Özden Melis Uluğ

• Many societies in different parts of the world have witnessed intractable conflicts. People living in these societies construct conflict frames to understand the ongoing conflicts. Based on Lederach’s (1999) pyramid approach to peace building, the current study investigates how people understand the Kurdish conflict in Turkey in three segments of society: a) politicians, b) scholars and journalists and c) lay people. The Kurdish conflict was approached based on the frame analysis of Entman (1993), which includes four domains: a) problem definition, b) causal interpretation, c) moral evaluation, and d) treatment recommendation. In a first phase, focus group discussions and open-ended questionnaires were used to explore alternative conflict understandings among lay people. In a second phase, Q methodology, a method suitable to uncover socially shared viewpoints, was used to understand the conflict frames of parliamentarians, experts and lay people. In a third phase, after analyzing each participant group’s frames separately, a second-order analysis was performed to see the similarities and differences between the different segments. Five different frames of the Kurdish conflict could be distinguished. In general, the meaning of the different frames, differences and commonalities within and between the segments, the usefulness of Q methodology to explore representations of conflict, and implications for conflict resolution will be discussed.