Marlies Casier

Fruitless Attempts? The Kurdish Initiative and Containment of the Kurdish Movement in Turkey

Following the victory of the Kurdish party DTP (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, Democratic Society Party) in Turkeys southeastern provinces in the local elections of March 2009, Turkey witnessed the AKP (Adalet ye Kalkinma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) governments Kurdish initiative, the closure of the victorious Kurdish party and waves of arrests of Kurdish activists and politicians. This rush of action constituted a renewed effort to contain and roll back the political and societal influence of the Kurdish movement. But what is it exactly that the government and the state were attempting to contain, and why? This article considers the recent moves of the ruling AKP, the judiciary, and the Turkish Armed Forces in regard to the Kurdish problem in Turkeys southeast, interpreting them as different responses to the regional success of the Kurdish movement.

Designated Terrorists: The Kurdistan Workers' Party and its Struggle to (Re)Gain Political Legitimacy

The European Union designation of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) as an international terrorist organization has led to a profound distrust of the EU on the part of the PKK. This has resulted in a perception that the Kurdish organization has turned against the EU and withdrawn its support for Turkeys accession. The PKK activities and viewpoints as presented and discussed in this article, however, indicate that this is not the case. Politically squeezed at home and sidelined abroad, it is argued, the PKK is, in fact, primarily concerned to (re)gain recognition as a representative of Turkeys Kurds (upon which it is making its support for Turkeys accession conditional).

Turkey's kurds and the quest for recognition transnational politics and the EU-Turkey accession negotiations

The growing literature on transnationalism documents the ways in which immigrants and refugees stay connected with their communities and countries of origin, and shows how homeland governments reach out to their former constituents. Social, financial and political ties are extended across borders. We know little, however, about the specific ways in which oppositional transnational political practices are shaped and made effective. What is more, research on transnational political practices has often limited itself to investigations of the connections between nation states. This article illustrates how transnational political practices articulate different levels of policy making (local, national, supranational) in ways that multiply the effectiveness of engagement at any one site. It will be shown that homeland political activists can effectively shape the homeland political agenda through the mobilization of immigrants’ and refugees’ associations and institutions in multilevel constructions of networks, constituting a space of political engagement that needs to be considered in its own right.

Neglected middle men? Gatekeepers in homeland politics. Case: Flemish nationalists' receptivity to the plight of Turkey's Kurds

Studies of transnational political activism or diaspora politics have tended to disregard the importance of political gatekeepers in the pursuit of immigrants and refugees political change back home Furthermore, when attention has been given to the crucial role of gatekeepers for politically engaged migrants to negotiate their ways into host-country politics, it has often been confined just to resumés of those involved and the activities undertaken. Rarely has research engaged with questioning political gatekeepers themselves about their personal beliefs underlying their commitments to the cause. Nor has research often looked into how certain alignments and cooperative relationships between transnational political actors and their gatekeepers in receiving countries came into being, and how such genealogies might lend insight into the transnational advocacy networks and the particular types of activities that transnational political actors have developed. This paper aims to help fill this lacuna, by providing original and unique insights into the genealogy of Flemish nationalists support for Turkeys Kurdish nationalist movement, and thus also to testify to how investigations into political gatekeepers can improve our understanding of the ways in which transnationalism materializes.

Beyond Kurdistan? The Mesopotamia Social Forum and the appropriation and re-imagination of Mesopotamia by the Kurdish movement

Through its integration in the Global Justice Movement and the establishment of its own Social Forum, activists of the Kurdish Movement in Turkey seek to contest, re-appropriate and change the ‘conceived spaces’ of Turkey’s Kurdish Southeast. This case-study of the Mesopotamia Social Forum provides a window onto how activists assess the existing inequalities and initiate alternative politics, and how these are informed by and related to changing political discourses on the role of civil society and democratization, the latter being rethought and narrated in the ideological discourse of the movement. The region of Mesopotamia is thereby reclaimed and reproduced as a political space that is to serve as a postnationalist imaginary and consequently go beyond ‘Kurdistan’. Introduction: The production of a political space Contemporary geographers have convincingly argued for a relational approach to space and place. Indeed, any nation, region or city is also a product of relations which spread out way beyond it. The local and global are actually mutually constituted, which goes against the tendency to imagine the local as a product of the global, ruling out agency. In fact, the local all too often figures as a victim of globalization, consequently diminishing our understanding of the potential of local agency. The local is not simply always a victim or, conversely, a 1 Doreen Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility”, Geografiska Annaler, v. 86, n. 1, 2004, p. 6. 2 Ibid., p. 10

Breaking the in‐group out‐group: shifting boundaries in transnational partner choice processes of individuals of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, Turkish, Punjabi Sikh, Pakistani and Albanian descent in Belgium

The ongoing popularity in some second and third generation migrants in Western Europe of marrying a partner from the countries of origin of their (grand)parents is considered to be problematic for micro and macro level societal integration of some migrant populations. Partner choice and marriage practices in migrant communities are problematized in public, media and political discourses by discriminating them from marriage practices in the ‘native’ population on the basis of three related dichotomies: (1) agency versus structure, (2) us versus them and (3) romantic versus instrumental marriage intentions dichotomies. By means of in-depth qualitative research methodologies on the partner choice processes of women and men of Turkish, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Punjabi Sikh, Pakistani and Albanian descent in Belgium and an intersectional theoretical approach, this article aims to deconstruct popular and simplifying dichotomous representations of partner choice processes in these migrant populations. Our study reveals how religious, gender and social class boundaries are stretched to meet personal/individual desires and preferences. Individuals do experience social restrictions when it concerns social group boundaries and the potential partners that they can look for. At the same time individuals are never fully determined by their social environment, they creatively develop strategies to by-pass certain restrictions and to some extent are able to meet their personal needs while being sensitive to the desires of their social environment.