Kurdish Self-Determination, Turkish Anxiety: The Making of the Republican Raison Detat.
Serhun Al.
Nûbihar Akademî 2021

How did the First World War (1914-1918) and its aftermath shape and transform the Kurdish political activism and Kurdish nationalism in the Middle East? How did the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) and its clauses offering the Kurds an opportunity for self-determination influence the Turkish nationalism and the worldview of the founding fathers of the Republic? In the light of these questions, this article seeks to understand and explain the inter-dependent relationship between the Kurdish aspirations for self-determination and the making of the modern Turkish state and the Republican mindset in the early twentieth century. In so doing, the global market of ideas and the transnational historical context (e.g. debates over Wilsonian self-determination and nationhood, centralization vs. decentralization) will be taken into account as well as the ruptures and continuities in the Ottoman-Turkish state tradition against the state-seeking nationalisms. Understanding this historical context influenced by the transnational and local societal and political forces would shed light to unpacking the state-minority relations in Turkey in general and the modern Kurdish question in the Middle East in particular. [1]
=KTML_Link_External_Begin=https://www.kurdipedia.org/docviewer.aspx?id=440335&document=0001.PDF=KTML_Link_External_Between= Click to read the article: Kurdish Self-Determination, Turkish Anxiety: The Making of the Republican Raison Detat=KTML_Link_External_End=