As we present you our fourth volume of the Kurdish Studies Journal, we want to take this opportunity to introduce our editorial team’s new members, while saying goodbye to dear colleagues and friends. If you follow social media, you may already have noticed KSJ’s renewed and active presence across a number of platforms. This is thanks to the fabulous work of Rojda İdil Arslan (University of Connecticut), our new social media assistant. Rojda will make sure that what gets published in the journal reaches a wide audience by highlighting the contributions of individual authors, shedding light on special issues, and showcasing past publications relevant for current affairs. If you are a social media user and have not been following us yet, you can find us on Instagram under kurdish_studies_journal, on Facebook under Kurdish Studies Journal-Brill, on LinkedIn as Kurdish Studies Journal, and on Bluesky we have the handle kurdish-studies.bsky.social.
Our team is further joined by George Murer (Columbia University), our new associate editor. George will focus on editorially assisting submissions in the fields of cultural studies, music and ethnomusicology, literature, and anthropology. George comes to us with extensive experience in editorial work and mentoring junior colleagues, which will be an immense asset for our team. In addition, we are joined by Yunus Abakay (University of Exeter), the journal’s new book review editor. Yunus has long followed ongoing publications in the field of Kurdish studies as editor of the bibliographic website
Welcoming new colleagues unfortunately also means saying goodbye to old ones. Yunus is coming in to replace Sacha Alsancakli, long-standing associate and book review editor who will finalize his commitments with KSJ over the course of this year. Sacha’s contributions to the journal have been tremendous, as he has seen countless manuscripts to production, curated the journal’s book review section, and helped with transitioning the journal to Brill, our current publisher. Sacha is leaving us to take up a position as assistant professor at Kyoto University—congratulations!
We also say goodbye to associate editor Farangis Ghaderi (University of Exeter) who greatly supported the journal with her expertise in the field of Kurdish language and literature. Farangis not only played a crucial role in processing submissions in these fields, but also helped with outreach work, particularly in Sorani-speaking southern and eastern Kurdistan. Another associate editor to whom our thanks is due is Djene Rhys Bajalan (Missouri State). Djene was part of the journal’s editorial team from its very beginning and did immense work in setting up the journal’s structures, ensuring scholarly quality, and editorially processing articles in the field of Kurdish history. And lastly we say goodbye to Kubra Sagir (EHESS), who we relied upon for the translation of abstracts into Kurmanji for many years.
We are immensely grateful to Sacha, Farangis, Djene, and Kubra for commiting their time and energy to the journal and wish them all the best going forward.
The last years have brought tremendous changes to the academic publishing world. We have witnessed first-hand how the commercialization of scholarly knowledge renders fields like ours—fields, that is, which lack the financial and political support of established academic institutions—vulnerable to exploitation by predatory publishers. Now, we are faced with another challenge: that of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it reshapes practices of academic writing, thinking, and argumentation. After having received several submissions that were clearly authored by AI, we feel the need to reiterate that we do not accept papers generated by AI tools. We understand that authors may want to make use of such tools for proofreading and copy-editing, which is permissible. However, we cannot accept papers that are based on content generated by generative AI. We also do not condone the use of AI tools on the part of peer reviewers. Uploading manuscripts or parts thereof to AI platforms does not only violate authors’ confidentiality, privacy, and copy rights, but peer review also requires forms of nuanced thinking and argumentation which AI tools cannot replace. You can find out more about Brill’s AI policy here:
This issue of KSJ brings you three research articles: first an article by Martin Greve on the life and work of the German ethnomusicologist Dieter Christensen, one of the few European scholars who carried out field research in Kurdistan in the 1950s and 60s. Christensen became a towering figure in the field of Kurdish music until the emergence of a new generation of scholars in the late twentieth century. Next we have a contribution by Mustafa Kemal Topal on the methodological and ethical challenges of doing research with Kurdish women fighters. Topal reflects in depth on the implications of the researcher’s gender for conducting research amongst a feminist (and all-female) movement. And last, we publish an article by Soran Tarkhani on the landscape of Kurdish parties in Iraq, showing that diversity in party systems cannot solely be attributed to ethnic affiliation, but relies on societal differences rooted in language, religion, region, and class.
In addition to our collection of book reviews, sadly we also feature two obituaries in this volume. The first, by Latif Tas, commemorates the work of Vera Eccarius-Kelly, well-known scholar of Kurdish political mobilization and diaspora politics, who passed away in 2025 following a battle with cancer. The second, by Martin van Bruinessen, revisits the extraordinary life and scholarly influence of Mehmed Emîn Bozarslan, who passed away earlier this year. Educated through the Kurdish medrese system, Bozarslan was a key figure in the Kurdish revival in Turkey in the 1960s, and devoted his life to the publication of Kurdish literature, archival sources, and the compilation of a comprehensive Kurmanji dictionary.
As always, we would like to thank our translators for their help in making all abstracts accessible in Kurdish. For Kurmanji, we rely on the support of Çeto Özel, for Zazaki on Mahîr Dogan and Ugur Sermîyan, and for Sorani on Mohammad Hama Saleh Tofiq.
June 2026
Marlene Schäfers and Martin van Bruinessen
