Minorities, Statelessness, and Kurdish Studies Today: Prospects and Dilemmas for Scholars

Öz

There are few topics in which the academic and the political are as deeply intertwined as the subject of minorities in the Middle East. From its inception, Western scholarship on the region has been closely connected to European attempts to protect and indeed “liberate” the Christian populations of the region, or at least to disguise their wider efforts to control the region’s lands and resources under the pretext of safeguarding Christians, as Said outlined in his famous Orientalism. As others have shown, the very notion of minority as we know it today arose in the context of European attempts to classify and control the regions (inside the Middle East and beyond) they colonized or otherwise attempted to influence. Although scholarship on minorities in the Middle East has come a long way, particularly in recent decades, it is still fraught with tensions, a key factor being the pervasive linkage between the academic and the political in the study of Middle Eastern minorities.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Minorities
• Statelessness
• Kurdish