scholarly journals Convince me you exist. An analysis of The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) court files

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (27) ◽  
pp. 248-256
Author(s):  
Islam Sargi
Keyword(s):  
Evidence Based ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Case Files ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Kurdistan Workers Party ◽  
Means Of Transmission ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
Modern Sense

The end of empires and the rise of nation-states have transformed the way politics and societies operate and the modern sense of these changes, transformations, events, and situations. Language, culture, and memory are essential pillars of the nation-states’ projects of creating a new society. The modern form of government, the nation-state, use history not only as a means of transmission but also as a means of building identity and memory. This study examines the case files of three critical names in the Kurdish movement and the history-based debates in their trials. By applying discourse analysis, we have shown how the Turkish state and The Kurdish Workers’ Party used history as a tool to “prove” and “disprove” the existence of Kurds, the Kurdish language, and Kurdistan. While the judges imposed an evidence-based approach to history and denied the existence of Kurds, Kurdish and Kurdistan, the PKK members opposed the official thesis of the state and built their arguments more on the day-to-day realities of life.  The study’s main argument is that the official ideology uses history to prove and convey a message to the rest of society, whereas the defendants used it as a means of protest depending on the historical reality rather than history as a science. This study discusses that by using science to make examples of these members, the judges used history to prove the Kurds’ non-existence, whereas the defendants implied history as a way of protesting the ruling authority.

From containment and rollback to escalation: Turkey’s Kurdish issue under the AKP

2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 40-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joost Jongerden
Keyword(s):  
Turkish State ◽  
Kurdistan Workers Party ◽  
Kurdish Issue

This article will argue that the meetings between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers Party PKK between 2006-2015 were employed by the Turkish state to gain advantage in the conflict they were supposed to be aimed at resolving. This appraisal of the PKK-Turkey talks thus helps to explain the escalation in the summer of 2015 - as the result, that is, not of a failed process of negotiations but of a failed intelligence operation.

The Depravity Standard for Violent Crimes

2021 ◽  
pp. 0306624X2110589
Author(s):  
Michael Welner ◽  
Kate Y. O’Malley ◽  
James Gonidakis ◽  
Samantha Blair
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Violent Crime ◽  
Scoring System ◽  
Interrater Reliability ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Violent Crimes ◽  
Early Release ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Case Files

In violent crime cases, aggravating factors in United States criminal codes, such as “heinous,” “atrocious,” or “depraved,” are used to distinguish elements of the crime warranting more severe sentencing. These aggravating terms are vaguely defined and applied arbitrarily in violent cases. This paper details the development of a 25 item Depravity Standard to operationalize an evidence-based approach to distinguishing the worst of violent crimes. The items were applied to 393 detailed case files drawn from several American jurisdictions to develop and refine the item definitions, determine interrater reliability, and mine for the frequency of each item’s occurrence. This information was combined with 1,590 participant responses ranking the relative depravity of each item to develop a straightforward scoring system for measuring depravity in violent cases. The Depravity Standard guide can seamlessly be applied to identify the worst violent crimes, and provide support for those cases that may deserve leniency or early-release.

National identity in the Ottoman Empire as a historical and social fact

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isra Shengul Chebi ◽  
Dilshat Karimova
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Defined both in an individual and in a social or cultural context, identity is a historical phenomenon; a consistent, complete sense of identity develops in the historical process. Social relations created by historical conditions shape Turkish identity, just like other collective identities. Revealed as one of the oldest nations in history, Turkish identity has also been shaped by the amalgamation of the effects created by the rule of law in the collective consciousness. Despite the fact that the length of the historical process makes it difficult to clearly identify the stages of the adventure, when studying Turkish identity it is necessary to look at the Ottoman Empire, which is a prerequisite for the modern Turkish state, and the self-identification of the society that feels belonging to the above state. Indeed, it is not very wrong to associate the phenomenon of identity as a topic of discussion with the relationship of the Ottoman state with the modern nation states of the West. In this context, it would be appropriate to touch upon the perception of identity in the Ottoman Empire.

Is it only ‘What works’ that ‘Counts’ in New Knowledge Economies? Evidence-based Practice, Educational Research and Teacher Education in Australia

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Blackmore
Keyword(s):  
Education Policy ◽  
Educational Research ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Economies ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Research In Education

Recent texts on globalisation and education policy refer to the rapid flow of education policy texts producing or responding to common trends across nation states with the emergence of new knowledge economies. These educational policies are shaping what counts as research and the dynamics between research, policy, and practice in schools, creating new types of relationships between universities, the public, the professions, government, and industry. The trend to evidence-based policy and practice in Australian schools is used to identify key issues within wider debates about the ‘usefulness’ of educational research and the role of universities and university-based research in education in new knowledge economies.

Allies and Enemies: Pro-Kurdish Parties in Turkish Politics, 1990–94

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole F. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private Realm ◽  
Turkish Politics ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Kurdistan Workers Party

Preventing the development of an ethnic Kurdish cultural and political movement has been a priority of the Turkish state since the Kurdish-led Shaykh Said Rebellion of 1925.' Nevertheless, beginning around 1959 this effort was steadily if slowly undermined, and events of the past ten years suggest that it has indeed failed. Not only have Kurdish activists gained some measure of international recognition for themselves and for the concept of Kurdish ethnic rights,2 but promoting the notion of specifically Kurdish cultural rights has almost become a standard litany for a wide array of Turkish civic and state actors, from Islamist political parties to business organizations, human-rights groups, prime ministers, and mainstream newspaper columnists. Although the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its insurgency against Turkey have claimed a great deal of academic and popular attention, it is these diffuse but public re-considerations of minority rights taking place within legitimate Turkish institutions have contributed the most to the sense that past policies of coping with the “Kurdish reality” are ultimately unsustainable, and that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to return to the climate of earlier years, when discussions of ethnic difference were suppressed, limited to the private realm, or confined to the fringes of radical politics.

The Best Form of Government: A Perspective on the Continuity of Political Theory

1978 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
James V. Schall
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Political Modernization ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Past Half ◽  
External Form

During the past half-century or so, the world has seen the formation of some one hundred new nation-states, while many of the other fifty-odd political entities have radically altered their previous form of constitution by force, revolution, conquest, election, or change of political philosophy. This has given renewed life to the classical issue about what is the best form of rule under which men ought to live. Political modernization has become a crucial aspect of political science. The external form of almost all these new nation-states, to be sure, even of the most absolute, has almost invariably been some legal variety of “constitutional democracy,” the wording commonly given in modern times to the structure of the best state.

Guerrillas could prompt Turkish state of emergency

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Local Population ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
The Government ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
Kurdistan Workers Party ◽  
State Group

Significance They were responding to increasingly serious attacks on Turkish soldiers and police by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) guerrillas in eastern Turkey. With President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowing fierce retribution, and conflicts between the authorities and the local population growing in the Kurdish-dominated south-east, the country is braced for full-scale war, just as it prepares for fresh parliamentary elections on November 1. Impacts Business and the economy face a sharp downturn with the lira growing steadily weaker. The conflict with the Kurds will intensify and Kurdish demands for full-scale independence will increase. The government will not seek a compromise with the Kurds and will be prepared to allocate any resources needed for a military solution. A more authoritarian style of government is likely to emerge after November. Turkey looks increasingly vulnerable to serious Islamic State group (ISG) attacks in urban centres, though probably not before the election.

History-writing in Turkey through securitization discourses and gendered narratives

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-344
Author(s):  
Bengi Bezirgan-Tanış
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
History Writing ◽  
National Interests ◽  
External Threats ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Turkish State

Since the official history-writing is a defining aspect for the formation and consolidation of nation-states, it is crucial to explore the attempts to legitimize particular discourses regarding historical atrocities. The selective representations of the past, in this regard, contradict counter-memories and propagate hegemonic patterns of remembrance and/or forgetting of past crimes. This article accordingly addresses how the representations of counter-memories as threats to national security and the silencing of gender-specific experiences and remembrances by sanctioned historical narratives become manifest in the history-making of the Turkish nation-state. By focusing on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide as two cases of crimes against humanity, it is intended to discuss the shifting positions and roles that the Turkish state adopts in the remembering and forgetting of historical offences. The article argues that through prioritizing national security and national interests, the securitization of memory reconstructs collective traumas of distinct ethnic and religious groups on the basis of a nation-state’s perceived internal and external threats. It also claims that the competing voices of women and their distinct experiences and patterns of remembrance and forgetting past atrocities are suppressed for the sake of the preservation of national security. By incorporating the issue of gender into the debate on the securitization of memory, this article elucidates the mismatch between positions of femininity and masculinity within the official national historiography of the Turkish state.

scholarly journals A purple patch for evidence-based health policy?

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Mark Cormack ◽  
Anne-marie Boxall ◽  
Carolyn Hullick ◽  
Mark Booth ◽  
Russell L. Gruen
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Policy Action ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Public Policy Process

The global focus on nation states’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic has rightly highlighted the importance of science and evidence as the basis for policy action. Those with a lifelong passion for evidence-based policy (EBP) have lauded Australia’s and other nations’ policy responses to COVID-19 as a breakthrough moment for the cause. This article reflects on the complexity of the public policy process, the perspectives of its various actors, and draws on Alford’s work on the Blue, Red and Purple zones to propose a more nuanced approach to advocacy for EBP in health. We contend that the pathway for translation of research evidence into routine clinical practice is relatively linear, in contrast to the more complex course for translation of evidence to public policy – much to the frustration of health researchers and EBP advocates. Cairney’s description of the characteristics of successful policy entrepreneurs offers useful guidance to advance EBP and we conclude with proposing some practical mechanisms to support it. Finally, we recommend that researchers and policy makers spend more time in the Purple zone to enable a deeper understanding of, and mutual respect for, the unique contributions made by research, policy and political actors to sound public policy.

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