This panel offers analytically guided original research on the formation and evolution of Kurdish political identity and mobilization in a comparative historical perspective. The panel engages several interrelated questions: How do Kurdish nationalist actors challenge and reproduce state authority? How do sectarian, religious, tribal, geographical, and class-based divisions affect the strategies of Kurdish political actors and the construction of a Kurdish identity? How do state and societal actors interact and negotiate regarding the status of predominant political symbols and signs? Finally, how does a focus on state-society relations in Kurdish politics enrich scholarly understanding of ethnic mobilization in other parts of the Middle East?
A central contention of this panel is that a dichotomous approach to state-society relations, which identifies the state with "repression" and society with "resistance," fails to provide an adequate understanding of the temporal and spatial variation in Kurdish political mobilization and the construction of Kurdish identity. Approaches that are based on this dichotomy ignore how both competition and accommodations among state and societal actors have been central to political struggles over Kurdishness and deeply affected the success or failure of nationalist projects. For instance, kinship, tribal and class divisions that are often treated as impediments to Kurdish nationalist mobilization have actually facilitated the rise of nationalist movements such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Similarly, villagers can preserve multiple loyalties to family, clan, nationalist struggle, and state authority simultaneously by skillfully navigating competing demands even times of intense conflict between state and insurgent forces. Moreover, symbols that are perceived to signify Kurdish unity can become source of political conflicts, as recent protests in the city of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan, the site of a chemical attack in 1988, demonstrate. Finally, political visions of Kurdish nationalist entrepreneurs actually reproduce patterns of state authority and rule they seek to destroy.
The papers in this panel, which represent historical, sociological and political science approaches, are based on a rich variety of original sources in three primary languages; Arabic, Sorani Kurdish, and Turkish. The sources include Kurdish nationalist newspapers published in Syria in the mid-20th century, publications of the Kurdish insurgent PKK since the late 1970s, ethnographic research in the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, and Kurdish areas of Turkey, and official and court documents. All authors have extensive field experience and the discussant will analytically evaluate the papers in a comparative perspective.
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Dr. Ceren Belge
During the 1990s, around 3,400 Kurdish villages have been evacuated in Eastern Turkey, resulting in the displacement of 370,000 individuals according to official figures. This paper examines why some villages survived the civil war intact while others were forcibly evacuated by Turkish soldiers or attacked by PKK guerillas. My tentative hypothesis, which relies on anecdotal evidence, is that villages which were able to juggle multiple allegiances--to the state and to the PKK--were able to survive the war intact, while those that unambiguously signaled an exclusive allegiance were either evacuated or suffered high casualties. I hypothesize, moreover, that the ability of villages to "pass" as pro-government when the gendarmerie visited their village, and to camouflage as pro-PKK when the guerillas visited, rested internally on their clan networks and externally on the ability of the villagers to establish ties of trust with outsiders, mainly teachers, judges, and prosecutors, who were sent to their village from the outside, and who were under pressure to inform the government on the allegiances of "the village."
The paper seeks to contribute to several broader questions in the study of ethnic conflict: How do social organizations on the ground, such as clan networks, transform the ideological meanings and material incentives associated with the "high" politics of ethnic conflictt How do multiple loyalties--to family, nation, and state--affect survival strategies during civil conflictg And what sorts of order emerge in war zones where states have a tenuous hold?
The paper will be based on interviews and data drawn from surveys of the internally displaced population.
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The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), established in embryonic form in the mid-1970s, has been one of the most successful insurgent organizations in contemporary times. While the PKK failed to militarily defeat the Turkish state, it has persisted as a resilient and popular organization despite the capture of its leader, changing geopolitical conditions, and democratization trends in Turkey. Moreover, the PKK has become the only organization that has effectively challenged the authority of the Turkish state and developed strong appeal among Kurdish citizens of Turkey even if it was just one of the many Kurdish radical organizations that mushroomed throughout the 1970s. This paper aims to understand how the PKK has become the hegemonic Kurdish organization in Turkey. It analyzes the evolution of the PKK from its foundation in the mid-1970s to the late-1980s when it became a serious military threat to the Turkish state.
The existing explanations of the rise of the PKK either put forward conspiracy theories (i.e., the linkages between the PKK and the Turkish security services) or the waves of repression following the 1980 coup. This paper offers a more satisfactory and accurate account based on two premises. First, the PKK correctly diagnosed that persistent socioeconomic inequalities and power of landlords and tribal sheiks created a fertile ground for insurgent recruitment. Next, the PKK also realized only an armed struggle that instills confidence among poor peasants and urban proletariat would mobilize public support. As a result, the PKK emerged as a mass movement even before the 1980 coup. The paper is based on two conceptual approaches: 1) it goes beyond a dichotomy of state-society and analyzes state-society interactions in geographical areas where the PKK was active, and 2) it explicitly recognizes the plasticity and porous nature of ethnic identity and shows how the PKK developed a new understanding of Kurdishness that both expanded and limited its appeal.
Data for this paper comes from a rich array of sources: 1) a newly constructed database that includes biographical information about hundreds of PKK militants as well as members of other Kurdish radical organizations (e.g., KUK), 2) personal interviews with and memoirs of Kurdish political activists, 3) issues of the PKK's monthly magazine Serxwebun that started its publication in January 1982 and other PKK documents, 4) court documents from the trials of Kurdish activists, and 5) Turkish newspapers and magazines from the period.
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Dr. Nicole Watts
On March 16, 2006 Kurdish demonstrators in the city of Halabja set fire to a memorial commemorating the victims of a 1988 chemical bombing attack on the city that killed an estimated 5,000 men, women, and children. In the clash between demonstrators and Kurdish security forces, police killed one teenage protestor. The event drew international attention both because of the dark irony of Kurdish demonstrators destroying a memorial built to honor their own dead and because it highlighted little-noticed but growing tension between local Kurdish communities and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.
This paper examines state-society relations in Halabja, and, more generally, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, through the prism of the Halabja protest and the events surrounding it. I suggest we can interpret these events as a effort by local people to gain control over the considerable symbolic and material resources Halabja accrued due to its status as a martyred Kurdish city, and, thus, to renegotiate the relationship between citizens and the KRG. The paper is divided into three sections. Part I examines Halabja's symbolic resources and the ways that KRG officials had monopolized this symbolic capital to serve the broader Kurdish nationalist cause. Part II of the paper examines the protest itself. Events immediately prior to and following the protest suggest this was a student-led and community-supported effort to convince KRG officials to make good on their promises and rebuild the city, or, put another way, to use the material benefits provided by the city's symbolic status to focus on those who still lived, rather than only on those who had died. Part III of the paper examines how local community members, non-governmental organizations, and the independent media mobilized after the protest to reconfigure the balance of power between officials and people of Halabja.
The paper is based on three main sets of sources: 1) face-to-face interviews with protestors, media and NGO representatives, and government officials; 2) Sorani- and English-language media accounts, particularly in the independent press (e.g., Hawlati and Awene); and, 3) government documents and NGO reports. It derives from research conducted in Halabja and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in 2009 and 2010.
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Dr. Ahmet Akturk
Examining early Kurdish nationalists' views regarding the Kurdish masses and traditional structures within Kurdish society is necessary to understand their imagined community. Following the failure of the Ararat Rebellion against Turkey in 1931, Syria and Lebanon became the centers of Kurdish literary activities in the 1930s and 1940s. Two brothers, Celadet Ali Bedirkhan and Kamuran Ali Bedirkhan initiated a cultural movement under the auspices of French mandate authorities in Syria and Lebanon. Key to this movement was the publication of Kurdish journals and newspapers: Hawar, Roja Nu, Ster, and Ronahi. In these publications, Kurdish intellectual elites, most of them either educated in Europe or under the influence of European ideas, promoted a Kurdish national discourse and attempted to reach out to the Kurdish masses in a presumed homeland, Kurdistan, that was divided into four parts by recently designated political borders. They followed two primary approaches in order to address Kurdish populations. In a positive, romantic vein contributors to the journal collected and analyzed folk songs, legends, and stories of wars among Kurdish tribes and glorified traditional feudal values such as manhood and generosity. In their writings, tribes and religious orders appear central to Kurdish society. In a negative, reformist vein they argued that the Kurdish masses are culturally backward and easily duped by enemy states, land lords and religious officials. Thus, the Kurds should be educated, awakened and enlightened for their good and for the sake of their divided country. Some of them harshly criticized tribal leaders and religious officials whom, they believed, were responsible for the backwardness of Kurdish masses. Through a close examination of these two approaches I will show how the nascent Kurdish elites viewed traditional religious and tribal structures within Kurdish society. I will also demonstrate how they explained Kurdish people's relation with the ruling state, first the Ottoman Empire and then Turkish Republic, both as cooperation and oppression. Moreover, I will try to explain what kind of a Kurdish polity they implied in reference to their analysis of traditional authorities within Kurdish society. Lastly, I will show how the Kurdish nationalists' view regarding traditional structures within Kurdish society reflected Turkish state modernizers' elitist view of Turkish society which Kurdish nationalists were watching closely.This presentation will be based on a critical reading of above mentioned Kurdish journals and newspapers published in Syria and Lebanon along with secondary sources in Kurdish, Turkish, English and French.
