Notes on Contributors

A legal expert, researcher, and author, Fırat Aydınkaya was born in Muş, a Kurdish town in Eastern Turkey, and graduated from Istanbul University's College of Law. He has published three books in Turkish, Eternal Return: Origins of the New Fascism (2008), The Corridor of Death (2005), and The Dagger of Bediuzzaman (2020) His numerous articles have been published in various academic journals. Currently, he coordinates Kürd Araştırmaları Dergisi, a social science journal of Kurdish studies. He is also conducting research on political violence, the history and theories of national liberation movements, anti-colonial literary theory, and the Armenian genocide. Through his writings and legal and academic endeavors, Aydınkaya continues to advocate for the recognition of Kurdish identity and rights and is considered one of the prominent figures in the anti-colonial Kurdish discourse in Turkey.Selahattin Demirtaş stands as a prominent figure in Kurdish political leadership, renowned not only for his tenure as a parliamentarian and presidential candidate but also for his pivotal role as the head of the left-wing pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey. In the 2014 presidential election, Demirtaş was the HDP's candidate and secured third place. Under his leadership, the HDP achieved significant electoral success, garnering 13.1 percent of the vote in the June 2015 parliamentary elections and 10.7 percent in the November 2015 snap elections, finishing fourth in both. Demirtaş has been imprisoned since November 4, 2016. Despite his imprisonment, the HDP nominated him as their candidate for the 2018 presidential election, during which he campaigned from prison. In December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Demirtaş’s continued pre-trial detention was politically motivated, citing its timing with significant political events in Turkey and a systemic trend of suppressing dissenting voices.Choman Hardi is an educator, author, and gender studies pioneer in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. She founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies which initiated the first gender studies minor in Iraq. She is the author of critically acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, her postdoctoral research, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (2011) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. Since 2010, poems from her first English collection, Life for Us (2004), have been studied by secondary school students as part of their general curriculum in the UK. Her second collection, Considering the Women (2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2017, a selection of her poems was published in Italian. In 2020, Considering the Woman was released in a French translation. Her translation of Sherko Bekas's Butterfly Valley (2018) won a PEN Translates Award, and she is a recipient of the 2023 Franco-German Human Rights Prize. Whispering Walls, her debut novel, was published in 2023.Dastan Jasim finished her PhD on the political culture of Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen Nuremberg and is an associate fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. Her research focuses on political developments in Kurdish regions in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey alongside questions of democratization and security policies in the region.Sara Kermanian is a PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her thesis provides a framework for explaining the relational formation of international imaginaries, with a particular focus on the entangled emergence of democratic confederalism and neo-Ottomanism.Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, psychologist, psychotherapist, and trauma expert, is a researcher at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University, and dean of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychotraumatology at the University in Duhok/Kurdistan Region Iraq. He was the chief psychologist of the Special-Quota Project, a program funded by the state government of Baden-Württemberg. The project aims were to bring eleven hundred women and children who have been held hostage by the Islamic State to Germany for medical treatment. His main areas of research are psychotraumatology, transcultural psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy, transcultural health research, racism, radicalization, migration, refugees, and mental health. He has published more than 30 books and more than 120 studies in international journals. He has been awarded many times nationally and internationally for his work.Mashuq Kurt is a decolonial scholar and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He is associate professor of sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey: Islamism, Violence, and the State (2017) and numerous articles and book chapters published in venues such as Current Anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Social Research: An International Quarterly, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, The Cambridge History of the Kurds, and The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey. He writes about Kurds and Kurdistan, Islam, Turkey, youth, education, radicalization, and Muslim diasporas.Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on the history, culture, and politics of the Kurds, and on the history and philosophy of the humanities. In 2022, he received the Jemal Nebez award for his contributions to Kurdish studies.Nilay Özok-Gündoğan is associate professor of Ottoman and Middle East history at Florida State University. Her research centers modern state making, colonialism, elite formation, property regimes, and intercommunal conflict and coexistence in Ottoman Kurdistan. Her work stands at the junction of interconnected Ottoman, Kurdish, Armenian, and Turkish histories. Her first book, The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy, and Privilege, was published in 2022 and won the 2022 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Prize. Her publications have also appeared in the Journal of Social History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, New Perspectives on Turkey, and edited volumes. She also regularly contributes to Jadaliyya, an independent e-zine that covers the Arab world and the broader Middle East with op-eds on the question of methodology in Kurdish studies.Hakan Sandal-Wilson is assistant professor of gender, peace, and security in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include gender and sexuality; ‘race,’ ethnicity, and racism; conflict; and social and political theory. He is also interested in thinking about creative methods and methodologies in social sciences in conversation with art and literature.Diren Yeşil Sincar is a research assistant and doctoral candidate with a focus on gender and diversity at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Wuppertal. Her doctoral thesis is on the experiences of racism by Kurds in Germany—functions and effects of (not) speaking about anti-Kurdish racism in the educational realities of the migration society. Her current research focus is anti-Kurdish racism in the context of Germany, Kurdish studies, critical race theory, anti-colonial theories and methodologies, critical racism, migration studies and anti-racism, intersectional analyses, and gender theory. Her most recent publication, coauthored by J. Jording and A. Messerschmidt, is “Die Ambivalenz von Erfolgsgeschichten in Verhältnissen von Alltagsrassismus und postkolonialer Situation” (2023).Veli Yadirgi is the author of the double-award-winning book The Political Economy of Kurdish Question: From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (2017) and the coeditor of The Cambridge History of the Kurds (2021). Since 2016, he has taught in the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). Currently, he is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research covers a broad range of issues and areas including the political economy of development; development issues facing middle-income countries; and comparative politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).