Umut Ozkirimli

• Pompeu Fabra University

The soon-to-be completed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which will be the largest hydroelectric power plant and among the largest reservoirs in Africa, has highlighted the need for expanding traditional integrated water resources management to better include the cultural, social, and political complexities of large water infrastructure in...

Despite the ever-growing literature on various aspects of the Kurdish question in Turkey, there are practically no normative discussions of Kurdish demands for the public recognition of their identities. This is all the more startling given the ascendancy of philosophical accounts in the literature on minority rights. This article will try to redre...

The aim of this academic obituary is to briefly consider Fred Halliday's (1946-2010) contribution to nationalism studies. The article will first discuss Halliday's understanding of nationalism, which he defines as a set of ideas that asserts that the world is divided into distinct peoples with a particular history and various entitlements, and his...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the ‘Kurdish question’ in Turkey within the framework of the current debates on the ‘death of multiculturalism’. Contra what I would call ‘multikulti-sceptics’, I contend that it is too early to compose an epitaph for multiculturalism, both as practice and as ideology, that there is no binary opposition between a...

The aim of this article is to draw attention to the dangerous, indeed poisonous, nature of the current debates on immigration and multiculturalism in today's ‘omniphobic’ Europe, plagued not only by a severe economic crisis, but also a more general normative crisis, a ‘crisis of values’ so to speak, which has been consistently overlooked or manipul...

Nationalism is an elusive concept, resisting all attempts at formulating an allembracing definition. Despite this Janus-faced character, however, the literature on nationalism abounds with definitions and theories designed to explain its rise. In a groundbreaking study, Michael Billig (1995) challenges the orthodox conceptions of nationalism and in...