Bilgin Ayata

A Belated Awakening: National and International Responses to the Internal Displacement of Kurds in Turkey

Internal displacement has replaced the flows of border-crossing refugees as the major form of forced migration across the world in the past two decades. International organizations seek to have a central role in providing assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) although this phenomenon comes under the traditional realm of state sovereignty, in contrast to the refugee regime, which is part of international law. The evolving international IDP regime has triggered policy and scholarly debates about various aspects of state responsibility and international assistance. On one hand, when states fail to provide protection to the displaced, the decision to take international action is often selective and depends to a large extent on the balance of geopolitical interests of powerful donor states. On the other hand, extant international humanitarian assistance practices also face criticism for having created new modes of power over displaced groups. The displacement of several hundred thousand people in the Kurdishpopulated southeastern region of Turkey during the 1990s and recent deliberations about how to protect and assist them constitute a very important case which demonstrates the nexus between the workings of the interstate system, state sovereignty and the regulation and control of target populations. After years of neglecting the plight of people evicted from their homes in the course of the armed conflict with Kurdish guerillas,

Turkish Foreign Policy in a Changing Arab World: Rise and Fall of a Regional Actor?

Abstract This article analyses Turkey’s responses to the Arab uprisings in the context of its larger foreign policy transformation and regional aspirations. The AKP government seized the uprisings as an opportunity to increase its influence in the region by assigning itself a central role in the transition processes in various countries. In the process, however, Turkey faced a number of setbacks and reversals. Comparing the cases of Libya, Syria, and Egypt, the paper argues that Turkey’s efforts to advance regime change in these sites were marked by inconsistency and incoherence. Furthermore, the paper argues that this trajectory of reactions can be explained only by taking both ideational and domestic factors into account. Despite the shortcomings of Turkey’s actions, however, the article concludes that Turkey has consolidated itself as a regional actor, albeit a controversial one.

Kurdish Transnational Politics and Turkey's Changing Kurdish Policy: The Journey of Kurdish Broadcasting from Europe to Turkey

The bulk of scholarship on EU–Turkey relations has focused mainly on intergovermental or state–society relations, while the larger literature on enlargement and Europeanization has hardly paid any attention to the role of diasporas and immigrant communities as relevant political entrepreneurs in Europeanization processes. In this article, I examine the role and impact of the Kurdish diaspora and the transnational politics of Kurds on recent policy changes in Turkey, with respect to Kurdish broadcasting. Until 1990, the Turkish state officially denied the very existence of Kurds, today Turkish state television broadcasts programs in the Kurdish language. Other reforms have taken place as well. This has often been explained as a result of EU conditionality, yet, no studies have explored the fact that all of these different aspects of Kurdish cultural and educational activities that have begun to take shape in Turkey were actually first developed and implemented in Europe, by Kurdish organizations themselves. The analysis of ROJ-TV in Europe shows that this Kurdish satellite channel is a paradigmatic example of how ‘the diaspora strikes back’. I argue that the emergence of a state-sponsored Kurdish channel in Turkey is a further reaction by the Government to the existence of ROJ-TV in Europe, after initial efforts to shut down the station failed. I conclude that for a comprehensive understanding of Turkeys reform process the transnational activism of the Kurdish diaspora has to be taken into account.

The Kurds in the Turkish–Armenian Reconciliation Process: Double-Bind or Double-Blind?

A century after the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial by the Turkish state, there has emerged a notable and unprecedented interest in the Armenian past and present both in civil society discourse and scholarship in Turkey, accompanied by various reconciliation iniatives at the state and society levels. Observers have suggested that this increased engagement with Turkeys suppressed past is an outcome of its EU candidacy, the democratization reforms of the early 2000s, and the shockwave among liberal segments of Turkish society caused by the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. I argue that this shortsighted analysis, which completely ignores the Kurdish movements transformative challenge to Turkish denialism since the 1980s, echoes the key fallacy of present discussions of Turkeys engagement with its past: compartmentalization and disjunction of interlinked state crimes.