The Question of Kurdistan in the Middle East
Wed, 17 Mar 2021 17:00 - 18:00 Greenwich Mean Time (UTC±0)
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A talk by Janroj Yilmaz Keles
This talk is part of the Modern Languages Research Seminars Series of the School of Humanities (University of Westminster). All Welcome. No registration required. Zoom details at the bottom of this page.
Regional and International Dynamics of the Question of Kurdistan in the Middle East
Janroj Yilmaz Keles
This talk will address the complexity of the Kurdish issue and the question of Kurdistan in the regional and international context.
The Kurds are known to be the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own. Over 35 million Kurds live under the national jurisdictions of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria where the Kurdish identity, culture, linguistic rights, homeland and own political representation are contested and contained in most cases by force of arms. Consequently, the combination of authoritarian state ideologies, the systematic and recurrent use of state violence in these countries has led to the rise of Kurdish opposition and resistance at various times and to varying degrees. While the Kurds became subordinated and silenced in the 20th century and their demand for self-determination has been brutally suppressed, at the turn of the 21st century, however, various political developments suggest a shift for the Kurds, including the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Kurdistan-Iraq (KRG), power-sharing between the federal government and the KRG, the establishment of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria and the rise of pro-Kurdish political parties in Kurdistan-Turkey. Moreover, the question of Kurdistan is no longer a subject of countries ruling Kurdistan, but it has a regional and international dimension due to deterritorialized conflicts in the Middle East, where Kurds have become an important regional actor.
Janroj Yilmaz Keles is a Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Middlesex University Law School and a Visiting Fellow at London School of Economics (LSE), researching on peace and conflict, gender, political violence, ethnicity and nationalism, statelessness, migration, diasporas, (digital) social movements, and political communication. He has conducted research in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Kurdistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Sri Lanka. He is one of the co-investigators of GCRF HUB – Gender, Justice and Security and has published several co-authored and single-authored articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of Media, Conflict and Diaspora (I.B. Tauris, 2015), and the editor of the British Sociological Association’s journal Work, Employment and Society.
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