Mehmet Gurses on the transformation of Turkey’s Kurdish issue
December 23, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #260 – Mehmet Gurses, director of Kurdish Studies at the University of Central Florida, on his article “Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict Transformed”, recently published in the journal Current History.
The article places the PKK’s emergence and transformations in a historical context over the past four decades, also weighing up shifts that may be triggered by its current dialogue process with Ankara.
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Nilay Özok-Gündoğan on political authority in Ottoman Kurdistan
October 17, 2023
Turkey Book Talk #204 – Nilay Özok-Gündoğan, assistant professor of history at Florida State University, on “The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege” (Edinburgh University Press).
The book narrates the rise and fall of the Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire’s east, as well as how their autonomy was removed as the empire modernised and centralised from the 19th century.
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Become a member on Patreon to support Turkey Book Talk. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, links to related content upon publication of each episode, and over 200 book reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history and politics.
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