Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Toronto [Ont.]--Université de Toronto, 1993. / Bibliogr. p. 785-808.

Thesis Ph. D.--Department of peace and development research--Göteborg university, 2005. / Bibliogr. p. 223-248.

Thesis--Utrecht. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 449-459).

Thesis--Utrecht. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 449-459).

No description available.

Ethnicity and political action have always been interesting connections. With diaspora groups, this connection is intensified due to their strong desire for a homeland. Some members of the Kurdish community in Canada do not leave their political aspirations back home. As refugees, they use their newfound freedom to promote their political causes. Along with their political aspirations, also come political divisions. For Kurdish immigrants (mostly refugees), the importance of the homeland, their desire for 'nation-status' and recognition of their ethnic identity are paramount concerns. These desires take on different shapes and forms for different members of the community. This study shows that their degree of activism and their success are primarily a result of their attitudes toward Kurdistan, their family situation, their past experiences and their ability to put regional differences behind them. The Kurdish community is not homogeneous and these rifts in the community may keep it from flourishing.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Waikato, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [163]-173) Also available via the World Wide Web.

Diss. / Arbre généalogique. Bibliogr. p. 459-489. Index.

Can national liberation movements envisage self-rule without statehood? This research examines the politics of a national liberation movement that claims to do just that. The research focuses on the incessant quest for self-rule in Kurdistan in general and the politics of dominant Kurdish liberation movements in Turkey and Syria in particular – with regard to the kind of political community they aspire to found. The research reveals that a salient aspect of Kurdish politics has been its detachment from state-building, and that this aspect dominates the politics of Kurdish movements in Turkey and Syria. Likewise, their project for self-rule in Kurdistan envisages a political community that differs greatly from its competitors; i.e. the hegemonic nation-state and its main opposition Islamic Ummah. I note that the Kurdish model draws heavily on the growing literature in political theory about the inadequacy of representative institutions and the risks of appealing to the notion of national sovereignty. I emphasize that the project shifts the origin of sovereignty from 'the imagined community', i.e. the nation, to residential communities (note the plurality). I also highlight that the Kurdish model of political community is built upon the exercise of political power through direct and semi-direct forms of democracy. Popular councils and assemblies within municipalities appear as the ultimate regulatory institutions. Sovereignty, thus, is dispersed and fragmented throughout autonomous, yet co-existing, and ideally horizontally organized political entities such as towns and cities. Accordingly, the primary form of political organization is not territorial state, but autonomous municipality. I argue that the claim to self-rule in the model is not in the name of the nation, but of communities of settlement, e.g. villages, neighbourhoods, towns, and cities. In a world of nationstates, the Kurdish movements' politics is an interesting example of post-nationalist and post-sovereign claims.

In many countries around the world, determining what languages or dialects should be the instrument of education in schools is a major issue. Today, in Kurdistan this issue is a growing concern, particularly amongst students who speak a Kurdish dialect known as Kurmanji (Hassanpour, 2008, 2012). This thesis is an attempt to investigate the difficulties that Kurmanji students encounter in schools. Its aim is to investigate their attitudes and perceptions towards the Sorani dialect and Sorani speakers. For this reason, twenty students, including 10 males and 10 females, participated in this study. The students were from a Kurmanji town known as Akre. For this study,the qualitative method was used as it allowed the students to describe in detail the difficulties they have faced in schools and the attitudes they had towards the Sorani dialect and its speakers. The research revealed that Kurmanji students faced different kinds of problems not only in their classes, but also in their neighborhoods and communities. These problems ranged from simple issues with classroom curricula and pedagogical approaches, to more extreme problems. Many of the extreme problems involve being humiliated in the classroom by their teachers, being unfairly disciplined and penalized for language mistakes, and many other forms of punitive action. Further, the study reported how these issues have been addressed through the use of a method called bidalectialsim in several countries, such as America, Australia, Canada, England, etc. This method teaches the dominant dialect through the use of the students own native dialect (Yiakoumetti, 2006, 2007). These approaches and solutions can offer Kurdistan a blueprint for how to address their own problems and how to pave the way for speakers of Kurmanji to learn the targeted standard dialect of Sorani in Kurdistan.