... Also post on Facebook
Posting as Omer Tekdemir ▾
Comment
Facebook social plugin
All Rights Reserved - 2012 © Strategic Outlook | Editored By ertugruloztarsu
http://www.strategicoutlook.org/africa/news-an-interview-with-omer-tekdemir-about-kurdish-question.html
Page 3 of 3
