Return to Point Zero

Murat Somer is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey.

• IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgments1. Introduction: Choices, Structures, and Politics in Creating and Solving Conflicts2. The Three Dilemmas Explained3. From Empire to Imaginable and Imagined Nations: How Did the Kurdish Question Arise?4. How Was the Kurdish Conflict Created? A Nonstandard Explanation5. The Changing Context of the 1990s: Seeing Kurds without Recognizing Them6. Return to Point Zero: Why Did the Peace Initiatives in the 2000s Fail?7. Ideational Bottlenecks8. Return to Point Zero: New Political Choices Informed by New IdeasNotesBibliographyIndex

"…readers should find Somer's latest contribution to the field very useful, insightful, and original." — Middle East Journal"With its rich and sophisticated analysis, Return to Point Zero makes a major contribution to the social sciences literature on Turkey. In addition to helping us understand the Kurdish problem in all its complexity, Somer takes the additional step of suggesting practical ways of overcoming the difficulties and moving toward solutions. This is an important book that will influence how we think about modern Turkey for many years to come." — Reşat Kasaba, University of Washington"In this highly original and sensitively written analysis, Murat Somer elucidates how the Kurdish Question became the Kurdish Conflict, and in doing so provides a cogent and clear-headed explanation for why the Kurdish-Turkish conflict has continued to persist and what needs to be done if it is to be transcended." — Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton University"Somer's deeply informed monograph puts emphasis on multiple and contradictory processes that determined and still determine the evolution of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and opens new theoretical avenues to understand dynamics of ethnic conflicts throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." — Hamit Bozarslan, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)"This is a major contribution to the understanding of nationalist politics. Eschewing reductionist or mechanistic explanations, Somer provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich account of the emergence of Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms and shows how the conflict is not historically inevitable or predetermined." — Michael Keating, University of Aberdeen