New Yiork- My fieldwork on Kurdish militancy in the Qandil mountains of Iraq’s Erbil governorate was cited by the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies published by Metropolitan University Prague. In The PKK’s Friends and Foes in the Middle East Since 1999, authors Tomáš Kaválek and Miroslav Mareš put the PKK;s complex relationship with regional state and substate actors as well as to its affiliate organizations or wings and their Apoist ideology that prioritizes, or prioritized, the armed struggle against the Turkish state as it central organizing principle.
The identity politics across greater Kurdistan -Rojava, Rojhelat, Bashur, and Bakur has captivated me since I first landed in Athens on an overnight train in the summer of 1998 as a young university student. Walking with some friends from New Zealand around Plaka after midnight while looking for a budget hotel, we happened upon a young Greek leftist putting up pro-PKK posters with a bucket of wheat paste urging Western tourists to boycott Turkey because of the rampant oppression of Kurds in the country’s south and east.