"Under the Banner of Islam: Turks, Kurds, and the Limits of Religious Unity"

Sunni Islam has played an ambivalent role in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict—both as a conflict resolution tool and as a tool of resistance. Under the Banner of Islam uses Turkey as a case study to understand how religious, ethnic, and national identities converge in ethnic conflicts between coreligionists. It asks a question that informs the way we understand religiously homogeneous ethnic conflicts today: Is it possible for religion to act as a resolution tool in these often-violent conflicts? Blending interview data with a detailed historical analysis that goes back as far as the nineteenth century, Under the Banner of Islam searches for answers to this question.

Gülay Türkmen is a political sociologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Göttingen’s Institute of Sociology. Her work examines how certain historical, cultural, and political developments inform questions of belonging and identity-formation in multiethnic and multi-religious societies. Her research and teaching interests stand at the intersection of politics and religion, as they relate to questions of migration, nationalism, citizenship, and inclusion/exclusion in multicultural contexts.

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Link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/97562898640
Meeting ID: 975 6289 8640