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Expanding Kurdish Studies: A Review Essay
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Extract
The Failure to Implement the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres thwarted Kurdish hopes for their own state, but it did not write the Kurds out of history. From Sheikh Said’s rebellion against the Turks in 1925 to the legendary Mulla Mustafa Barzani and his son Massud, Kurds have grabbed the occasional headline and challenged central authorities more or less continually throughout the 20th century. Conversely, and in less chronicled fashion, they have also played powerful roles in consolidating state rule. Only after the Gulf War in 1991, however, did Kurds begin receiving sustained western attention and, in the last three years in particular, a new flood of articles and books by academics and journalists has swelled periodicals and library shelves. The Middle East Studies Association’s annual conferences from 1995 to 1997 all featured panels devoted to Kurds and Kurdish politics; at the MESA conference in San Francisco last December, papers concerning Kurds were also presented on thematic panels dealing with such diverse subjects as nationalism in the Middle East and youth in Turkey.
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- Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1998
References
Endnotes:
1. Cheriff Vanly, Ismet, Survey of the National Question of Turkish Kurdistan with historical background (Hevra: Organization of the Revolutionary Kurds of Turkey in Europe, 1971)Google Scholar; Kinnane, Derk, The Kurds and Kurdistan (London: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Edmonds, Cecil John, Kurds, Turks and Arabs: Politics, Travel, and Research in North-Eastern Iraq, 1919–1925 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.
2. Bruinessen, Martin van, Agha, Sheikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Press, republished 1992)Google Scholar.
3. Meiselas, Susan, Kurdistan in the Shadow of History (New York: Random House, 1997)Google Scholar; Kirişçi, Kemal and Winrow, Gareth M., The Kurdish Question in Turkey: An Example of a Trans-State Ethnic Conflict (London: Frank Cass, 1997)Google Scholar.
4. Izady, Mehrdad, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (Washington, DC: Crane Russak, 1992)Google Scholar. Another very good journalistic account of the Kurdish problem in Turkey can be found in Nicole, and Pope’s, Hugh recently published Turkey Unveiled: Ataturk and After (London: John Murray, 1997)Google Scholar.
5. This is a point made by, among others, Lois Beck in her essay on the Qashqa’i tribes of Iran and their often symbiotic relationship with the state. See Beck, Lois, “Tribes and the State in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Iran” in Khoury, Philip and Kostiner, Joseph, eds. Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar.