Turkey’s Kurdish question is a long-standing issue which gained special importance after the start of armed conflict between Kurdish insurgents and Turkish security forces. Despite multiple failed attempts to solve the Kurdish question, it remains the most significant issue in Turkey today. This book approaches Turkey’s Kurdish question for the first time from an educational perspective. It scrutinizes the relationship between the ideological Kemalist education and the challenges facing Kurdish pupils educated in Turkish public schools. Turkey’s Kurdish Question from an Educational Perspective represents a comprehensive examination of all major factors in education—teachers, curriculum, policy documents, educational attainments and textbooks—that might possibly affect Kurds. It sheds a critical spotlight on the educational side of the issue, offering a summary of existing challenges, ways to deal with these problems, and the proposal of long-term solutions to achieve permanent peace in the region.

This book scrutinizes the relationship between the nationalist characteristics of the ideology-driven Turkish educational system and Turkey's Kurdish question by analyzing the effects of the education system on Kurdish pupils from the perspective of teachers coming from different ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds.

This volume examines the Kurdish question in Turkey, tracing its developments from the end of the Ottoman Empire to the present day. The study considers: secession; federal schemes; various forms of autonomy; the provision of special rights; and further democratization.

Almost three decades have passed since political violence erupted in Turkey’s south-eastern regions, where the majority of Turkey’s approximately 20 million Kurds live. In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) initiated an insurgency which intensified in the following decades and continues to this day. Kurdish regions in Turkey were under military rule for more than a decade and the conflict has cost the lives of 45,000 people, including soldiers, guerrillas and civilians. The complex issue of the Kurdish Question in Turkey is subject to comprehensive examination in this book. This interdisciplinary edited volume brings together chapters by social theorists, political scientists, social anthropologists, sociologists, legal theorists and ethnomusicologists to provide new perspectives on this internationally significant issue. It elaborates on the complexity of the Kurdish question and examines the subject matter from a number of innovative angles. Considering historical, theoretical and political aspects of the Kurdish question in depth and raising issues that have not been discussed sufficiently in existing literature, this book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Nationalism and Conflict, Turkish Politics and Middle Eastern politics more broadly.

The Kurds, one of the oldest ethnic groups in the Middle East, are reasserting their identity—politically and through violence. Divided mainly among Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the Kurds have posed increasingly sharp challenges to all of these states in their quest for greater autonomy if not outright independence. Turkey's essentially democratic structure and civil society_ideal tools for coping with and incorporating minority challenge_have so far been suspended on this issue, which the government is treating almost exclusively as a security problem to be dealt with by force. For the West the situation in Turkey is particularly significant because of the country's importance in the region and because of the economic, political, and diplomatic damage that the conflict has caused. If Turkey fails to find a peaceful solution within its current borders, then the outlook is grim for ethnic and separatist challenges elsewhere in the region. This study explores the roots, dimensions, character, and evolution of the problem, offers a range of approaches to a resolution of the conflict, and draws broader parallels between the Kurdish question and other separatist movements worldwide.