1 - Introduction

Summary

Turkey is among the drafters of the European Convention on Human Rights, has been subject to the ECtHR's oversight for over three decades and is an EU accession country since 2005. Yet, it continues to engage in state violence and political repression against its Kurdish minority. Starting with a description of this puzzle, the chapter provides a review of the literature on supranational courts and legal mobilisation, highlighting the significant gap in scholarship concerning the ECtHR's failure to penetrate into Turkey's authoritarian politico-legal culture, despite decades of mobilisation by Kurdish lawyers. It explains that the book seeks to fill this gap through a process-oriented study of the ECtHR's engagement in Turkey's Kurdish conflict by drawing from methodological approaches in law, political science and sociology, and combining doctrinal legal research, semi-structured interviews, desk research and participant observation. The chapter concludes with a brief layout of the content and purpose of the remaining chapters.