Kurdish Studies Volume: 2, No: 2, pp. 225 – 246 ISSN: 2051-4883 & e-ISSN: 2051-4891 October 2014 www.kurdishstudies.net 225 BOOK REVIEWS KARIANE WESTRHEIM MICHAEL GUNTER YAVUZ AYKAN YENER KOÇ DIANE E. KING JORDI TEJEL MARTIN VAN BRUINESSEN JOOST JONGERDEN Adem Uzun, “Living Freedom”: The Evolution of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey and the Efforts to Resolve it. Berghof Transitions Series No. 11. Ber- lin: Berghof Foundation, 2014. 48 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-941514-16-4). With more than 25 years of experience in the Kurdish liberation movement in Turkey and currently a leading member of the Administrative Council of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), Adem Uzun has authored a succinct report “to explain the emergence and internal evolution of the PKK [Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or Kurdistan Workers’ Party] within the Kurdish struggle for freedom and democracy against the repressive and nationalist policies of the Turkish state” (p. 9). His report has three main parts: 1.) An examination of Kurdish history and the post-World-War-II bipolar world in which the pre- sent Kurdish movement developed; 2.) The global changes involving the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and their impact on the Kurdish move- ment; and 3.) The current era which began with the Oslo meetings between Turkey and the PKK in 2007 and presently involves the peace process since 2013 on Imrali island where Abdullah Öcalan, the founder and current leader of the PKK, has been imprisoned since his capture in 1999. Given his qualifi- cations and dedication to a peaceful approach, Adem Uzun is particularly well suited to analyse these subjects, both the development of the PKK and par- ticularly the currently stalled peace process. In his opening section Uzun offers an upper limit estimate of the world- wide Kurdish population: “Unofficially, 20 million Kurds live in Northern Kurdistan (Turkey), 10 million in Eastern Kurdistan (Iran), 7 million in Southern Kurdistan (Iraq) and 2.5million in Western Kurdistan (Syria)—with approximately 2 million Kurds more scattered across the globe. This means that there are almost 40 million Kurds worldwide” (p. 10). In his second sec- tion Uzun somewhat confusingly tells his reader about “the establishment of the PKK in 1973” (p. 13), but then a few lines later states that “the PKK was officially founded on 27 November 1978, largely because its cadres believed that all legal ways of organising a national movement had been exhausted”