A crisis 'in' conflict for international relations: The case of the Turkish/Kurdish War through neogramscian lenses

This thesis takes an alternative approach to understand the social basis of regional conflict. As such, it bridges the fields of Comparative Politics and International Relations. It builds a ‘society up’ model as a lens for an extensive case-study of Kurdish nationalism in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Kurds of Turkey. The thesis provides a critique of the statist assumptions in International Relations and Comparative theories, suggesting that ‘top down’ theories lack the precision required to grasp the social basis of ethnic and national conflicts. From there, an examination of the profound transformations in global politics in the past fifteen years is tabled to reveal the need for an approach that can better capture the redefined agencies in global politics that are a result of globalization. A neogramscian theoretical framework is proposed, asserting that the Kurdish identity has been defined historically only in relation to how the Kurds are different from the dominant Turkish social order. Using an historical sociological methodology, the thesis moves to a history of Kurdish ethnonationalism, assigning agency on the Kurdish peoples themselves, rather than at the level of those empires and states that ruled over them. It is suggested that the Kurdish people were instrumental to both the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the consolidation of the modern state of Turkey. This historical sociology then examines the evolution of Kurdish identity construction under the domination of the Turkish state, and looks at the transformations of both Kurdish social forces and of Turkish society. In the final section, the dialectic of hegemony/counter-hegemony is used to provide a detailed examination of the multiple processes of social conditioning that the Turkish majority have upon the Kurdish minority, and vice-versa. The repressive measures taken by the Turkish state have internationalized the Kurdish conflict, and the responses by Kurdish nationals have been to deterritorialize the conflict through the development of cyber-nationalism. This has led to the establishment of a truly transnational national movement. This is a phenomenon that ‘top down’ theories of global politics are unable to capture effectively.