Informal Control: Everyday Lives of State-building in Kurdish Borderlands explores how the Turkish state territorially rebuilds itself on an everyday level in remote and mountainous Kurdish-populated borderlands between Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. In 2011, in the midst of Turkey’s state-led reform process to devise formal policies for its minority communities, 34 Kurdish villagers were killed unexpectedly along the Turkish-Iraqi borderland. This tragic incident raises a paradox and a central question: how can such a violent incident occur in the middle of a state-led reform process? How does the territorial logic of the state (re)shape people’s everyday lives in borderlands? In answering these questions, this research is based on interview data with villagers, activists, journalists, and lawyers from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in contested borderlands during the 2013-14 ceasefire between the Turkish state and the Kurdish guerrilla movement (PKK). (+up-to-date data will be included via digital ethnography). I argue that local processes of state-building and ethnic control over territory shape people’s everyday lives and their political preferences and behaviors. In contested zones, people’s lived experiences may deviate from and even jeopardize the formal policies of state-building. I also show that the Turkish state authorities use a combination of formal programs and policies alongside informal ones as the state perceives the Kurds as a threat to the state’s territorial integrity. Unlike a state-centric canon, I show the salience of everyday experiences and ethnic control in state-building in this book. The interview data shows how influential informal control, using arbitrary power, changing expectations and measures, as well as manipulating emotions, escalates insecurity and makes it easier to enforce formal control. Informal control is thus a source of the state’s (re)building in Kurdish borderlands. By analyzing the impact of daily experiences, and by situating people’s lived experiences at the core of explaining conflicts, this project contributes to the literature on ethnic diversity, border studies, and state making by providing a micro-level analysis of the state and its ethnic control.
