Introducing Djene Bajalan

Please welcome our newest Foreign Exchanges contributor!

Hello everybody, it’s Derek. I’m pleased to bring on board our second new contributor of 2023, Djene Bajalan! He’ll go into more detail below, but Djene is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history at Missouri State and co-host of the excellent This Is Revolution Podcast. Fans of American Prestige will likely recognize him from our ongoing series on Kurdish history. Here at Foreign Exchanges he’ll be writing about Kurdish issues, Middle Eastern politics, and more.

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Greetings friends! I am honored to be joining the community of scholars and experts that Derek has built here at Foreign Policy Exchanges.

Those who follow American Prestige may already be familiar with me through the series we have been recording over the last year on the history of the Kurds. However, for those of you who are not, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Djene Rhys Bajalan and I am an associate professor in the Department of History at Missouri State University, where I teach Middle Eastern history and serve as the Graduate Director.

Beyond this, I am an editor at the scholarly journal Kurdish Studies and have written for several non-academic publications (primarily although not exclusively on Kurdish-related issues) including Jacobin, OpenDemocracy, Jadaliyya, MERP, Sublation Magazine, and Compact Magazine. I am also a co-host of the This is Revolution Podcast.

My first book, Jön Kürtler Birinci Dünya Savaşı'ndan Önce Kürt Hareketi (1898-1914) (“The Young Kurds: The Kurdish Movement Before the First World War”) focused on the emergence of Kurdish civil society during the late Ottoman period. I am currently in the process of completing my second book, which looks more broadly at the origins of the “Kurdish question” in the period between 1880 and 1923.

For Foreign Exchanges, I’ll be writing on the Kurdish issue as well as the history and politics of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Taking Kurdish participation in the recent protests in Iran as a jumping-off point, my first piece will examine the forces that have shaped the Iranian Kurdish identity and the political orientation of Iran’s Kurdish movement.