Kurdish politics in Turkey and elsewhere is a notoriously complicated acronym soup of allied and competing groups. “The Kurds of Turkey: National, Religious and Economic Identities” by Cuma Çiçek charts a course through this bewildering landscape, complicating simple, homogenous ideas of “the Kurds.”
The book is released at a particularly uncertain time, after the collapse of the peace process between Turkey and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in summer 2015, with Kurdish issue-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) leaders now arrested, MPs in jail, and local administrations replaced by appointees from Ankara across the southeast.
Çiçek spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about the book, contemporary Kurdish politics in Turkey, and implications for next month’s referendum on shifting to an executive presidential system.
