Kurds in Dark Times: New Perspectives on Violence and Resistance in Turkey

By Metin Atmaca, Janet Klein, Baris Ünlü and 12 more

With an estimated population of 35 million, Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without an independent state of their own. Kurds constitute about 20 percent of Turkey, the largest Kurdish population in the region. The history of the Kurds in Turkey is marked by state violence against them and decades of conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish fighters. Although the continuous struggle of the Kurdish people is well known, and the political actors involved in the conflict have received much attention, an increasing wave of scholarship is being written from the vantage point of the Kurds themselves.

Alemdaroglu and Göçek’s volume develops a fresh approach by moving away from top-down Turkish nationalist macroanalyses to a microanalysis of how Kurds and Kurdistan as historical and ethnic categories were constructed from the bottom up. Contributors look beyond the politics of state actors to examine how Kurdish workers, women, youth, and political prisoners experience and resist marginalization, exclusion, and violence. Kurds in Dark Times opens an essential window into the lives of Kurds by generating meaningful insights into the formal and informal ways of negotiating their power and place in Turkey; and therefore, it provides crucial perspectives for any endeavor to create peace and reconciliation in the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9780815655640

Book preview

Introduction

Ayça Alemdaroğlu and Fatma Müge Göçek

Thinking has recently and once again become very challenging in Turkey as the country became immersed in gross violations of human rights, repression, and violence in a repetition of the past. Such abuses and violence have a hefty cost for journalists, academics, students, and political dissidents. Yet, for most citizens, they remain unnoticed or marginal due to censorship, propaganda, and simply lies by the government. Hence, the systematic silencing obscures the extent and degree of rights violations and violence.

We argue here that the times we live in are akin to what Hannah Arendt describes in Men in Dark Times (1968). Reflecting on twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, Arendt contends that the darkness was not merely about physical destruction of Jews and others through genocides, purges, and hunger but also about the destruction of the truth by bureaucratic rationalization and mere talk, which served to obscure the horrors conducted by drawing them into incomprehensible triviality (ix). Consequently, ordinary men and women, unable to think and judge for themselves, not only normalized terror and torture but also yielded their support to dictatorial regimes. Under such conditions, Arendt contends, the only possible defense of citizens against the totalitarian or bureaucratic tendencies toward evil would be to think because only thinking and judging for themselves would ultimately enable citizens to wrest their agency away from state propaganda and publicly call out evil (Berkowitz 2009).

Arendt further elaborates on the political implications of thinking when she critically analyzes the Nazi murderer Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem (2006). She notes that Eichmann, notwithstanding his deeds’ evilness, was strikingly average; his evil actions were motivated mainly by his ordinary bourgeois ambition of getting ahead by doing his job well. Arendt draws parallels between Eichmann, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens—which includes the colluding Jewish leaders—to argue that what emerged in Nazi Germany was a collective escape from thinking and making an ethical judgment. This mass evasion of accountability and collective responsibility for one’s actions enabled the Nazi regime and its atrocities.

Arendt’s analysis of dark times is pertinent to Turkey time and time again. Since 2013, the Turkish state has embarked on an intensified campaign against political dissent. The Kurds are once more the primary target of this campaign in addition to the unabated economic marginalization and political discrimination of them. Especially after the elections of June 2015 when the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) won 13 percent of the vote in general elections, thereby becoming the third-largest party in the Turkish Parliament, the government’s persecution of Kurds reached a new level. The state has also expanded censorship and propaganda, obstructing citizens’ right to get informed and ability to think, judge, and call out human rights violations and state violence.

The HDP’s electoral success had emerged on the coattails of the peace negotiations initiated by the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK). Yet that success caused the AKP to lose its majority vote, which is required to form the government. At that juncture, instead of attempting to form a coalition government, the AKP leadership instead plunged Turkey into violence and instability. A series of attacks—first, in Suruç the Islamic States of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed thirty-three members of the pro-Kurdish Socialist Youth group that had mobilized to help the Syrian Kurds’ fight against ISIS in Kobane, and then the murder of two police officers in Ceylanpınar, for which the government held the PKK responsible, became a pretext for the government to end the Kurdish Peace Process and initiate an extensive military campaign in southeastern Turkey—known as Bakur (Bakurê Kurdistanê), or Northern Kurdistan—and in the Kurdish regions across the border into Syria and Iraq.

The government under the AKP had initially searched for a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict mainly to meet the requirements for Turkey to join the European Union (EU). However, when the AKP’s electoral support declined and the EU option proved to be improbable, the government restored the previous state-security approach, flaring the conflict. Hence, the AKP government chose violence over peace to stay in power. The government deployed thousands of military officers in massive security operations supported by heavy armaments to generate shock, awe, and fear. Concomitantly, it also declared blanket curfews in several Kurdish cities and towns where the PKK’s youth affiliate—the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (Yurtsever Devrimci Gençlik Hareketi, YDGH) had become active in building barricades and digging trenches. The ensuing urban warfare in Turkey’s Kurdistan escalated civilian deaths dramatically: between July 2015 and December 2016, some two thousand people, including about twelve hundred local Kurds, were reportedly killed in security operations. The extended curfews cut off entire Kurdish neighborhoods, confining residents in their homes for several days at a time. The brutal military campaign also razed several cities and towns to the ground in some parts of Kurdistan, displacing hundreds of thousands of citizens. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2017) has documented many human rights violations in Kurdistan in the same period, including killings; excessive use of force; enforced disappearances; torture; destruction of housing and cultural heritage; prevention of access to food, water, emergency medical care, and livelihoods; and violence against women.

The Turkish state’s retreat to military methods and violence against the Kurds since 2015 goes hand in hand with the deterioration of freedom of expression and academic freedoms. Scholars whose research makes a case against Turkey’s state policy have always been at risk of persecution. Perhaps the most dramatic legal case of state violence against the Kurds has been the seventeen-year persecution of İsmail Beşikçi, a Turkish sociologist. He was the first intellectual in Turkey to define the Kurds as an international colony (Beşikçi 1990) and to vividly document Kurds’ dire living conditions. Beşikçi then argued that the Turkish state and its governments legitimated the violence by alleging that the Kurds undermined the Turkish nation’s indivisibility. Even though he had not engaged in violence, his way of thinking about the Kurds deviated from the official narrative, so that was enough for the Turkish state to arrest and imprison him for seventeen years.

More recently, just as the faltering Kurdish Peace Process came to an end in 2015, Barış Ünlü, a fellow sociologist and a contributor to this volume, was taken to court for penning an exam question on Abdullah Öcalan at Ankara University. In the indictment, the Turkish prosecutor claimed that the exam question aimed to legitimate Öcalan’s ideas and therefore amounted to terror propaganda. Although the court acquitted Ünlü, his university continued to penalize him by censoring his academic activities: it forbade his participation in the Kurdish politics conference at Northwestern University in 2016, where initial conversations about this book took place. Ünlü was eventually dismissed from his university in the aftermath of the coup d’etat attempt on 15 July 2016.

In 2015, along with the end to the peace process and a rapid move back to the militarization of the conflict with the PKK, the government expanded the persecution of academia from an individual to a collective level in its reaction to more than a thousand academics’ signing of a Peace Petition titled We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime (Bu suça ortak olmayacağız) to protest the state’s escalating violence against Kurdish civilians in the Kurdish region. The academics did so to raise public awareness and to request that the government take the initiative to end violence against the Kurds and resume the peace process. The government’s response to the petition was too harsh: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan led the charge by calling the petitioners traitors. Within a day of his provocative speech identifying the academics as a target to be duly punished, several Turkish universities took punitive measures against faculty who had signed the petition, eventually expelling most of them from their positions. In addition to the universities, the judiciary also acted upon the Turkish president’s provocation: the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office launched a criminal investigation against the petitioners under Article 7 of the Antiterror Law, charging academics with engaging in terrorist propaganda. Initially, four academics suspected of penning the petition were arrested and remained imprisoned in pretrial detention for the full legal limit of forty days before they were released. In the meantime, engaged academics reopened the petition to additional signatures; more than a thousand more academics signed it to support their colleagues. Another petition, this time an international one, was circulated, asking the Turkish government to stop the persecution of the scholars, and was signed by hundreds of renowned scholars in the West, including Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Étienne Balibar, and several Nobel laureates.

Even though the government suspended the initial criminal investigation, it launched yet another one by exploiting the state of emergency declared following the coup attempt in July 2016. More than six thousand academics were dismissed: they were either legally stripped of the right to teach at the universities or became unemployed when their universities were closed down for alleged sedition. Also, hundreds of academics who signed the petition were prosecuted on antiterrorism charges, and many received prison sentences. The official stigma the president had pronounced against the Academics for Peace (Barış için Akademisyenler) drove a young academic, Mehmet Fatih Tıraş, to commit suicide. Many left their profession or fled Turkey entirely.

Eventually, in July 2019, after four nightmarish years in which the purges and trials had decimated the Peace Academics, the Constitutional Court finally ruled that penalizing them on charges of terror propaganda had violated their freedom of expression. By that time, however, hundreds had lost their jobs, even if they somehow managed to survive the persistent legal and political threats against their well-being.

In the process, Turkey’s universities were cleared of a significant portion of critical academics who could speak truth to power. When the alleged threat the president concocted was thus eliminated, the Constitutional Court stepped in to change the initial verdict. However, the blackballed academics could not return to their positions. Nor was the country’s president or university administrations held accountable for violating the academics’ rights. Junior scholars who return to Turkey after completing their degrees abroad continue to counter several obstacles. A case in point is the experience of our contributor Güllistan Yarkın. After a two-year delay, the Inter-University Board (Yükseköğretim Kurulu) rejected her application to have her PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton conferred in Turkey. The government uses an otherwise mundane bureaucratic procedure to facilitate universities’ academic staff recruitment to punish critical scholars. The board’s rejection letter stated that Yarkın had failed to identify the PKK as a terrorist organization in her dissertation, hence violating Turkey’s Antiterror Law. In addition, the board found that her identification of Turkey as a colonial state violated Article 301 of the Criminal Law, which stipulates crimes against the nation, the state, and the government (Yarkın 2022). Yarkın is one among many who are criminalized in Turkey for refusing to use sanctioned official language in their study of social and political phenomenon such as the PKK.

Amid this official war against academics, we began our collaboration that eventually led to this book. We, the two editors of this volume, had signed the Peace Petition, but we were practically immune to its immediate punitive consequences because we live and work abroad. We wanted to utilize the relative freedoms and resources at our institutions in the United States to promote collective critical thinking, especially when spaces to do so are minimized under the widespread oppression by today’s authoritarian regime in Turkey. In other words, when the Turkish state exerts violence against the Kurds to legitimate, consolidate, and sustain its authoritarian rule, we as social scientists feel that it is necessary now, more than ever, to think together and call out the past and present wrongs of the Turkish state’s Kurdish policy.

Our initial conversation took place in Chicago in the fall of 2016 at the Historical and Comparative Perspectives on the Kurdish Politics Conference at Northwestern University. The conference program included talks by academics on the formation and evolution of Turkish state policy toward the Kurds, resistance and autonomy movements, political parties, and the everyday struggles of Kurdish citizens.

The Northwestern conference was one of the first of several Kurdish studies meetings in North America, followed successively by ensuing meetings at Northwestern and other major North American research universities such as Yale, the University of Toronto, and Brown. We intended to use the academic space available to us in the United States to call attention to the erosion of the already-restricted public space and academic freedom in Turkey as well as the escalating violence against the Kurds.

Turkey’s authoritarian regime possesses a relentless capacity to operate an extensive security regime, violate citizens’ fundamental rights and freedoms, and disseminate disinformation. We argue that the authoritarianism that we witness in Turkey and elsewhere in the world today poses no fewer challenges than those posed by early twentieth-century fascist dictatorships. That is why we began here within a framework inspired by Hannah Arendt: what she argued regarding collective violence in Nazi Germany is still very relevant today. What is needed in dark times, Arendt wrote, are people who think and who by engaging in thinking create a space within which they can take on the wrongs committed in society. So this book is the physical product of our collective effort to think, judge, and declare what is wrong in Turkey in relation to the treatment of Kurds. It is also a product of our commitment as social scientists to understand and explain the origins, forms, and lived experiences of discrimination, displacement, and violence that occur in the world. We believe that the democratization of Turkey and other states require acknowledging past injuries and responding to the present demands for justice.

We now turn to further contextualizing our work by first providing a historical overview of the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Then, we summarize the book’s contribution to existing literature and how each chapter helps highlight the systematic discrimination and violence Kurds have faced in Turkey as well as their experiences and resistance in surviving these assaults.

Historical Background of Turkey’s Kurdish Politics

Though the exact number of Kurds living in Turkey is unknown, the current estimates are between 13 to 20 percent of the total population (Kirişçi and Winrow 1997, 15; McDowall 2000, 3; Pultar 2011; van Bruinessen 1978, 1992). The term Kurdish applies to speakers of one of four closely related Indo-Iranian languages—Kurmanji, Sorani, Zaza, and Gurani—and to their descendants (McDowall 2000, 9–10). If the Turkish-speaking descendants of Kurds were also included in the population figures, the total number of Kurds in Turkey would undoubtedly be much higher, probably reaching at least a quarter of Turkey’s present population. It is impossible to know the exact population of any ethnic group because the state does not officially collect population data about ethnicity in order not to undermine the unitary-nation myth on which Turkish nationalism depends. Moreover, over the past three decades the state has evacuated thousands of villages for posing a security threat. Millions of Kurds have migrated to cities in western Turkey and western Europe, primarily Germany. Although we do not precisely know the Kurdish population size, economic and social indicators show that the southeastern region, predominantly populated by Kurds, is one of the least-developed areas in the country (Bildirici and Koç 2018; İçduygu, Romano, and Sirkeci 1999; Yadırgı 2018).

Yet underdevelopment is not a cause of what became known as Turkey’s Kurdish problem. It is at best an outcome of that problem, which has been generated largely by the oppression of and denial of rights to an ethnic minority (the Kurds) by a majority group (the Turks). The state discourse has blandly reduced the Kurdish problem to a mere socioeconomic issue—the underdevelopment of the country’s Southeast region—hence denying the history of discrimination and oppression. Moreover, until recently, it has denied the existence of Kurdish ethnic identity and continues to punish Kurds’ political demands for equality and justice. Furthermore, the Turkish discourse also dismisses Kurds’ political actions and steals their agency by claiming that Kurds are gullible pawns in the hands of Western states that aim to weaken Turkey, as they tried to do in the past. Hence, the state in Turkey insists on identifying the Kurdish region solely according to its geographical parameters, the Southeast, and assumes that the employment of the historically accurate proper name used by the Kurds, Kurdistan, is an endorsement of their secessionist struggle.

Political unrest in Turkey’s Kurdistan in the Republican Era was almost coeval with the republic’s establishment in 1923. The Sheikh Said Rebellion of 1925 emerged in reaction to the increasingly secular and ethnic Turkish character of the emerging Turkish state and attempted to bring back the old Ottoman imperial social order in which the Kurds and Turks, as members of the dominant Muslim community, were treated as equals. Other rebellions in Ağrı in 1927–30 and in Dêrsim (Tunceli) in 1937–38 followed this initial uprising. Because these rebellions risked the success of Turkish nationalism in building a nation-state with a homogenous community, the state reacted very harshly, decimating Kurds indiscriminately by the thousands as well as oppressing other religious and ethnic groups in Turkey. This suppression was accompanied by the literal disappearance of the word Kurd from the Turkish lexicon; the banning of spoken Kurdish and expressions of Kurdish cultural identity in spaces under state surveillance and control, such as schools; the replacement of almost all Kurdish village and town names with Turkish ones; and the denial of parents’ right to give Kurdish names to their children (Barkey 2000; Jongerden 2009; Zeydanlıoğlu 2012). In response to these measures, although some Kurds did assimilate, many others either refused, left the country, or became silent.

Even though the Kurdish rebellions before World War II had a strong tribal and religious character rather than a national one, this pattern underwent significant change after Turkey’s transition to multiparty system in 1946. In the following decades, Kurds who complied with the state’s security regime were allowed to join Parliament and hold significant official posts provided that they publicly suppressed their identity as Kurds. Later, amid the political liberalization allowed with the 1961 constitution in the 1960s, Kurds gradually formed a separate political movement. The continuing migration to urban areas in western Turkey and increased access to higher education escalated public awareness of Turkey’s vast economic and political disparities, contributing to pluralization and subsequently to radicalization of politics and state–society relations. Kurdish activists were initially absorbed into leftist organizations prominent among students attending universities in Istanbul and Ankara. It was in these organizations, such as the Worker’s Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi, TİP), that they began to reconceptualize the Kurds as a colonized people and to demand recognition of their ethnic difference and national liberation. In the 1970s, a number of Kurdish political organizations emerged to challenge the Turkish state nationalism and its ethnic politics. Out of these organizations, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, although characterized often by internal disunity and conflict, established its hegemony in the 1980s, superseding other left-wing and conservative Kurdish organizations, such as the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Turkey (Türkiye Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi, TKDP), which closely identified with Mustafa Barzani’s party in Iraqi Kurdistan (Gunes 2013).

In its formation, the PKK described traditional Kurdistan as a colony where tribal leaders and the local bourgeoisie had colluded to help the Turkish state exploit the lower classes, thereby identifying the liberation of Kurdish tribal society as the primary target of the party’s revolutionary struggle. The goal was both national liberation and socialist transformation through armed insurgency in Kurdistan (Jongerden and Akkaya 2016). The PKK’s early and sporadic use of violence, mainly against Kurdish tribal leaders and other Kurdish organizations, turned into a protracted guerrilla war against the Turkish security forces and state personnel in 1984.

The military coup of 1980 had a deep impact on Turkey. As some scholars have argued, two separate regimes came into being with the coup: autocratic militarism in the eastern provinces populated predominantly by Kurds and their semiauthoritarian incorporation in the western part of the country (Jacoby 2005). The 1980s also witnessed the transformation of the state’s ethnic politics. The Turkish Republic employed Turkishness as an umbrella identity under which all citizens of Turkey who spoke Turkish and shared Turkish culture were Turks. This generalization did not stand the test of time, however. The many ethnic and religious groups eventually started to publicly identify themselves as separate from the Turks. Rather than including these groups in the national body politics on equitable terms, however, the Turkish state and especially the military started to persecute all social groups other than Muslim Sunni Turks as potential threats to the nation (Ataman 2002). As a consequence, the violence against the Kurds continued, with the Turkish military now openly taking the lead.

With the commencement of military operations in 1984, the Turkish state and the PKK became identified as the two opposite sides between which every citizen had to choose (Cornell 2001, 39). The state listed the PKK as a terrorist organization and carried out a successful international campaign for the European Union and the United States, among other countries, to do the same. Furthermore, the state has insisted on equating virtually all expressions of Kurdish identity with PKK terrorism, and the Turkish military has been especially adamant about pursuing only an armed solution to the Kurdish demands. How one refers to the PKK is a litmus test for the state to distinguish friend from foe, patriot from traitor. The state continues to surveil public speech and written text to see how the PKK is referenced both inside and outside Turkey.¹

Despite its designation as a terrorist organization, the PKK was able to mobilize necessary resources, thousands of active fighters, and ideological support from the civilian society. Several favorable conditions contributed to this outcome in the 1980s and early 1990s. First, the flight of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and a small group of activists to Syria in 1979 before the military coup protected them from the military regime’s obliteration of political dissent. Second, the torture that Kurdish political prisoners were subjected to under the military regime in places such as the notorious Diyarbakir Prison between 1980 and 1984 helped later fill the ranks of the post-1980 PKK (Marcus 2007). The PKK appealed to Kurds’ hearts and minds by its articulation of already-existing local conflicts between landlords and peasants in favor of the latter, its initial military efficacy and resilience in fighting the Turkish military, and its discursive strategies to create and promote a homogenous Kurdish identity (Barkey and Fuller 1998; Gunes 2013; Jongerden and Akkaya 2016; Romano 2006). Moreover, the PKK’s well-financed organization contributed to the sucess in spreading its ideology. The exact sources of its financing are elusive, but both voluntary and enforced support from Kurds in Turkey and from Kurdish migrants and refugees in western Europe, extortion of funds from businesses and transborder smuggling, and, finally, indirect and direct backing from other states in the region, such as Syria, have helped sustain the PKK’s fight (Barkey and Fuller 1998, 29–34).

The Gulf War of 1990–91 initially proved beneficial to the Kurds of Turkey when the US-led operation against Iraq released northern Iraq from the Iraqi state’s control, creating the US-backed Kurdish Federated State. During this period, the Turkish state undertook an active role in working out the power-sharing agreement between two local Kurdish powers, Mustafa Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP, Partiya Demokrat a Kurdistanê) and Celal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK, Yekîtiya Nîştimanî ya Kurdistanê), with the intent to prevent the PKK from joining this new federated state. The ensuing conflicts between the KDP and the PUK instead ended up fostering the PKK’s growth, which based its operations thereafter in Iraq, wresting by 1994 large chunks of territory away from the control of the Turkish military.

The Turkish state countered the Kurdish resistance by adopting counterinsurgency tactics. One rural tactic entailed recruiting Kurdish tribesmen into a local militia known as village guards (korucu) (Işık 2021). Another tactic was to force Kurdish civilians to evacuate their villages, thereby disrupting guerrilla logistics by physically removing the population. Some three thousand Kurdish settlements were cleared in southeastern Turkey, forcibly displacing about a million Kurds (Ayata and Yükseker 2005; Human Rights Watch 2002; Jongerden 2010; Kurban 2012). The military brutally pushed the locals out of their villages with beatings, rapes, and extrajudicial killings and set many villages on fire to prevent the guerrillas and the residents from coming back (Ron 1995). Also, in the early to mid-1990s, to exhaust the ranks of Kurdish leaders, the state’s secret paramilitary organizations assassinated prominent Kurdish intellectuals and leading members of Kurdish political parties (Göral 2021; Göral, Işık, and Kaya 2013).

In the meantime, the state also devised a massive infrastructure project as a complimentary way to deal with the conflict. The Southeastern Anatolia Dam Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP), originally planned in the 1970s, aimed to create a large network of dams and hydroelectric plants to channel the water from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers into a vast reservoir to water large tracts of the arid southeastern Anatolia region (about 10 percent of Turkey’s total land). In the 1990s, the project was revised into a more ambitious scheme to transform, integrate, and control the region and undermine the PKK’s influence (Bilgen 2018; Jongerden 2010; Özok-Gündoğan 2005; Yörük and Özsoy 2013). Although the project remains incomplete even after many revisions of its completion date in the past thirty years, and although its development goal has proven to be a solution neither to high unemployment in the region nor to large regional disparities in Turkey, it has nevertheless expanded the state’s administrative and service infrastructure in the region.

At the same time, the state adapted to Kurdish guerrilla warfare, forcefully driving large Kurdish populations out of the region to urban centers elsewhere in Turkey. These policies sapped the PKK’s control in the region, so much so that by 1998 Syria remained the PKK’s last remaining supporter. The Turkish state then exploited its alliance with Israel to threaten Syria with war unless it expelled Öcalan and the PKK bases in the Bekaa Valley. Damascus complied and Öcalan was captured in Kenya in 1999 with the help of US government intelligence. The PKK forces that had relocated from Syria to northern Iraq likewise received a severe blow from the Turkish military in 1999, effectively ending the war (Cornell 2001; Radu 2001).

Despite these setbacks, the capture of Öcalan in 1999 and Turkey’s EU accession negotiations in the early 2000s facilitated the growing influence of legal Kurdish political parties in local and national politics, and a new state policy toward Kurdish demands favored political solution over violence. The election of Kurdish deputies as independents to the Parliament in July 2007, the AKP government’s reforms recognizing the Kurdish language and cultural rights, and the peace process bolstered a brief period of hope for peace in Turkey.

The AKP’s effort to distinguish itself from the state establishment and the Kemalist regime and its initial commitment to EU accession led to the passing of legal regulations that recognize Kurdish language and cultural rights. The AKP government also endeavored to replace the politics of forgetting with remembering, taking several steps to recognize past state violence. In that context, the government made an official apology for the Dêrsim Massacre of 1937–38, when tens of thousands of Kurdish Alevis were killed in a Turkish military campaign. State prosecutors also brought court cases against the military leaders of the coup in 1980 and against state security and paramilitary forces for gross human rights violations, including the killings, disappearances, and displacements of Kurds in the 1990s (Yıldız 2015). During one such legal case in 2009, Temizöz and Others, the former Gendarmerie commander, Colonel Cemal Temizöz (ret.), and eight other military officials were tried for killing twenty-one civilians between 1993 and 1995. Scholars initially hoped that this approach would create a platform for an informal and unofficial truth commission to be established and thus lead to reconciliation. However, against such hopeful expectations and amid the resumed Turkish military operations in Kurdish cities, this court case—like tens of thousands of similar cases—ended with the acquittal of all the defendants in November 2015 (Göral 2021). Moreover, the AKP’s shift in state discourse from denial to reconciliation went hand in hand with the killing of thirty-four Kurdish civilians, most of whom were children and young men, in an airstrike in Şırnak province in 2011. Although the Dêrsim apology is applauded domestically and internationally for its democratic potential, the government’s actions in Şırnak proved that the apology was merely a tool to score political points and far from any actual pursuit of reconciliation (Ayata and Hakyemez 2013).

Nevertheless, since the early 1990s Kurdish participation in national and local politics has successfully created a new institutional basis for political expression, distinct symbolic resources, and novel access to domestic and international audiences (Watts 2006). Although Turkey’s Constitutional Court has banned a series of these Kurdish parties in the past three decades, their political cadres remain resilient and have simply continued their political journey in new parties. In 2015, the HDP, the latest iteration of a legal pro-Kurdish party, achieved unprecedented electoral success by getting 13 percent of the national vote. This success was made possible in part by the HDP’s deliberate effort to voice the democratic demands of non-Kurdish groups in the country. However, as we mentioned earlier, the HDP’s growing vote meant the AKP’s loss of its parliamentary majority to form the government, which brought a de facto end to the Kurdish Peace Process and an unleashing of a new cycle of persecution of Kurdish politicians and activists.

The retreat to a security framework in the state’s approach to the Kurdish political movement went hand in hand with the deterioration of human rights in the country. Turkey’s persecution of thought and expression reached a new extreme after the coup d’etat attempt in July 2016. Under the auspices of counterterrorism measures and the declaration of emergency rule, hundreds of media outlets, especially those operating in Kurdish, were shut down. Turkey became an open-air prison for journalists who did not toe the government line, surpassing China and other authoritarian states in the number of journalists it imprisoned. More than one hundred thousand civil servants were sacked from the military, state bureaucracy, and schools, and thousands more were arrested or detained. Many elected mayors, politicians, and HDP representatives, including the former HDP cochairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been in prison since 2016 (Tepe and Alemdaroğlu 2021). The AKP government claims that it has the right to take these measures to ensure national security. However, the court cases against the elected politicians are based on weak and vague evidence and frequently built upon the testimonies of secret witnesses. The police employ this evidence to frame legal activities such as political meetings and protests, social media posting, and voluntary work in civil society organizations as terrorist activities. The government’s growing use of the police and judiciary for political purposes indicates that judicial repression and securitization have become Turkey’s primary strategies to contain political dissent and Kurdish politics today.

In the meantime, the war in Syria, the construction of Kurdish regional autonomy in Rojava, and the paramount role of Kurdish forces in the fight against ISIS boosted international recognition of Kurdish demands for autonomy while also intensifying the Turkish government’s concerns about the political empowerment of the Kurds inside and outside the country. Also, since 2016 Turkey has organized a series of operations to constrain and defeat the Syrian Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party, and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units, which the Turkish state identifies with the PKK. Turkey’s refashioned aggressive nationalism seems to have so far stalled the expansion and consolidation of the autonomous Kurdish administration taking shape at its border. However, it is too soon to analyze the long-term effects of this heightened Turkish nationalism, widespread internal oppression, and costly expansionist militarism on Kurds.

The Volume’s Contribution and Outline

Since at least the Sheikh Said Rebellion in Turkey in 1925, Kurds have continued to seize occasional headlines in North America and western Europe. However, before the Gulf War of 1991, there were not more than a dozen books on the Kurdish issue (e.g., Edmonds 1957; Kinnane 1964; van Bruinessen 1978, 1992). In the late 1990s, this dearth was changed to a flood as many new books and studies appeared in the English language, with studies on Kurds becoming more apparent especially in Middle East studies. As Nicole Watts (1998) argues, the integration of Kurds into Middle East studies was important because it allowed a move away from the state-centric approach, which dominated the analysis of countries in the region. In doing so, it also debunked official imaginaries regarding national homogeneity and state power. Although the newfound attention to Kurds in the region has challenged nationalist claims and state-centric narratives and perspectives, until very recently the Kurdish studies literature in English nevertheless focused largely on macropolitical analyses. For example, the vast majority of existing academic work on Turkey’s Kurdish issue comprises four threads: the Turkish state’s nationalism and ethnic politics, the origins and evolution of the PKK, the political ideology of Abdullah Öcalan, and Kurdish political parties (Barkey and Fuller 1998; Bilgin and Sarıhan 2013; Kirişçi and Winrow 1997). They all present top-down and macro perspectives, prioritizing sweeping historical narratives over temporally and spatially tuned alterations as well as preferring written documents by dominant agents over ordinary people’s oral testimonies. In doing so, these studies privilege state and party perspectives over people’s experiences and microstruggles for equality and justice.

In the 2010s, a new generation of scholars from prestigious North American and European universities began to take an interest in the Kurds’ predicament in Turkey, leading to a surge not only in the quantity of the academic output in books, journal articles, and conference presentations but also in its quality. This new cohort of scholars possesses solid knowledge of social theory, linguistic skills, and methodological training; as such, they advance the field of Kurdish studies from the backwaters of area studies to the social sciences’ frontiers. Among these scholars, many are indeed in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and geography and engage with cutting-edge theories of race, intersectionality, biopower, spatial and temporal dimensions on inequality as well as with new ways of thinking about representation, recognition, violence, displacement, and resistance (Biner 2020; Bozçalı 2020; Çaylı 2021; Darıcı 2013; Ergin 2014; Gambetti and Jongerden 2015; Günay 2019; Gunes and Zeydanlıoğlu 2014; Hakyemez 2017; Saraçoğlu 2011; Üstündağ 2019). Specifically, the most recent works on the Kurds in Turkey focus on violence, especially how political actors are involved in the conflict.

Current social science literature on violence and possible avenues toward peace often advocates that scholars need to expand beyond the political to fully capture the oppressed people’s experience from their vantage point. Such an expansion first necessitates adopting a critical perspective (Cassano 2010) that approaches political crises not at the macro institutional level but rather through the inherent local power negotiations on the ground. Such a perspective moves away from the naturalized standpoint of the hegemonic Turkish state to civil society, from top-down state-centric descriptions to bottom-up society-centric analyses, and from the elites to ordinary people (Nickel 2012). Recent studies also focus on societal processes of meaning production (Malesevic 2010), the problematization of victimhood (Enns 2012), and the gendered negotiation of power (Ahall 2012). Finally, in line with new approaches, we acknowledge that the conflict resolution between the Turkish state–society and the Kurds is possible only if both sides are treated ontologically and discursively as equals (Cobb 2013).

This book is intended to be an illustration of the changing perspectives in Kurdish studies outlined here. It endeavors to bring together the theoretically grounded and meticulously researched work of young scholars. We editors are sociologists who work in political and comparative historical sociology, but the contributors come from many other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The chapters draw on a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches in their respective fields. Many of the contributors base their analyses on multiple methods of research and extended ethnographic fieldwork. They unequivocally exhibit the shifting scope and research questions surrounding Kurds in Turkey from conventional political science approaches to the analysis of politics defined more widely as a power struggle over meanings and resources. Overall, the chapters in this book capture the temporal, spatial, and affective construction of racial and ethnic categories, on the one side, and the negotiation and resistance strategies of laypersons, on the other. As such, this volume opens a very significant window into Kurds’ lives in Turkey, generating meaningful insights into their formal political interaction with the Turkish state and society as well as into their more extensive, more amorphous nonpolitical and informal experience.

This volume comprises three parts. Part one delves into the social and historical construction of Kurdishness and Kurdistan; part two focuses on the Kurds’ marginalization and racialization; and part three moves on to deciphering the elements of Kurdish mobilization, thereby, we hope, ending on an optimistic note.

Part one focuses on the historical and discursive construction of Kurdishness and Kurdistan, how Kurds are politically, spatially, and temporally situated in the making of ethnic/racial hierarchies in the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey vis-à-vis the core Muslim/Turkish community. The first three chapters analyze historical texts, but the fourth chapter also presents how the history of displacement and migration has influenced the treatment and experience of Kurds in one of Turkey’s metropolitan cities.

In chapter 1, Metin Atmaca demonstrates how the geographic location of Kurdistan has shifted throughout the centuries in connection with Ottoman administrative needs and priorities, especially with respect to its regional power struggles with the Safavids. Until the nineteenth century, the area that the Kurds inhabited—along with Armenians, Assyrians, Turcomans, and others—remained mostly terra incognita. The Ottoman Empire then administratively structured the Kurds’ habitat into two regions: (1) provinces (eyalet) and towns such as Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Van, Muş, and Mardin that were integrated into the Ottoman land system as tımars (fiefs), and (2) provinces that remained autonomous, thus forming a buffer zone in the frequently changing borders between the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire. These administrative units’ boundaries and what was defined as the center of Kurdistan changed with each sultan’s accession. Atmaca’s chapter thus ably demonstrates how politics intersected with space and territory in defining the location of Kurdistan and its people through time.

In chapter 2, Janet Klein explores Kurds’ identification as a minority group in the early twentieth century. Her work debunks the Ottoman Empire’s official discourse, whereby the term minority was employed to refer only to non-Muslim imperial subjects, such as Christians and Jews. At the same time, the Ottoman state regarded the Kurds as part of the Sunni Muslim core of the empire. By drawing on Kurdish, Ottoman, and European sources and especially on the Kurdish-Ottoman press from 1898 to 1919, Klein shows, first, that the Armenians and then the Kurds became the target of imperial minoritization with the growth of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century on. These groups moved from being officially regarded as loyal Ottoman subjects to being defined as internal others who threatened Ottoman imperial sovereignty and territorial integrity. When the Ottoman state specifically targeted its Armenian subjects, it initially regarded the Kurds tenuously as part of the dominant Muslim majority. Later, however, when the Ottoman state’s interests conflicted with those of the Kurds, the latter were denigrated as uncivilized and unreliable elements that threatened the territorial integrity and unity of the empire. At the turn of the twentieth century, Kurds tried to resist this marginalization by emphasizing their loyalty and strategic geographical significance to the imperial borders in the East and their unique identity, history, and dominance on their own ancestral lands. They initially pushed for an imperial order stating that they did not have a minority designation, but they eventually had to accept regional states’ assimilationist policies. Over time, the Kurds even adopted Orientalist discourses that portrayed Kurdish people as backward. By 1918, Klein argues, the Ottoman state’s denialist discourses about the Kurds were already publicly palpable and continue to this day.

In chapter 3, Barış Ünlü moves on to the subject of the transition from empire to nation-state, analyzing the racial/ethnic formation of the Turkish Republic. Drawing on whiteness studies in the United States in general and on Charles Mills’s (1999) concept of racial contract in particular, Ünlü argues that the Turkishness contract—the foundational contract of the Turkish Republic—has generated an ethnic/racial hierarchy in the distribution of power and valuable resources, thereby structuring everyday relations between the Turks and non-Turks. This contract has included punitive measures against those who do not adequately internalize or comply with the expectations of Turkishness, which Ünlü defines as both a historical formation and everyday modes of thinking, feeling, and acting that transcend the social differences of class, gender, and ideological belonging. Ünlü’s chapter is part of a larger book project that provides a critical reading of the construction of Turkish ethnicity vis-à-vis the Kurds and others (Ünlü 2018). Hence, his contribution turns the Turkish official narrative of the Kurdish problem on its head, arguing that the source of the problem here is not the Kurds, but the Turks, especially those who wittingly or unwittingly construct, impose, and monitor Turkishness.

In chapter 4, Michael Ferguson contextualizes the Kurds’ experiences in Izmir since the 1850s, providing the long history of the displacement of migrants from all surrounding regions—such as the Balkans, Crete, the Crimea, Africa, and Syria—to that city. During the conflict between the state and the PKK in the 1980s and 1990s, forced displacement from their ancestral lands led Kurds to become the last community to settle on Kadifekale, the largest hill overlooking Izmir. Drawing on the literature on displacement, Ferguson focuses on Kurds’ reception and experiences in the city, arguing that approaches to Kurds are predicated on the political stand taken by Turkish host groups. Whereas those who acknowledge the historical layers of forced displacement in turn recognize and welcome Kurds as yet another community of migrants, those who deny this historical precedent and embrace an imagined ethnoreligious unity in Turkey foster marginalization, exclusion, and violence against the Kurds.

Part two focuses on more recent forms of marginalization and racialization by examining both the mundane employment of symbols and emotions to differentiate, exclude, and control the Kurds as well as Kurdish reactions to these processes in different urban and rural settings. The contributors to this section employ multiple methods and extended ethnographic fieldwork, thereby shedding light on the cultural transformation in the country over time from the total official denial of Kurdish identity to its unwelcomed recognition. They examine how the Kurds are stereotyped based on their physical characteristics and excluded as unworthy and dangerous others. They showcase how the Turkish