GPIS Dissertation Prospectus 3/30

Old Dominion University

College of Arts and Letters

Graduate Program in International Studies

 Dissertation Prospectus

The Treatment of Ethnic Minorities in Democratizing Muslim Countries: The Securitization of Kurds in Turkey versus the 'Autonomization' of Acehnese in Indonesia

Maurizio Geri

The main question of the study is: what factors explain the differences in how democratizing Muslim majority countries treat ethnic minorities? The research compares two similar cases with different outcomes: Turkey and Indonesia. The importance of the study is based on the hypothesis that the failure or success of Muslim democracies depended often on a domestic variable: the exclusion or inclusion of ethnic, religious or political minorities by the new regime, as the Arab Spring failure showed recently. The focus of the paper therefore is to analyze different treatments of minorities, specifically the securitization (Buzan et. al., 1998) of Kurds in Turkey and the “autonomization” or decentralization (Kymlicka, 2002/Lijphart 2004) of Acehnese in Indonesia, to understand which are the independent variables that affect these different outcomes (in particular: ‘nationalism and citizenship’, ‘ontological security’, and ‘elites power interest’).

COMMITTEE:

Dr. David C. Earnest (Chair)

Dr. Francis Adams

Dr. Frances Hassencahl

March 30, 2016

3:00 p.m.

BAL 7031

Prospectus-Geri.docx  (13.1 KB)

Posted By: Margo Stambleck
Date: Mon Mar 21 08:28:26 EDT 2016