{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028901734104046242, 'fraction_numerical': 0.015414258188824663, 'mean_word_length': 5.131889763779528, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Blood, Beliefs and Ballots: The Management of Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey, 2007-2009 (review)

Blood, Beliefs and Ballots: The Management of Kurdish Nationalism in Turkey, 2007-2009, by Robert Olson. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2009. $35. Reviewed by David Romano Robert Olson's book seeks to gauge the Turkish state's attempts to manage Kurdish nationalism by examining the period from national elections in 2007 to nationwide municipal elections in 2009. Professor Olson constructs his view of this period from mostly Turkish news sources (newspapers such as Hurriyet, Radikal, and Zaman), analyst's views in the Jamestown Foundation publications, some academic secondary sources, and a few personal interviews. As a historian, Olson possesses a good command of both the longue duree background to the Kurdish issue in Turkey as well as very current events, which are the focus of his book. Blood, Beliefs and Ballots thus offers the reader a nuanced treatment of a complicated issue, facilitated by the very circumscribed time period it examines as well as Olson's tendency to let actors "speak for themselves," unmolested by much of his own analysis or interpretation of their views and statements. Of course, the mere act of selecting which statements and events to focus on during this short but eventful time period necessitates choices and interpretations on Olson's part. These choices appear to have been made in as objective, reasonable, and fair a manner as any academic could wish for, fortunately. Especially for readers who didn't spend 2007-2009 reading current events in Turkey so closely, the book provides a nice summary of the time period. Some of the more useful bits of analysis include a view that the Turkish military (TSK) has progressively accepted the greater Islamicization of public life in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP), in hopes of using this as a tool to constrain the perceived greater threat of the secular Kurdish nationalist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Democratic Society Party (DTP) - now closed down by the Turkish courts and replaced with the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). Similar considerations may have led the TSK to buy into better relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) or Iraq, in the hopes that cooperation from more conservative Iraqi Kurds could help Turkey manage the more Leftist variant of Kurdish nationalism within its own borders. Neither strategy appeared particularly successful, however, given the DTP's improved electoral showing in the 2009 elections (compared to Olson's starting point comparison of the 2007 elections). Olson thus concludes that given Kurdish nationalist increases in electoral support in Turkey's southeast, "The 29 March elections showed both successes and failures. Turkey achieved success in that it did not meet any of the major demands of the PKK or the DTP for political autonomy, regional or provincial decentralization in the heavily Kurdishpopulated regions ... Turkey was also successful in not granting the major cultural and linguistic demands of Kurds" (pp. …