This panel includes four papers that study everyday life struggles in Turkey's Kurdistan through the lens of political economy, political anthropology and human geography. Having been subjected to regimes of exploitation, racism, and violence as well as sporadic yet recurring struggles against these all, ordinary life in Turkey's Kurdistan embodies the extraordinary contradictions of today's so-called "post-colonial" world. In line with recent political developments in the region - Turkey's EU candidacy, the US-led occupation of Iraq, the Arab Spring and the war in Syria - there has been an upswing in the number of studies on the Kurds/Kurdistan. Mostly mobilizing the same pool of literatures - nationalism, social movements, state-citizenship, and violence- these works provide insights into the political elites and institutions in urban Kurdistan. Yet they generally pay little attention to "ordinary" life struggles in their actuality, and leave rural Kurdistan out of their scopes. These studies also tend to limit their horizons with presupposed categories and dichotomies (i.e. state vs. Kurds) without necessarily scrutinizing their viability in concrete life situations.
The panel presents new analytical, methodological and geographical horizons to the studies on the Kurds/Kurdistan. First, through engaging with current debates in anthropological literature, the papers indicate new research themes, namely value-making, materiality, and temporal and spatial perceptions. Second, they assemble different data-collecting methods: participant observation, institutional ethnography, oral history, and discourse analysis. Third, they are all based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in urban Diyarbakir and Van as well as rural Kurdistan, mountain/border towns and villages in Dersim, Van, and Hakkari.
In shedding an ethnographic light on extraordinary contradictions of daily encounters in Kurdistan, papers address these questions: How do Kurdish workers demand socio-economic rights from Kurdish legal party-controlled municipalities in Diyarbakir and Van? What kind of politico-moral tensions do such claim-making processes entail? How do border villagers of Van frame smuggling as a licit border-trade activity? What roles do different materials involved in border-trade play in this politico-moral and economic framing? How do changing security measures on borders affect trade activities and everyday socio-economic interactions in the Kurdish bordertown of Yuksekova? What modes of aspirations, anticipations and despair emerge regarding these changes? How does physical and discursive landscape in Dersim, a Kurdish-Qizilbash upland region, become medium and mediator of political struggle for its inhabitants? As new aspects of the landscape are brought into politics, how do the state and private capital respond to these shifts in its political value?
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Dr. Firat Bozcali
The borders of the modern nation-states of Turkey and Iran cut across and separate predominantly Kurdish-populated territories from each other. Yet, Kurdish populations in each side of the border have sustained close political and social relations as well as trade networks, even though these relations require illegal border crossings by people and things. Kurdish border-traders (i.e. “smugglers”), therefore, view legitimacy of this border-trade differently from the state authorities. Following this illegal but licit border-trade, the paper detaches the question of morality from the question of legality, and situates it in a complex web of politico-economic and cultural interactions. Drawing on my 18 month-long ethnographic research in Van, a predominantly Kurdish-populated border province of Turkey, I examine different politico-moral and economic framings that Kurdish traders construct to justify the illegal border-trade.
Referring to poverty and unemployment as side-effects of underdevelopment, three-decade long war between the state and Kurdish guerillas, or even the 2011 Van earthquake, some traders frame smuggling as the only means of livelihood available to them. Some traders also formulate smuggling as a form of wealth re-distribution providing mass consumption items –-such as diesel fuel, cigarettes, or table sugar– to the needy in fair prices. Other traders consider smuggling as justifiable tax evasion and ‘fiscal disobedience.’ While some of them question the morality of paying taxes to the Turkish state, which is not believed to serve but oppress its citizens, others deny the sovereignty claims of Turkey and Iran on Kurdistan at all.
In my analysis, I first discuss strategic construction and use of ‘the State vs. Kurds’ dichotomy in politico-moral framings of the border-trade. Although this dichotomy appears as a fixed anchor in each framing, I show how its actual content and circulation vary as a floating signifier. Secondly, I discuss how the objects involved in the border-trade –namely, material qualities of the trade items, transportation technologies, and the money that traders invest and/or generate– influence the construction of these politico-moral framings and also customize ‘the State vs. Kurds’ dichotomy in concrete life situations. Instead of identifying a preconceived and single logic behind the moral economy of the Kurdish border-trade, I identify multiple politico-economic and cultural references and logics. Additionally, I also depict ‘the State vs. Kurds’ dichotomy as a shifting construct that requires daily maintenance, rather than a fixed analytical dichotomy that predominates in recent studies on the Kurds and Kurdistan.
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Dr. Cagri Yoltar
2013 in Turkey’s Kurdistan. It was the year when the Turkish state and Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish movement, started “Peace Negotiations,” raising hopes for an end to the decades-long “low intensity” war – a war, which demanded over forty thousand lives, thousands of evacuated villages, millions of forcibly displaced Kurdish peasants, now living in over-populated cities reined by poverty and the lack of means of livelihood. 2013 was a year when “memories” of the war and struggle were still vivid, as they kept recurring in familiar forms: new extra-judicial killings of prominent Kurdish figures in France; resistance to internationally facilitated atrocities in Syrian Kurdistan; deadly protests against ongoing construction of high-security military bases on Kurdish mountains; and struggles and anguish of thousands of Kurdish political prisoners. 2013 was also a year of deep ambivalence about what is expecting the ones who have “paid the price” of revolting against the Turkish state. In the midst of this ambivalence, in January and July 2013, two strikes were “silently” held by municipality contract workers in Van and Diyarbakir, two major cities of Turkey's Kurdistan today.
Tracing the events and debates around these two separate strikes, this paper explores the politico-moral tensions evoked by Kurdish workers’ pursuit of socio-economic claims from Kurdish legal party-controlled municipalities. In so doing, this paper reads everyday economic struggles, worries and expectations of Kurdish municipality workers at the present vis-à-vis an ongoing history of Kurdish struggles and accompanying moralities they have engendered.
The last two decades have witnessed Kurdish political parties’ gaining control of some major municipal governments in the region. Paradoxically linking the Kurdish struggle to formal administrative structures of the Turkish state, these municipalities opened up a novel space for the mediation of contradictory politico-moral visions of agency, rights, responsibilities and principles of personal conduct. Primarily based on the data I collected during my 18 month-long ethnographic research in Diyarbakir and Van, this paper examines these uneasy mediations through tracing two labor strikes - where different actors divergently appropriated moralities of Kurdish struggle, in their efforts to either mobilize or demobilize Kurdish municipality workers’ pursuit of socio-economic claims. As such, the paper offers an analysis of ordinary struggles in Turkey’s Kurdistan, which complicates the assumed dichotomies between the Kurds vs. the state, moral economy of the subaltern vs. amoral capitalist economy.
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Dilan Yildirim
In the past decade, the Turkish state has expanded its neoliberal developmental strategies throughout Turkey, and particularly in Kurdish provinces, with an emphasis on the extraction of natural resources. Among these projects, the simultaneous construction of hydroelectric dams and expansion of military-posts have ignited intellectual debate and public protests. By exploring how these interventions are refracted through the historically sedimented socio-political life of the physical landscape in Turkish Kurdistan, this paper shows how they in turn provide the cultural and political material for encounters between the state, insurgent politics, people, and capital.
Since the 1920s, the production of Anatolia as an ethnically homogeneous space has been central to the Turkish state’s nation-building project. In addition to its demographic policies (including ethnic cleansing), the state drew on a number of geospatial strategies: It destroyed the heritage of non-Turkish groups, confiscated their property, and re-appropriated their historical geographies through infrastructural projects (Oktem 2004). With the emergence of the Kurdish guerilla movement in the 1980s, the previous strategies of the Turkish state took on a counter-insurgency logic (Jongerden 2007): The army destroyed thousands of villages, forests, and fields. By targeting Kurdish landscapes, I argue, the state turned the rural landscapes into a material archive of an undocumented war, and, finally a political tool to act back.
This paper focuses on the discursive and material struggles between inhabitants of Dersim, a Kurdish-Kizilbash province in Turkey, and the occupying state over the region’s landscape. I examine how inhabitants locate politics in the physical landscape, working to forensically examine the land in order to imbue it with economic, political, and cultural value. The state in turn responds to this politicization through attempts to contain resistance through building of an extensive network of military posts and hydroelectric dams which reproduce the topography of the region as isolated and contained and submerge material traces of sacred landscapes and past struggles. This paper builds upon an ethnographic study by following the itineraries of activists, and through archival research in state and unofficial archives on the Kurdish conflict. I ultimately ask how we can understand the physical landscape of Dersim as both a medium and mediator of political struggle. The paper brings rural extraction and warfare to the heart of understandings of spatial politics, and the concept of ‘labor of resistance’ to the center of understandings of production in insurgent landscapes, both economically and politically.
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Mr. Omer Ozcan
This paper focuses on daily activities of cross-border traders and “smugglers” in the Kurdish border town of Yuksekova to explore how border is experienced, defined and understood in everyday lives of the inhabitants of the town. Located at the juncture of Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish borders, Yuksekova has always been a crossroads of border-trade, and since the mid-1980s, the town has become a significant center of the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the PKK). Throughout these years rural Yuksekova had been heavily militarized and mostly depopulated, and all these shattered the local economy, which historically relied on animal husbandry. During the 1990s, the urban population of Yuksekova tripled, without any “legal” employment opportunity, which made border trade and smuggling the most important source of income for many people in the town. On March 23, 2013, three months after the Turkish State and Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, initiated “the peace process,” the PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire and started withdrawing its guerrilla forces. Following the ceasefire and the withdrawal, temporary road check-points were deployed and high-security military bases (kalekol) were constructed across the region. The construction of new military stations brought an abrupt halt to the border crossing and smuggling activities, and shattered the local economy of Yuksekova.
Focusing on the practices and stories of border-crossing and smuggling before and during “the peace process”, this paper traces the effects of changing security measures on the everyday socio-economic interactions in the border town of Yuksekova. Drawing on the data collected during an 18-month ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and daily conversations with people from various socio-economic backgrounds, this paper explores the ways in which borders have become an unsettling part of everyday politico-economic struggles in Yuksekova. In so doing, this paper argues that the nation-state borders, particularly in heavily militarized borderlands like Turkey’s Kurdistan, are experienced not just as cartographic lines that denote the limits of sovereign nation-states. In the places where it is difficult to pinpoint where the border zone ends, borders are experienced as a ubiquitous reality that stretches across the region through the movement of bodies and goods and the surveillance of the high-tech military bases, check-points and drones. Through the various opposing registers on legality and legitimacy of border-crossing and smuggling, borders permeate the sensibilities of everyday life and actively shape contours of socio-political contradictions, future expectations and despair in Yuksekova
