In recent years, the attention is being increasingly drawn to the role of the European Union on the development of minority rights in the candidate countries. The adoption of the Copenhagen political criteria, which also require "respect for and protection of minorities," as preconditions that applicants must have met before they could join the Union has inevitably led to some policy changes to the minorities in Eastern Europe. This policy shift is particularly directed at minority language rights, because one of the most important aspects of the protection of minorities is the recognition of their linguistic identity. The aim of this study is to explore to what extent this development has influenced the situation of language rights of the Kurds in Turkey. In order to answer this question, it first examines the relationship between the Copenhagen criteria and international and European standards protecting minority language rights. Secondly, considering those standards, it assesses the achievements and failures of the recent legislative amendments which are directed to bring the language rights of the Kurds within the line of the Copenhagen criteria. The case of Turkey reveals the vast potential of the European enlargement process on the development of minority language rights, but also its limits in situations where there is a lack of political will to respect and protect diversity.

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This dissertation examines the origins and development of ethno-national mobilisation amongst the Kurds of the Ottoman Empire in the decades leading up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It argues that, like other elements of Ottoman community, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the idea that the Kurds constituted a 'nation' gradually proliferated amongst Kurdish intellectual and political leaders. This nascent 'national consciousness' found concrete expression in the establishment of a series of newspapers, journals and organisations claiming to represent the views and interests of the Ottoman Kurdish community. However, while a growing number of Kurds began to see themselves as part of a 'Kurdish nation', the political implications of Kurdish 'nationhood' remained controversial. Indeed, from its inception the Kurdish movement contained within it a number of factions which held very different opinions on what precisely constituted the Kurds' national interests. This included some who attempted to secure the advancement and development of their people within the framework of the empire (accommodationists) and others who sought national independence (separatists). This study seeks to highlight the diversity within the Kurdish movement and, more importantly, shed light on the reasons behind it. In doing so, it will become possible to create a more nuanced historical narrative of the origins and nature of the Kurdish question, a question which remained a major political issue facing Middle Eastern leaders and statesmen today.

This dissertation aims to illuminate the changing nature of the Kurdish contention in Turkey since the 1990s as well as its ubiquitous dissemination among the Kurdish grassroots through examining the repercussions of political violence and the relocation of the grassroots from rural to urban centers. My understanding of the recent internal displacement of Kurdish citizens in Turkey in the late 1980s, but en masse in 1990s relates the issue to three overarching intertwined trajectories; 1) the end of the cold war, resulting in the changing nature of political violence and of identity politics; 2) the incursion of neoliberalism and the changing paradigms regarding the nature of state-society relations, resulting in a tendency for decentralization and a decline in the welfare functions of the state 3) the increasing salience of new international concerns--particularly international human rights rhetoric--and their influence domestically. Against this backdrop, I examine how the displacement of Kurdish citizens on a large scale has become part of the changing nature of the Kurdish Question, and in turn has started to redefine its contemporary face in Turkey in the 1990s. I argue that following the 1990s, the Kurdish question in Turkey has [re]surfaced as 1) a problem of political legitimacy between the state and (Kurdish) citizens affected by conflict and displacement 2) an ethno-nationalist claim, 3) a poverty and social citizenship problem. I analyze these three propositions in relation to three main processes. First, I propose that new dynamics have been introduced into the state/center-citizen/periphery relations, through which 'legitimate' Kurdish citizens and secure spaces/geographies are distinguished by the Turkish state in contrast to the 'illegitimate,' 'so-called', 'undeserving' and/or 'suspicious' ones. This process, in turn, brought in question the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the displaced Kurdish citizens. Second, previously existing Kurdish contention has turned into an ethno-political issue, which is entrenched among the Kurdish masses mired in poverty in the urban centers of southeastern Turkey. Finally, the discontents of neoliberal restructuring in the form of poverty, unemployment and social exclusion have converged with the ethnicized discontent prevailing among the Kurdish masses in the city centers in southeastern Turkey.