Ragan Updegraff

Ragan Updegraff is program assistant at the National Endowment for Democracy. He is a frequent writer and commentator on Turkish politics and maintains the blog Turkish Politics in Action.

January 2012, Volume 23, Issue 1

Turkey Under the AKP: The Kurdish Question

Turkish state policy toward the Kurds, the Republic of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, has evolved from denial and mandatory assimilation to cultural recognition to acknowledgment of the Kurds’ contested status as a political problem demanding political solutions. The election of 36 Kurdish-nationalist lawmakers, most of whom now sit in parliament as representatives of the Peace…