M. Leezenberg

Iraqi Kurdistan: contours of a post-civil war society

Iraqi Kurdistan began the road to reconstruction after it became an autonomous region following the 1991 Gulf war. Although many of the difficulties facing post-Saddam Iraq are similar to those facing Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1990s, the experience of the North cannot be treated mechanically as a model for the country as a whole. The paper traces political and economic developments since 1991 and concludes that many of the factors which led to destabilisation in the North in the 1990s are present today in the rest of Iraq. These include the use of violence to create ethnic and sectarian tensions in pursuit of political ends, dependence on centralised food distribution, and foreign interference. The 1990s also witnessed the emergence of new clientelist networks, which cut across the distinction between state and civil society. The rehabilitation of the oil industry and a geographically fair division of its considerable revenues may hold out the prospect for a peace dividend, but this is not guaranteed unless issues of security, genuine political participation, massive unemployment and clientelism are addressed.

Power in communication: implications for the semantics-pragmatics interface

Abstract This paper argues that closer attention to social factors, and especially to power relations, may enrich the theoretical study of language. It takes its departure from Searle’s work in the philosophy of language and on the foundations of social reality. Searle’s analysis of language and institutional facts implies a consensus view of society, and rests upon an ideology of language as a kind of social contract. Some problems for such a contract view are pointed out, and an alternative approach, which may be qualified as a conflict view of language and communication, is outlined. Power is a crucial variable in such a view; some of the desirable features of such a power concept are discussed. A conflict view of language may have non-trivial implications for the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, and provide a fresh perspective on the notions of literal language and language change.

The ambiguities of democratic autonomy: the Kurdish movement in Turkey and Rojava

Abstract This paper traces the ideology of democratic autonomy, as developed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan from the libertarian and anarchist writings of Murray Bookchin, as an alternative to the authoritarian and centralist nation state, not only in the Kurdish-inhabited provinces, but in Turkey at large. It explores, first, the ideological underpinnings and second, the practical implementation of democratic autonomy both in south-eastern Turkey and in north-eastern Syria, or Rojava. Divergences between the two, I will argue, are not merely the result of contradictions between ideology and practice, or of the PKK’s enduring Leninist vanguardism, but also arise because the ideology itself remains ambiguous or implicit on the questions of party organization and the legitimacy of armed resistance. These ambiguities help to account for the apparent tension between grassroots anarchism and Leninist centralism in democratic autonomy, not only in practice but also in theory.

Elî Teremaxî and the vernacularization of medrese learning in Kurdistan

Eli Teremaxis Serfa Kurmancî has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. It was dismissed by Auguste Jaba as a text of “minor interest,” but in fact it is of paramount importance both for the study of the Kurdish language and for the history of Kurdish learning. Not only does it contain the oldest extant detailed remarks on Kurdish grammar, in all likelihood preceding even Garzonis 1787 Grammatica; it is also among the first examples of Kurdish-language prose writing. The rise of prose texts of learning in Kurdish in the eighteenth century is an aspect of so-called “vernacularization,” i.e. the use of a vernacular language for new purposes of written literature and learning. Vernacularization is, this article argues, a crucial prerequisite for the rise of a national language. The article also briefly discusses traces of a similar development in some of Teremaxîs near-contemporaries.

From Cognitive Linguistics to Social Science: Thirty Years after Metaphors We Live By

Abstract In the thirty years since the appearance of Metaphors We Live By, cognitive linguistics has developed into a flourishing autonomous branch of inquiry. Interdisciplinary contacts, however, have largely been restricted to literary studies and the cognitive sciences and hardly extended towards the social sciences. This is the more surprising as, in 1970s anthropology, metaphor was seen as a key notion for the study of symbolism more generally. This contribution explores the cognitive linguistic view of social and cultural factors. Lakoff and Johnson appear ambivalent regarding the relation between culture and cognition; but they share the belief, elaborated in detail by Gibbs and Turner (2002), that cultural factors can be accounted for in terms of cognitive processes. This view runs into both methodological and philosophical difficulties. Methodologically, it assumes that cultural factors can be reduced to cognitive processes; philosophically, it boils down to a Cartesian emphasis on inner experience explaining outer phenomena. There are substantial anti-Cartesian strains both in contemporary philosophy and in a major current of Eighteenth- Century philosophy. The latter, in particular, emphasized the importance of embodiment and metaphor in cognition. As an alternative, I will sketch a more consistently semiotic- and practice-oriented approach that proceeds from linguistic practices to cognitive processes rather than the other way around. It takes practices as irreducibly public and normative; on this approach, so-called linguistic ideologies (Silverstein 1979) play a constitutive role in both linguistic practice and language structure. This alternative builds on recent developments in linguistic anthropology and the work of Peirce and Bakhtin. It suggests a different look at the relation between cognition, language, and social practice from that suggested in cognitive linguistics.

Transformations in Minority Religious Leadership: The Yezidis, Shabak, and Assyrians in Northern Iraq

This paper discusses three religious communities in Northern Iraq that are characterized by the shared fate of having been targeted by the 2014 “Islamic State” ( IS ) offensive. These events dramatically brought home the vulnerability of these communities in post-Saddam Iraq; but the precarious status of these groups was already painfully visible even to the most casual observer prior to the IS onslaught. In this paper, I trace the rather different trajectories of these—initially broadly comparable—minority groups, with a focus on the changing articulation and legitimation of religious leadership. I do so by pointing out some of the longer-term tendencies among these groups, while treating religious leadership in terms of patronage.

The Vernacular Revolution: Reclaiming Early Modern Grammatical Traditions in the Ottoman Empire

This article explores the remarkable shift toward new literate uses of vernacular languages in the early modern Ottoman empire. It argues that this vernacularization occurred independently of Western European (and, more specifically, German romantic) influences. It explores, first, how vernacular languages like modern Greek, Armenian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Albanian acquired a new status as a medium of high literature and learning; second, it argues that this process was accompanied by the equally novel phenomenon of writing vernacular grammars, which promoted vernaculars as both an object of knowledge and an object of governmental concern. Thus, the early modern Ottoman empire sees both a vernacularization and the governmentalization of language. Similar patterns, it will be argued, can be found in early modern German, Russian, and Urdu, without any one language or region clearly being the sole origin or cause of this process. Hence, this wave of virtually simultaneous vernacularizations poses new questions for theories of modern nationalism and of the role of the modern humanities in them.

“A People Forgotten by History”: Soviet Studies of the Kurds

The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Saids sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced hegemonic categories of “bourgeois” knowledge, notably concerning language and national identity. This becomes especially clear in the case of Soviet studies of Kurdish, a language subaltern with respect to Persian, Arabic, and, increasingly, Turkish. In the 1920s and early 1930s, native scholars like Erebê Shemo, Qanatê Kurdo, and Heciyê Cindî pioneered the creation of both an alphabet and a literature in Kurdish and of scholarly linguistic studies. Their work was shaped (and encouraged) by Nikolaj Marrs rejection of the idea of genetic links between Indo-Persian languages, and of the reification of “national characters.” Marrs “japhetic” linguistics dovetailed with Stalins nationality policies in the 1920s and 1930s; it is rightly rejected as unscientific, but it did have positive emancipatory effects. It criticized ethnocentric and racist assumptions in contemporary Indo-European linguistics, and emphasized the value of spoken subaltern vernaculars like Ossetian and Kurdish against hegemonic written languages like Sanskrit and Persian. It also had the paradoxical effect of both countering bourgeois nationalism and encouraging national consciousness. The article concludes with a discussion of how the Soviet experience may affect our view of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and of the linguistic turn in later postcolonial studies.

[Review of: M. Nichanian (2009) The historiographic perversion]

‘human rights’, but the ‘interests of humanity’ and ‘humanity’ represents the anti-thesis to ‘barbarism’—or, more precisely and less figuratively, the Ottoman Empire—are discussed in more detail in Swatek-Evenstein, Geschichte der ‘Humanitären Intervention’, pp. 64–84 (note 1). 3 In recent years, theorists of international law have more generally returned to the power of such historical episodes to shape international law. See Fleur Johns, Richard Joyce and Sundhya Pahuja (eds.), Events: the force of international law (Abingdon: Routledge 2011), and Michael Reisman and Andrew R. Willard (eds.), International incidents: the law that counts in world politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 4 These might be well situated within a history of a ‘humanitarian impulse’ of that time. See for example, Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes against humanity, 3 edn (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 18–20. Whether such a ‘broader’ history makes sense—outside the confinements of the development of international humanitarian law—is very much in question at the moment. 5 Antoine Rougier, ‘La théorie de l’intervention de humanité’, Revue générale de droit international public, Vol. 17, 1910, pp. 468–526. 6 Ellery C. Stowell, Intervention in international law (Washington, DC: John Byrne, 1921). 7 W. Michael Reisman and Myres S. McDougal, ‘Humanitarian intervention to protect the Ibos’, memorandum circulated in 1968, reprinted in Richard B. Lillich (ed.), Humanitarian intervention and the United Nations (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1973), pp. 167–180. Trim and Simms seem to misjudge the timing of this book and the conference it documents, attributing it to India’s war against Pakistan, which led to the eventual independence of Bangladesh (p. 18 and footnote 49). In fact, the conference was convened independently of these events. See Swatek-Evenstein, Geschichte der ‘Humanitären Intervention’, p. 36, note 1. 8 It is, however, still unfortunate that the discussion of the European intervention in the Greek War of Independence focuses in both books on the British involvement, whereas in the Greek self-perception, the role of the Russians was and is far more important. Greek international lawyer Maria Varaki explained this to me in a personal conversation. This shows that there is still room for further studies on the history of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

Rorty’s 'Romantic agony': taal en nationale identiteit in het Amerikaanse pragmatisme

This article argues that Richard Rorty’s pragmatism is informed by a number of problematic romantic assumptions; more specifically, Rorty fails to thematize language-based romantic nationalism. These romantic nationalist assumptions become clear from Rorty’s remarks on poets and poetic language, and especially from his remarks on metaphor. Ostensibly based on Davidson’s influential if controversial position, Rorty’s view introduces a radical twist to this analysis, inspired by Sellars’s distinction between reasons and causes. Thus, Rorty’s distinctions between literal and figurative, and between reasons and causes, resonate with a number of romantic distinctions. His failure to address the latter, however, leads to a tension between the liberal and communitarian tenets of his later work, and to unresolved questions concerning the legitimacy of the nation state as a framework of reference and locus of identification. The paper concludes with the suggestion to pay more systematic attention to the constitutive role of changing public usages and ideologies of language in liberal nationalism.