Etnik mobilizasyondan gruplar arası şiddete: Türkiye'de kürt sorunu ve Kuzey İrlanda çatışması karşılaştırması

Although there is an abundance of studies on ethnic civil war, most studies are not able to specify which ethnic dyads are likely to come into conflict with one another and why some countries in transition experience no violence at all. This research contributes to this gap in the literature based on the comparison of Kurdish problem in Turkey and Northern Ireland conflict. It questions more specifically why Kurds and Turks did not turn into communal groups in conflict despite the ethnic insurgency of the PKK whereas the ethnic insurgency of the IRA spoiled over into Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland by warring republican and loyalist paramilitaries. This research expands the range of instrumental-institutional explanations in line with electoral incentive arguments. The comparison of Northern Ireland conflict and Kurdish problem in Turkey reveals that political competition based on cross-cutting cleavages such as the case of center-periphery cleavage in Turkey serves to circumvent ethnic polarization during ethnic insurgency since political parties and governments are able to appeal to ethnic minority, include ethnic minority leaders in their minimum winning coalition, and restrain themselves from promoting exclusive frames against ethnic minority. Political competition based on overlapping cleavages in closely contested systems such as the case of unionist-nationalist cleavage in Northern Ireland produces political parties and governments supported exclusively by majority ethnic group, de-motivates political parties which hold the support of majority to include ethnic minority leaders into their minimum winning coalition and encourages them to use exclusive frames against minority in order to bond their constituency. This political divide is vulnerable to ethnic polarization which can explode into interethnic conflict under the impact of negative catalysts. This study directs another puzzle probing into which localities are more riot prone in Turkey and Northern Ireland. Through semi-structured interviews in Northern Ireland and Turkey, this study demonstrates that in Northern Ireland, communal tensions still boil in "tectonic boundaries", the interfaces which refer to the places where intercommunal violence occurred and where segregated Protestant and Catholic communities meet. Concentrating on "lynching" incidents against Kurds, this study demonstrates the spatial and temporal variation of communal violence against Kurds in Turkey between 1999 and 2012 based an original data collected from a Turkish source (Cumhuriyet newspaper) and a Kurdish source (Özgür Gündem and Dicle Haber Ajansı). This study argues that the change of political opportunity structure provided by democratization and increased pluralism toward Kurdish entailed three consequences influential on the rise and spatial distribution of communal violence against Kurds: boundary activation with regard to Kurdish identity especially in Western Turkey, the opportunity for collective violence due to decreased repression against Kurdish identity and rise of riot networks which are more mobile in statist-nationalist localities of Western Turkey.