Editorial: Alevi Kurds: History, Politics and Identity

This special issue brings together scholarship on Alevi Kurds by focusing on their ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, cultural and social specificity including a range of articles from the disciplines of anthropology, history, politics, linguistics and sociology. The first part focuses on Turkey, exploring the roots of Kurdish Alevism and how Alevi religious identities intersect with ethnic and national identity and political representations, and the second focuses on Alevi Kurds and their creation of a transnational religious identity and their mixed experience of settlement in the UK diaspora.