Alexis Portnoy
School of International Service
American University
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, District of Columbia 20016 USA
Faculty Advisor: Anders Härdig

Turkey has expelled more than five Kurdish political parties from Parliament within the last three decades. Although the international community has condemned Turkey for its restrictive policies towards its sizable Kurdish population,the Turkish government continues to employ restrictive policies. This paper addresses the conundrum of how the Turkish legal system justifies the expulsion of Kurdish political parties. Scholars advance the theory that the absence of Kurdish assimilation within Turkey has sustained ethnic tensions and continued to drive oppressive policies beyond of Kurdish assimilation within Turkey has sustained ethnic tensions and continued to drive oppressive policies beyond the political sphere into the educational and cultural lives of Turkey’s 70 million Kurdish citizens. This paper offers insights into how the linguistic choices of the Constitution’s authors limit sustain ethnic-Turk homogeneity within the government. This will be achieved via a discourse analysis the Turkish Constitution and the Law on Political parties.Through such analysis, the paper argues due to the strict parameters composing Turkish identity, Kurdish political parties are inherently threatening to the State, resulting in their expulsion in an inexhaustible cycle. This paper’s conclusions create a starting point for more pointed research to reform the Turkish legal system into a more inclusive, democratic complex.[1]
=KTML_Link_External_Begin=https://www.kurdipedia.org/docviewer.aspx?id=581849&document=0001.PDF=KTML_Link_External_Between=Click to read A People Unrepresented: Turkey’s Constitutional Justification for a Growing Chain of Kurdish Political Party Expulsions=KTML_Link_External_End=