Job Market Paper:
State-Building and Borderlands: Informal Control of the Turkish State on an Everyday Level (under review)
Abstract: In this article, I use the case of Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands to revise theories that address the role of informal practices and unwritten norms in state-making. During the violent conflict from 1984 to 2015, the Turkish state used various violent and non-violent (direct and indirect; formal and informal) tools/strategies to suppress dissidence and maintain control over people, land, and property in its fight against the Kurdish insurgency (Kurdistan’s Workers Party–PKK). These tools have included formal institutions and policies, but it has also gone beyond the formal realm. I conducted twelve months of a political ethnographic study of Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands next to Iraq and Iran between 2013 and 2014, employing participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. By exploring people’s everyday practices of state-making through people’s relationship to the land and property, (illicit) border-crossings, kinship relations, and cadastre process, my article uses informal control as an analytical category to engage with the scholarship on the micro-study (bottom-up) of ethnic conflict and war. I found that people’s experiences of manipulation, uncertainty, and contingency were pervasive in the borderlands. Another important finding is that informal control is not a state weakness; on the contrary, it is a source of state-making in contested borderlands where multiple actors interact but also compete with each other. Based on the empirical findings, I argue that the Turkish state uses uncertainty, contingency, fear, and manipulation as an ad hoc source of authority to control people and territory in its borderlands. This strategy essentially depends upon getting inside people’s heads; a form of authority and control that an exclusive focus on formal policies and institutions would miss. Through the case study of Kurds and Kurdish borderlands in Turkey, this article adds to extending analyses of state-making, state-society relations, political violence, as well as conflict and peace studies that comprise a growing literature on territorial imperatives of state’s ethnic control, especially in borders and borderlands. I also contribute to analyses of the role of informal institutions and practices in state-making in divided nations, in general, and in Turkey, in particular.
Book Chapters:
“The Kurdish Movement in Turkey: Understanding Everyday Perceptions and Experiences” The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics edited by Günes Murat Tezcür. London: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Abstract: The prolonged conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), spanning four decades, has resulted in 4,000 villages being evacuated, and more than 3 million people displaced. Despite this profound impact on people’s everyday lives, studies on people’s perceptions of the Kurdish movement are still limited. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Kurdish participants in Turkey, this chapter explores how Kurds from different backgrounds, of different ages, and politicized to different degrees, perceive the Kurdish movement and what motivates their commitment to it. Guided by an interpretivist methodology and drawing on findings from fieldwork, the chapter proposes that everyday experiences and understandings of the Kurdish movement are embedded and salient in a political sense. It concludes that by mobilizing people’s daily perceptions and experiences and translating them into political engagement, the Kurdish movement shifts the scale of politics from national to transnational and local levels. This shift implies that conducting extensive qualitative research among ordinary people brings a novel understanding of political movements and ethnic conflict in terms of both people’s motivations and movements’ strategic choices.
“Rethinking democracy and autonomy through the case of the Kurdish movement in Turkey” Democratic Representation in the Plurinational States: The case of Kurds in Turkey edited by Ephraim Nimni and Elcin Aktoprak in the series on ComparativeTerritorial Politics (edited by Michael Keating). London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019.
Abstract: Despite the rise of enriching literature on autonomy, the practical dimension of autonomy has found little place in the discussions among scholars. It is mostly because the literature on the institutional redesign of ethnically divided nations is usually led by those who support the integration or accommodation of minorities but rarely frames the debate regarding minority empowerment (Gagnon 2012). In this article, minority empowerment is the foundational principle of my discussion on autonomy. In contrast to the regimes where relations of hegemonic control are deeply rooted in the tradition of the unitary state, power-sharing and autonomy are proposed as a new way of thinking about diversity and its relation to democracy. The objective of my article is to focus on the Kurdish case in Turkey in order to analyze the extent to which democracy and autonomy can be compatible. I begin my argument by drawing a theoretical distinction between instrumentalist and intrinsic values of democracy. This intrinsic view of democracy is compatible with autonomy and collective self-determination because the demands of freedom as non-domination for everyone regardless of ethnicity and group membership become a threshold that a set of democratic institutions has to meet. In the absence of a certain type of democracy, which is more egalitarian, democracy and autonomy become incompatible and as a result, political actors are compelled to strive for alternative models of institutional design.
Article:
Interviews:
Scholars in Context: Dilan Okcuoglu, Jadaliyya, December 2021: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/43617
Book Reviews:
Hardi, Choman. Gendered Experiences of Genocide (London: Ashgate, 2011), International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 15 No. 1, (Jan. 2103);
Ozar, Semsa, Handan Caglayan and Ayse Tepe. Ne Degisti? Kurt Kadinlarinin Zorunlu Goc Deneyimi (What Changed? Experiences of Kurdish Women on Forced Migration) (Ankara: Ayizi Kitap, 2011), International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 15 No. 3, (Sept. 2013);
Research-related Policy Pieces:
“Informal Control of the Turkish State: Lived Experiences from Kurdish Borderlands” Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy, Harvard University Kennedy School Publication, 2021:https://jmepp.hkspublications.org/2021/04/13/informal-control-of-the-turkish-state-lived-experiences-from-kurdish-borderlands/
“The trials of betrayal,” Jerusalem Post, November 2019 (co-authored with Prof. Uriel Abulof): https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-trials-of-betrayal-607559
“The elusive quest for peace between the Turks and the Kurds,” The Conversation Canada, January 2019: https://theconversation.com/the-elusive-quest-for-peace-between-the-turks-and-the-kurds-107646
“La quete Kurde de l’autonomie territoriale,” Le Devoir, August 2015 (translated by Remi Carbonneau):http://www.ledevoir.com/international/actualites-internationales/448343/la-quete-kurde-de-l- autonomie-territoriale
“Local peace-building in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands,” Peace Insight, May 2015:http://www.insightonconflict.org/2015/06/local-peacebuilding-turkeys-kurdish-borderlands/