Editorial

Abstract

Kurdish studies have, in the past few decades, come to be established as a respectable field of academic investigation and publication, after long having been as marginal in academia as the Kurds themselves were in the politics of the Middle East. The received wisdom, in many Western academic institutions, was that it was essential to retain access to the “field” and that permits to carry out field research in such pro-Western and relatively accessible countries as Turkey and Iran would continue to be granted as long as scholars stayed away from sensitive issues – and the Kurds were definitely one of the most sensitive of those issues. Turkey and Iran, Iraq and Syria perceived their Kurdish citizens as a major security issue, and scholarly interest in the Kurds aroused suspicions of imperialist meddling in Arab, Persian or Turkish affairs.