Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies

This award, sponsored by Kurdish Political Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, recognizes the best article in Kurdish Studies published in the previous calendar year.

For this award cycle, articles published in 2024 will be considered. All articles published in English-language peer-reviewed journals addressing questions and covering issues related to Kurdish politics, broadly defined, will be considered for the award.

The award is open to all disciplines under social sciences and humanities. The primary author of the article must be an untenured scholar (graduate student, post-doc, independent scholar, assistant professor, or equivalent) at the time of the publication. The winner will be awarded $1000.

Nominations are due by January 15, 2025, and the awardee will be announced by February 15, 2025. Self-nominations are welcome.

Please send an electronic copy of the nominated article to gurses@ucf.edu.

Award Committee:

2024 Awards

First Prize Winner

Erdoğdu, Ulaş. “Democratization, Foreign Military Intervention, and Rebel Fragmentation in Civil War: Evidence from the PKK Insurgency in Turkey.” Journal of Global Security Studies 9, no. 4 (2024): ogae030. https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogae030

Honorable Mention

Palani, Kamaran. “Client agency in a multiple patron setting: the case of Iraqi Kurdistan.” Territory, Politics, Governance 13, no. 1 (2025): 28-45. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2024.2390526

Previous Awards

2023

First Prize Winner

Suni, Anoush Tamar. “Palimpsests of violence: Ruination and the afterlives of genocide in Anatolia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65, no. 1 (2023): 192-218. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041752200041X

Honorable Mention

Abdullah, Sarwar, and Tim Gray. “Political constraints on economic diversification in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.” Energy Policy 171 (2022): 113274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113274.

2022

Co-Winners

Özgür Sevgi Göral (2021). Waiting for the disappeared: waiting as a form of resilience and the limits of legal space in Turkey. Social Anthropology, 29(3), 800-815. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13096

Nicola Degli Esposti (2021). The 2017 independence referendum and the political economy of Kurdish nationalism in Iraq. Third World Quarterly, 42(10), 2317-2333. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1949978

Honorable Mention

Hamed-Troyansky, Vladimir. “Becoming Armenian: Religious conversions in the late imperial South Caucasus.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 1 (2021): 242-272. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417520000432

2021

First Prize Winner

Bozcali, Firat. “Probabilistic borderwork: Oil smuggling, nonillegality, and techno‐legal politics in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey.” American Ethnologist 47, no. 1 (2020): 72-85. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12866

Honorable Mention

Pehlivan, Zozan. “El Niño and the nomads: Global climate, local environment, and the crisis of pastoralism in late ottoman Kurdistan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 3 (2020): 316-356. https://brill.com/view/journals/jesh/63/3/article-p316_3.xml

2020

Co-Winners

Mohammadpour, Ahmad, and Kamal Soleimani. “Interrogating the tribal: the aporia of ‘tribalism’in the sociological study of the Middle East.” The British journal of sociology 70, no. 5 (2019): 1799-1824. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12656

Schäfers, Marlene. “Archived Voices, Acoustic Traces, and the Reverberations of Kurdish History in Modern Turkey.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, no. 2 (2019): 447-473. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417519000112

Honorable Mention

Günay, Onur. “In war and peace: shifting narratives of violence in Kurdish Istanbul.” American Anthropologist 121, no. 3 (2019): 554-567. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13244

2019

First Prize Winner

Dehqan, Mustafa, and Vural Genç. “Kurds as spies: Information-gathering on the 16th-century Ottoman–Safavid frontier.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 71, no. 2 (2018): 197-230. https://doi.org/10.1556/062.2018.71.2.5

Honorable Mention

Türkmen, Gülay. “Negotiating symbolic boundaries in conflict resolution: Religion and ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict.” Qualitative Sociology 41, no. 4 (2018): 569-591. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9400-4

2018

First Prize Winner

Alsancakli, Sacha. “Matrimonial Alliances and the Transmission of Dynastic Power in Kurdistan: The Case of the Diyādīnids of Bidlīs in the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries.” Eurasian studies 15, no. 2 (2017): 222-249. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/24685623-12340037

Honorable Mention

Hakyemez, Serra. “Margins of the archive: torture, heroism, and the ordinary in prison no. 5, Turkey.” Anthropological Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2017): 107-138. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/654103/summary

2017

First Prize Winner

Jamison, Kelda. “Hefty dictionaries in incomprehensible tongues: Commensurating code and language community in Turkey.” Anthropological Quarterly 89, no. 1 (2016): 31-62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43955514

Honorable Mentions

Paasche, Erlend. “The role of corruption in reintegration: experiences of Iraqi Kurds upon return from Europe.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42, no. 7 (2016): 1076-1093. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2016.1139445

Yüksel, Metin. “On the borders of the Turkish and Iranian nation-states: the story of Ferzende and Besra.” Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 4 (2016): 656-676. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2016.1147436

2016

First Prize Winner

Hamelink, Wendelmoet, and Hanifi Bariş. “Dengbêjs on borderlands: Borders and the state as seenthrough the eyes of Kurdish singer-poets.” In Kurdish Studies Archive, pp. 39-71. Brill, 2024. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2016.1147436

Second Prize Winner

Yilmaz, Harun. “The rise of red Kurdistan.” Iranian studies 47, no. 5 (2014): 799-822. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00210862.2014.934153?journalCode=cist20

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