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The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue: multiple and contradicting trajectoriesintroduction
Zeynep Gambetti & Joost Jongerden Available online: 23 Dec 2011

To cite this article: Zeynep Gambetti & Joost Jongerden (2011): The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue: multiple and contradicting trajectoriesintroduction, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 13:4, 375-388 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2011.621785

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Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, Volume 13, Number 4, December 2011

The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue: multiple and contradicting trajectoriesintroduction
ZEYNEP GAMBETTI and JOOST JONGERDEN

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Analysis of the Kurdish issue from a spatial perspective is not new, but spatial analyses are still relatively scarce. More often than not, Kurdish studies consist of time-centred work that represents the trajectory of Turkeys Kurds either through modernist state discourses, that is, in terms of backwardness and lack, or through narratives that trace the development of Kurdish resistance from its origins to the present. In this special issue, we would like to shift the attention to space-centred analyses. How this might inform research on the Kurdish question in Turkey and what is to be gained from this perspective, however, need to be explained. Today, the concept of socially produced or constructed space appears in publications with little apparent need for justication or explanation.1 Yet it was not so long ago that space was generally ignored in social theory. It was generally accepted that sociology had a historical rationality. The sociological imagination of which C. Wright Mills was speaking 2 was a time-centred imagination.3 Time was equated with becoming, space with being; time was equated with change, space with stasis; time was considered as active, space as reactive; time was equated with the agent and space with the object.4 Time was considered qualitatively and operationalized in terms of a transformation of society bringing forward new social relations. Space was looked upon as quantitative, to be measured in square metres, and as isotropic, essentially everywhere the same5 and conceptualized as a residual of time.6 Sociology was concerned with explaining (and forecasting) the making of the world, and this shaping of society was considered to take place along a time-axis and according to a pre-congured picture. Such a conceptualization of space was at the heart of modernization theories, in which the West was placed at the apex of an evolutionary scale of development, and a roadmap of becoming like the
Tim Unwin, A waste of space? Towards a critique of the social production of space, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS, 25(1), 2000, pp. 1129. 2 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, London, 1959. 3 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso Press, London, 1989, p. 13. 4 Ibid.; Doreen Massey, A Global Sense of Place. Space, Place and Gender, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1994; Doreen Massey, Geographies of responsibility, Geograska Annaler, 86B, 2004, pp. 518. 5 Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991. 6 Doreen Massey, For Space, Sage, London, 2005. ISSN 1944-8953 print/ISSN 1944-8961 online/11/040375-14 q 2011 Taylor & Francis http:/ /dx.doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2011.621785
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376 Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden West was offered to those declared underdeveloped.7 This basically heldand still holdsto the idea that everywhere in the world is becoming alike, forming an economically, politically and culturally homogenous singularity. In this approach, underdevelopment is not considered a logic of spatially embedded differences producing development in one place and underdevelopment in another, based on factors like positions in a production process. Instead, the underdeveloped are considered to be those who will catch up sooner or later. Conceptualizations like stages of development etc. were expressions of space turned into time, since difference was not considered a product of uneven development, a spatial process of capitalism, but as intervals on a timescale. Historical materialism marginalised space, and privileged time and history.8 Soja, approvingly referring to Foucault, states: The nineteenth century obsession with time and history [ . . . ] continued to bracket modern critical thought,9 while according to Anderson,10 social sciences lost their spatial consciousness. With respect to the Kurdish issue in Turkey, modernization (development) was considered to be a process of inevitable social transformation, of the backward into the modern, of the tribal into the state, of Kurds into Turks. As opposed to time-centred social thought, thinkers such as Lefebvre, Harvey, Soja, Massey and others reintroduced a spatial consciousness in social sciences. They brought the idea of a social production of space to the centre of social theory. This, to our view, is of much signicance. Although historical analysis is indispensable in producing genealogies of social phenomena that would otherwise remain uncritically naturalized, transformations in spatial attributes cannot be ignored if one is to grasp how and why certain shifts occur. In other words, causalities constructed solely on successive moments in time fail to account for the power structures that embed social phenomena within sets of spatial relations of varying scales and dimensions. This is illustrated in studies of the Kurdish issue in so far as considerations of ` the successive strategies used by the Turkish state vis-a-vis ethnic and cultural diversity from the founding years of the Republic to the present, omit a whole array of spatial transformations that state policies have either aimed at producing or have responded to, including forced migration, resettlement, concentration/ dispersal of the Kurdish population in certain regions or urban zones, spatially induced differences in assimilation or resistance, access to or lack of resources, and so forth. It must be underlined that our purpose is not to refuse all historiography. Indeed, critical temporal narratives are crucial in referring to decisive moments in the emergence and subsequent development of the Kurdish issue, which are closely related to the political constitution of the Republic. To wit, during the 1920s and 1930s, the newly established state of Turkey practised a de facto ` politics of colonization vis-a-vis the territory that had become the south-east on its map, an area that is also known as the northern part of the Kurdistan
Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Zed Books, London, 1992, p. xvi. 8 Stuart Elden, There is a politics of space because space is political: Henri Lefebvre and the production of space, , http://www.anarchitektur.com/aa01_lefebvre/aa01_elden_en.html . . 9 Soja, op. cit., p. 4. 10 Cited in ibid., p. 39.
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The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue 377 region.11 It imposed its authority over the peoples living there (Kurds, Arabs, Armenians and Syriacs among others) and proceeded to keep the region under rm control thereafter. For most of the Republics history, the south-east has been ruled under martial law and emergency regulations. Yet what temporal analysis tends to bring to the foreground are transformations and historical developments. What is ignored is the actual production of space: an analysis of the relations and practices constituting particular productions of space and the performativity of spatial practices, or how people experience and shape the places they live in, how social relations co-dene and institutions occupy geographical location as territory. The assimilation of ethnic and cultural difference into a ubiquitous Turkish identity was the main objective of the state, with oppression and reform as the two means of weakening Kurdish identity and increasing its vulnerability to assimilation.12 Even in the 1920s and 1930s, the displacement and resettlement of Kurds constituted a part of this politics of assimilation, employed both as an instrument to punish rebellion and crush further discontent and resistance, and also as a way of weakening tribal structures, considered by the state as the stronghold of Kurdish identity. At the same time, land reform was used as an instrument to target Kurdish landlords and co-opt peasants. Importantly, the Turkish state refused either to accommodate Kurdish aspirations or enter into political discussions on the matter. In the Republic, citizenship was considered to be equivalent to Turkishness, and in practice Kurds were required to qualify themselves thus, as cultural Turks.13 The state was able to extend its control over the region partially through local Kurdish (tribal) leaders, who generally supported the strong central leadership. However, Turkish nationalist politics also met with a series of resistance and rebellions (the largest being the Sheik Said rebellion in Diyarbakr in 1925, the Agr rebellion of 1927 30 and the Dersim uprising in 1937). In general, these were spatially conned and suppressed in a relatively short time. The resistance initiated by the PKK since 1984, however, has already acquired a history of more than three decades and spanned other state territories (Syria, Iraq and Iran) in Kurdistan as well as south-east Turkey.14 In the 1990s, the PKKs liberation struggle took the form of a fully edged asymmetric war, with a heavy toll in human life (an estimated total of 40,000 deaths) and material damage (to the south-east especially), including the massive evacuation of rural settlements, primarily by the Turkish Armed Forces and special units.
Ismail Besikci, Devletleraras Somurge Kurdistan, Yurt Kitap Yayn, Ankara, 1991. Besikci was among the rst to probe into the spatial aspects of the Kurdish question. As Azat Zana Gundogans contribution in this issue illustrates, the imaginaries corresponding to the terms East, south-east and Kurdistan were produced through a series of struggles over which the Turkish state did not have full control. Likewise, Marlies Casiers paper points to the recent emergence of another imaginary, that of Mesopotamia. 12 Mesut Yegen, The Kurdish question in Turkey, in Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden (eds), Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, Routledge, New York, 2011, pp. 7273. 13 Henry Barkey and Graham E. Fuller, Turkeys Kurdish Question, Rowman & Littleeld, New York, 1998. 14 It has also spread outside the immediate territory through migrating, displaced and eeing populations, with major organizational activities in Western Europe, Lebanon and other areas in Turkey.
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378 Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden What is often referred to as the Kurdish movement in Turkey today is composed of a variety of actors, of whom the PKK is the best known. Today, their aim is not so much secession as social and political recognition, a struggle for democratization. The means through which the struggle is organized are as various as the actors engaged in the movement: from armed combat to syndicalism, from political resistance to emboldened cultural self-assertion. In the south-eastern provinces mainly inhabited by Kurds, the movement has increasingly succeeded in attracting votes, converting them to political representation and to the bottom-up construction of alternatives,15 while the 2011 general elections also brought success in large cities such as Istanbul and Mersin. In addition, however, an important focus of the struggle that has developed over the last decade or so is place, the medium through which the social is constituted and the way it is organized in rural and urban settings. This focus emerged with electoral victories by candidates of the movement at the municipal level. Rather than prioritizing time, the authors in this issue discuss these spatial settings mainly in the context of the region and of several cities in Turkey.16 The contributions are based on the tacit avowal that the Kurdish question, in addition to being a question of group rights, is also one of spatial settings. In such an approach, relevant questions to be asked concern the ways in which the Kurdish issue is articulated in terms of space-centred practices. Which spatial strategies have been employed to deal with Kurds? How are these strategies absorbed and what counter-strategies are developed, both in cities populated by the Kurds in south-eastern Turkey and in other regions? The spatial divides within cities, the question of transitional spaces like those of seasonal migration and the shift in spaces of political activism all have an impact on both the broader ethnic question and on patterns of exclusion and belonging. Collective memories and experiences, cultural values and motivations, modes of being gendered and sexuated, and even ways in which Kurds relate to the Kurdish and Turkish languages undergo considerable spatial variations. However, so do the strategies and tactics used by agents of the hegemonic power in dealing with the Kurds. Although it is quite correct to talk about the systematic use of force against collective manifestations of Kurdish identity in public spaces across Turkey, tactics employed vary according to spatial context and the availability of resources. In some urban settings (as described by Haydar Darc), Kurds construct their place, which takes the form of a ghetto, a sort of safe haven that withstands police intervention. In others, however (as explicated by Dogan and Ylmaz), neighbourhoods are aligned along multiple loyalties and backgrounds. This allows for intervention by security forces as well as by neoliberal contractors.
15 Marlies Casier, Joost Jongerden and Nic Walker, Fruitless attempts? The Kurdish initiative and containment of the Kurdish Movement in Turkey, New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 44, Spring 2011, pp. 103111. 16 We would need more studies on rural settings in order to fully grasp the shifting spatiality of the Kurdish question. There are at least two major aspects that need to be researched here: (1) seasonal migration, which sends Kurdish agricultural workers towards coastal plantations in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Aegean regions; and (2) structural reforms in agriculture, irrigation projects and, of course, forced migration, which continue to impact on the countryside in southeastern Turkey.

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The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue 379 One cannot readily distinguish between the impact that state policies have had on the Kurdish issue from the ways in which local and national resistance strategies employed by the Kurds have forced the state to respond. The dialectics of power and resistance, appropriation and re-appropriation, symbolization and re-symbolization operate in manifold ways. No single grand narrative can capture the complexity of strategies employed by state agents (including the states ideological apparatuses) and Kurdish contesters in response to each other, because neither of the stylized proponents of this tug-ofwar is monolithic. The term Kurdish movement may include actors such as the outlawed PKK, the legal BDP and a panoply of civil organizations related to theseor, quite unceremoniously, people of Kurdish descent who spontaneously nd themselves confronting state forces without belonging to any formal organizational structure. Likewise, state agents may include the army, the police and the political elite, but also would-be lynching crowds or contracting businessesto say nothing of the arrangements and practices that constantly reproduce state ideology, from school curricula to mass media editing policies. The micro-level struggles between all these need to be mapped out meticulously for a fuller understanding of the issues at play today, and by taking into consideration the particularities of the spaces in which they are staged. For instance, a series of deterritorializations (or rather, reterritorializations) of the Kurdish issue have affected voting patterns and loyalties. It has become commonplace to claim that two-thirds of the Kurds do not vote for the proKurdish BDP. This statement is uttered in (sometimes willing) ignorance of the fact that the BDP does not (and sometimes cannot) propose candidates in all Turkish provinces. The overall vote that it obtains cannot be readily imputed to its failure to represent the majority of Kurds in the country. Likewise, the problem of integration into various spatial settings in western Turkey does not affect men and women, or adults and youngsters, in the same way (as Darcs paper shows so well). The particular history of the target of migrationas a multi-ethnic instead of homogeneous city, or an industrialized zone rather than a services-oriented one (as in the tourism resorts of the Mediterranean)has a signicant impact on the patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, settlement in specic neighbourhoods often follows or builds upon spatial divides that already exist in urban contexts. It is therefore a gross mistake to subsume the lived experiences of Kurds under any meta-narrative that either glories their adherence to the Kurdish cause or explains away their divided loyalties. The absence of such micro-level, spatially bound analyses affects the solutions proposed to the problem. The government-controlled Kurdish TV channel, TRT 6, may seem to soothe concerns regarding the cultural neglect of the Kurdish population in Turkey, but one needs to ask how this could alleviate spatial (and psychological) patterns of exclusion and non-recognition in urban settings. Likewise, the mindless reduction of the Kurdish question to one of terrorism cannot but aggravate class struggles that follow ethnic lines in the job market or housing sectors. Indeed, it has become entirely unrealistic to neglect the effects of neoliberal restructuring on the Kurdish question. Relatively cheap labour is extracted from regions populated by Kurds towards other parts

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380 Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden of Turkey. The spatial x as David Harvey17 terms it, is played out along ethnic as well as class lines. Even in a city like Diyarbakr, a Kurdish bastion pioneering political activism, the urban sprawl follows class-based patterns that pit the urban poor against the emerging class of Kurdish entrepreneurs. What needs to be underlined is that the so-called spatial turn in Kurdish studies is not a mere scholastic exercise, but rather reects life-and-death struggles being played out in different geographical settings. This was exemplied, for instance, in what Kerem Oktem calls the ethno-nationalist incorporation of [ . . . ] time and space.18 In this framework, incorporation of space entails strategies such as destruction and neglect of the others heritage (policies for the preparation and implementation of ethnic cleansing as well as planning of large-scale infrastructure projects) and dispossession and nationalization (of the non-national classes and redistribution of their possessions to national groups). Built on these strategies, the reconstruction of the material culture through re-designing a national architectural and cultural style effectively effaces the traces of the targeted other. Alongside temporal strategies, such spatial manoeuvres as hegemonic historiographies, toponymical strategies and inscription of nationalist symbols in the spaces of everyday life have been systematically employed by hegemonic agents in Turkey.19 In a similar vein, the Turkish armys resettlement policy in the 1990s targeted the massive destruction of relatively small (and isolated) rural settlements, and the enforced mass-migration of people from the countryside to the cities.20 In this issue, the contributions focus on the city. However, this is not to say that the countryside, facing destruction, was simply considered a terra nullius. Reconstruction plans reveal the idea of a thorough reorganization of rural space and the intention to develop a new settlement type and structure, which was thought to contribute to (i) the crafting of a nation by identity construction, and (ii) state-building by establishing administration. The new settlement types rural with urban characteristicswere equated with modernization, and with the transformation of traditional (read Kurdish) into modern (read Turkish) identity. Again, temporal transformations are intimately connected to spatial politics. In addition, the hierarchical scaling of statehood (vertical integration of settlements, the development of an integrated settlement structure) and the crafting of nationhood (through the development of settlements that would enable the emergence of a modern lifestyle) were the discursive axes around which interventions in the countryside revolved.21 The chances of resisting or reversing the effects of such hegemonic strategies also depend on how spaces for collective mobilization are constructed.
David Harvey, Neoliberalism as creative destruction, Geograska Annaler, 88B(2), 2006, pp. 145158. 18 Kerem Oktem, Incorporating the time and space of the ethnic other: nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Nations and Nationalism, 10(4), 2004, pp. 559578. 19 Ibid., p. 565. 20 Joost Jongerden, The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds: An Analysis of Spatial Policies, Modernity and War, Brill Academic, Leiden, 2007, p. 283. 21 Ibid.; Joost Jongerden, Village evacuation and reconstruction in Kurdistan, Etudes Rurales, No. 186, JulyDecember 2010, pp. 77100.
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The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue 381 Any analysis of the Kurdish movement in the age of neoliberalism would need to take into account spatial resources that are available or made available, since the extension of networks, and innovations made in movement repertoires are vital for the sustainability of grassroots collective action.22 Indeed, the decolonization of Diyarbakr, the informal Kurdish capital in Turkey, was made possible through the materialisation of a new discourse of social, cultural and urban needs [which] became the nodal point marking the dispersion of former antagonisms in favor of a more uid constellation of forces.23 These place-based developments inevitably had an impact on the subsequent evolution of the Kurdish movement.24 These and other studies25 that set out to approach the Kurdish issue from the entry point of space have started to replace meta-narratives that tend to render invisible imaginaries and subjectivities emerging as a result of the lived spaces of contact, contestation and symbolic investment. As opposed to the abstract space of the nation as a territorial whole, micro-spaces present us with a more complex topography, irreducible, as it were, to the two-dimensional simplicity of maps. Having said this, the purpose of this issue is not to pit the spatial dimensions of the Kurdish issue against more relational ones. Indeed, this is not the intent of the theoretical insight that informs the papers collected here.26 Let us briey explain why. It is our contention that space and place are not physical entities with preestablished identities, but are socially produced, not only through relations, but also through power geometries: There are no purely spatial processes, neither are there any non-spatial social processes.27 Social struggles are also struggles over space. It was Lefebvres insight that any social existence aspiring or claiming to be real, but failing to produce its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the cultural realm.28 We argue, therefore, that places and spaces do not have an authentic core, and the challenge is to understand their production,
Zeynep Gambetti, Politics of place/space: the spatial dynamics of the Kurdish and Zapatista movements, New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 41, Fall 2009, p. 45. 23 Ibid., p. 64. 24 Zeynep Gambetti, The conictual (trans)formation of the public sphere in urban space: the case of Diyarbakir, New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 32, Spring 2005, pp. 4371. 25 Chris Houston, Provocations of the built environment: animating cities in Turkey as Kemalist, Political Geography, 24(1), 2005, pp. 101 119; Jelle Verheij, Die armenischen Massaker von 1894 1896. Anatomie und Hintergrunde einer Krise, in Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.), Die armenische Frage und die Schweiz (18961923)/La question armenienne et la Suisse (18961923), Chronos, Zurich, 1999, pp. 69 132; Gunnar Wiessner, Hayoths ZorXavasor, Ludwig Reichert, Wiesbaden, 1997; Bediz Ylmaz, Far away, so close: social exclusion and spatial relegation in an inner-city slum of Istanbul, Tarlabas, in Fikret Adaman and Caglar Keyder (eds), Poverty and Social Exclusion in the Suburbs of Large Cities in Turkey, European Commission, Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, Brussels, 2006; Cenk Saracoglu, The changing image of the Kurds in Turkish cities: middle-class perceptions of Kurdish migrants in Izmir, Patterns of Prejudice, 44(3), 2010, pp. 239 260; Cenk Saracoglu, Sehir, Orta Snf ve Kurtler. nkardan Tanyarak Dslamaya, Iletisim Yaynlar, Istanbul, 2010. I 26 For various reasons, some contributors were unable to make it to this issue. We therefore plan on expanding the scope of the present investigation by including texts on Turkeys major cities (Istanbul and Izmir, for instance) in an edited book in the near future. 27 Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor. Social Structures and the Geography of Production, Routledge, New York, 1995 (revised 2nd edn), p. 51. 28 Lefebvre, op. cit., p. 53.
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382 Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden reproduction, transformation and alteration by studying the social processes by which they are produced. And yet, space is not a container devoid of agency, but also a medium through which the social is also produced.29 Understanding this dialectic provides the key to grasping how distinctive practices are enabled or disabled by the spaces that are constructed through them. The boundaries of space signal the limits of the practices that have brought them about. As Lefebvre argued, [i]tself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others.30 The claim that every society produces its own space should be qualied by acknowledging that it does so in accordance with a particular power geometry. Not insignicantly, struggles over space take hegemonic and counterhegemonic forms. Appropriating or hegemonizing space means gaining a foothold within a given social imaginary. Power is in part constituted through control over the visibility of signs. If power is not only structural but also performative, the formation and subsequent reproduction of hegemony requires a series of micro and macro strategies that include the spatial staging of a form of discursive categorization. The effectiveness of certain discourses in hegemonizing social spaces, on the one hand, and the varying degrees of visibility and invisibility of other discourses, on the other, partially depend on the success or failure of this staging. Strategies to create or destroy the lieux de memoire of political regimes, nations or culture include inscriptions onto natural or built spaces. The visibility of signs of power (or the corresponding lack of visibility of marginalized groups or cultures) serves to reinforce the founding of a social imaginary of strength and superiority by materially reiterating it. The problem is further complicated by what is conveniently called globalization. In most parts of the world, spaces and places are increasingly shaped by the dynamics of neoliberalism.31 The loss of place implied in mobility, displacement and deterritorialization become the paradigmatic gures of our times.32 Close attention must be paid to the ways in which global neoliberalism disturbs spaces of possible interest aggregation other than those serving the new regime of capital accumulation. It is certainly paradoxical that the proliferation of what is called identity politics coincides with the forceful alteration of modes of production and accumulation. The speeding up of turnover times of capital, the turn to the provision of ephemeral services, the process of exible accumulation, as Harvey points out, have led to a rapid write-off of traditional and historically acquired values.33 In fact, the fragmentation of formerly unied (and thereby normalizing) social struggles is partially responsible for the growing inability of alternative groups to occupy any signicant ground in both the physical and relational sense. In a world connected through hegemonic discourses that tend to erase the conditions that make it possible to sustain democratic grassroots activity, the capacity of a social movement to hold ground for long enough so as to become
29 Keith Halfacree, Rural space: constructing a threefold architecture, in Paul Cloke, Terry Marsden and Patrick H. Mooney (eds), Handbook of Rural Studies, Sage, London, 2006, pp. 44 62. 30 Lefebvre, op. cit., p. 72. 31 Harvey, Neoliberalism as creative destruction, op. cit. 32 Arturo Escobar, Culture sits in places: reections on globalization and subaltern strategies of localization, Political Geography, 20, 2001, pp. 139 174. 33 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, p. 290.

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The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue 383 a conditioning factor is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed, since [s]eizing or opening up a space of existence bestows a tangible reality on a political community, stabilises the power generated by collective action and institutes the conditions of remembrance.34 As a last note, we should take seriously the claim that the local and the global are mutually constituted. This implies that there is nothing that prioritizes the local over the global or vice versa, as if the two were separate entities, and as if it were possible to develop an outside. The commodication of social relations and the commoditized production of space in capitalist society prompt us to explore the mechanisms of how the local feeds into the global, reproducing it in unpredictable ways. As Massey35 argues:

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[L]ocal places are not simply always the victims of the global; nor are they always politically defensible redoubts against the global. For places are also the moments through which the global is constituted, invented, coordinated, produced. They are agents in globalisation. This fact of the inevitably local production of the global means that there is potentially some purchase through local politics on wider global mechanisms. Not merely defending the local against the global, but seeking to alter the very mechanisms of the global itself. A local politics with a wider reach; a local politics on the globaland we do need to address global politics too. This, then, is a further, different, basis for the recognition of the potential agency of the local.

The contributions in this issue build upon these theoretical insights to bring several dimensions of the Kurdish question into attention. A number of contributions to this collection refer to the forced migration, which took place as a result of village evacuation and destruction in the southeast of Turkey in the 1990s. This depopulation of large parts of the countryside resulted in a rapid urbanization of the Kurdish population and the settlement of many Kurds outside of Kurdistan. While a considerable number of displaced Kurds moved to cities in the region, for example, to Diyarbakr (an issue discussed by Ayse Seda Yuksel), many others migrated to the west and south of Turkey, to Adana and Mersin among others (elaborated by Haydar Darc, and Ali Ekber Dogan and Bediz Ylmaz). Although it is beyond the scope of this issue to engage in detail with the issue of forced migration, a few words might be in order. Structural interventions mediated by the Marshall Plan from the 1950s onwards in agriculture resulted in the expulsion of agricultural labourers and peasants throughout Turkey. The search for new livelihoods resulted in a massive migration to urban and industrial centres. Though this form of migration may be considered as forced tooforced by the state through policies that reorganized agriculture and marketsit was more structural than military. The forced migration in the 1990s, however, took place at gunpoint. Hundreds of thousands of villagers were forced to leave their homes and settle in cities inside and outside the region. This violence took place as part of a counter-insurgency strategy against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in which the Turkish Armed Forces evacuated and destroyed, according to ofcial gures, about 3,215 settlements, in
34 35

Gambetti, Politics of place/space, op. cit., p. 53. Massey, op. cit., p. 11.

384 Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden 14 provinces36 in the south-east of Turkey. 37 This is equal to about a quarter of all rural settlements in the region.38 Though the approximate number of settlements evacuated and destroyed is not really in dispute, the number of people affected has been a subject of great controversy. Government sources report that 384,793 people were evacuated during the 1990s. Human rights organizations claim that the number of displaced is as high as 3 4 million. Other calculations tend more towards 1.5 million39 or put the gure between 950,000 and 1,200,000.40 Most of the displacement took place in the period 1991 95, with a peak in 1994 when more than 1,500 settlements were evacuated and destroyed. As opposed to the rural-to-urban migration starting in the 1950s, the forced migration in the 1990s took place in a relatively short period of time. There were other differences, however. The probability that villagers who started to migrate to the cities from the 1950s onwards would increase their standard of living over time was high. They could relatively easily nd land to squat and on which to build a shelter, and which, over time, could be turned into permanent housing. Extended family loyalties and locality (home town/village) solidarity provided support (shelter, work) to newcomers, who were thus able to improve their conditions. In addition, as the earlier arrivals started to be able to maintain themselves, families and newcomers followed. This process is described as rotation poverty.41 The gap left behind by those rising up the social ladder (social mobility) was lled by new migrants coming in, a process that continued to repeat itself. Migrants entering the cities in the 1990s, however, did not have the same opportunities for social mobility as their predecessors, and many became trapped in permanent poverty. In a study of peasants, poverty and neoliberalism, Murat Ozturk42 suggests two important reasons why the new rural migrants have less opportunities for social mobility and a higher probability of getting trapped in poverty today. One is the commodication of land, which took place as a result of neoliberal policies, and tremendously affected access to the city for the rural migrants. While migrants in the past could relatively easily squat land and without incurring much costs create their own housing, today land has become a scarce commodity and the state, municipalities, private construction and investment companies want to develop it for a prot by building business and shopping centres and housing estates. For newcomers, it is not only more difcult, but sometimes virtually impossible to nd land on which to build a dwelling. Today, they are dependent on the private housing market, which is relatively expensive.
36 Adyaman, Agr, Batman, Bingol, Bitlis, Diyarbakr, Elazg, Hakkari, Mardin, Mus, Siirt, Srnak, Tunceli and Van. 37 Oguz Oyan, Melih Ersoy, H. Cagatay Keskinok, H. Tark Sengul, Galip Yalman, Remzi Sonmez and Erdal Kurttas (eds), Dogu ve Guneydogu Anadolu Bolgesi Koye Donus ve Rehabilitasyon Projesi Alt Bolge Gelisme Plan (12 vols), Bolge Kalknma Idaresi (BKI)-Turk Sosyal Bilimler Dernegi, Ankara, 2001. 38 Jongerden, Village evacuation, op. cit. 39 Tamer Aker, Betul Celik, Dilek Kurban, Turgay Unalan and Deniz Yukseker, Turkiyede Ulke Icinde Yerinden Edilme Sorunu. Tespitler ve Cozum Onerileri, TESEV, Istanbul, 2005, p. 8. 40 Sabahat Tezcan and Ismet Koc, Turkey Migration and Internally Displaced Population Survey (TMIDPS), Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies, Ankara, 2006. 41 Murat Ozturk, Turkey in the Neo-Liberal Age: Agriculture, Peasantry and Poverty, Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen, 2012. 42 Ibid.

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The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue 385 The second major problem newcomers were faced with, argues Ozturk, is employment. Not only are industrial job opportunities reduced, but with the neoliberal downsizing of the state, public sector job opportunities started to disappear too. In the case of Kurdish migrants forced to leave their villages as a result of the village evacuation and destruction strategy of the Turkish Armed Forces, there is another issue to take into consideration, namely, that the migration was accompanied in most cases by a complete destruction of their rural livelihood. This not only left these migrants with empty hands when they arrived in the city, but also without the possibility of getting support from those who stayed behind. In fact, other studies indicate that not only did the probability of forced migrants managing to increase their standard of living over time fade away, but also that forced migration became associated with a deterioration of living conditions. It did not only bring about horizontal (geographic) displacement, but also downward vertical (socio-economic) displacement,43 an issue also treated here (Yuksel). Together with the changing structural conditions for urban settlement, we must also draw attention to changes in the representation of inhabitants of shanty towns over time. Tahire Erman44 argues that in the 1950s, the shanty town (gecekondu) inhabitant was looked upon as the rural other. This turned in subsequent years into such further representations as the disadvantaged other (1970s), the (culturally) inferior other (1980s) and the threatening other (1990s). The migrants, inhabitants of shanty towns and poor neighbourhoods, were considered the unemployed, the street gangs, the maa, the tinerci (those addicted to the easily available chemical substance used to dilute paints) who are mostly children and, in a nutshell, the underclass.45 The various representations are connected with different reactions and reexes. In the patronizing modernist discourse, the rural and disadvantaged others were subject to interventions that aimed at their inclusion, since they were considered as prospective modern urbanites. The culturally inferior other, however, is someone who has to be kept out. This inferior other is not a prospective urban citizen, but a danger. In this discourse, the aim is not to abolish the boundary between prospective urbanite and a sub-population, but to produce and maintain the symbolic and physical boundary. The threatening other is the representation of danger, both for the city and to the political system, and the one who has to be denied access and even existence.46 In his work on class and racism, Cenk Saracoglu47 too has drawn attention to the spatial othering of Kurdish migrants in the course of the 1990s. He explains how Kurds became subjects of social exclusion, and how this took the form of spatial separation. The neighbourhoods of Kurdish migrants are the anti-city in the city, synonymous with everything a decent urbanite is not (supposed to be).
43 Deniz Yukseker, Exclusion: problems encountered by internally displaced persons in the provinces of Istanbul and Diyarbakr, in Dilek Kurban, Deniz Yukseker, Ayse Betul Celik, Turgay Unalan and A. Tamer Aker, Coming to Terms with Forced Migration: Post-displacement Restitution of Citizenship Rights in Turkey, TESEV, Istanbul, 2007, p. 258. 44 Tahire Erman, The politics of squatter (gecekondu) studies in Turkey: the changing representation of rural migrants in the academic discourse, Urban Studies, 38(7), 2001, pp. 983 1002. 45 Ibid., p. 996. 46 Ibid., pp. 996997. 47 Saracoglu, The changing image, op. cit.; Saracoglu, Sehir, Orta Snf ve Kurtler, op. cit.

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386 Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden Yet Saracoglu rightly argues that this exclusion is not based on ethnic or cultural identity alone, but also on class. State-based ideological discourses on the Kurds become translated or reformulated by a middle class that comes into contact with Kurdish migrants in everyday urban settings. In this issue, Darc, and Dogan and Ylmaz refer to similar processes in which migrants in cities outside the south-east are subject to processes of exclusion, because they are poor and Kurd, while Yuksel discusses the real and symbolic exclusion of the (Kurdish) poor by the (Kurdish) well off in Diyarbakr, the latter having started moving to gated and guarded communities outside the city centre. When urban spaces are historically imbued with meaning, as in the case of Dogan and Ylmazs study of a former leftist stronghold in Mersin, the arrival of Kurdish migrants transforms local imaginaries in multiple and contradictory ways. Revolving around a spatial temporal axis, Dogan and Ylmaz discuss the transformation of a particular neighbourhood, Demirtas, by focusing on its decline (along the temporal axis), and on the associated social problems its inhabitants face in relation to similar problems in the Kurdish slums in the Akdeniz district, which emerged as a direct consequence of the Kurdish forced migration during the 1990s (spatial axis). They conclude that the inhabitants of Demirtas, who are politically and culturally divided, and lack a common perspective concerning their neighbourhood, have more difculties in dealing with social problems than the inhabitants of the Kurdish-dominated shanty towns. In the newer districts, mainly inhabited by Sunni Kurds, people succeeded in organizing their daily lives, and by doing so shaped their neighbourhood according to their own ideas, an issue also discussed in the contribution of Haydar Darc. In so doing so, they pregured their own alternatives, instead of being dependent on outside interventions. Though economically poor, the neighbourhood is socially resilient because private and public spaces get redened according to the axes of a heightened emphasis on identity. The transformation of patterns of belonging is a common point linking all of the papers. Although migration is one of the major dynamics that affects actual conditions of identity formation, dis-placement is not the only factor that needs to be taken into consideration. The reinvestment of space with meaning appears in most of the papers here as an ongoing struggle in urban contexts, thus pointing to a process of place-making that attempts to ll the void left by the loss of places of origin. The most striking examples of re-symbolization that defy commonplace views of state power in Turkey are struggles over social imaginaries. Contesting the reductionist claim that an all-powerful state has initiated and controlled all social processes taking place in Turkey since the foundation of the Republic, Azat Zana Gundogan underlines the active role that political contention has played in the construction the space of the Turkish nation-state. Most studies on the making of the region (the south-east, the Kurdistan region in Turkey) have dealt with state policies. The agency of non-state actors, either local people or their organizations or oppositional political parties, has been largely neglected. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Massey, Gundogan brings the role of local agency into prominence. Looking at the Eastern Meetings, a series of meetings and mobilizations that marked the end of the 1960s, he re-interprets the struggle over space as a reclaiming of the region from the state and its assimilative politics. Gundogan not only relates his analyses to the agency of non-state actors, or more particularly collective actions by people themselves, but also to a spatial turn in Kurdish and Turkish studies. This

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The spatial (re)production of the Kurdish issue 387 implies a move away from time-centred processes of identity construction, and the dominant discourse of modernization, and towards the shaping of modalities of belonging in the context of a subordinate position in the nation-state system. This spatial turn, bringing to the forefront the issue of the particular production of the East in combination with peoples agency and contestation, offers a new perspective on the process of the making of a nation-state in Turkey. The production and subsequent transformation of the East, not as a geographical region but as one in which antagonistic subjectivities are formed and transformed, points to how assimilation policies have either failed or were subverted by politicized senses of spatial belonging. Another example of counter-hegemonic symbolization appears in Marlies Casiers paper on the Mesopotamia Social Forum, which points to the ongoing project for the re-appropriation of regional social imaginaries. This project is ideologically shaped by the PKK and its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan, and takes place against the background of decades of concerted efforts of Turkish nationalists to homogenize the region. Looking at the Mesopotamia Social Forum, an event that took place in 2009 in Diyarbakr, Casier explores how Kurdish political activists re-imagine the region from a post-nationalist and nonstate perspective, thereby diverting from the old dream of an independent nation-state of Kurdistan towards Mesopotamia, a new imaginary political space currently under construction. The Forum consequently allows one to investigate how the Kurdish movement in Turkey is rethinking its ideological goals and its means through its encounter and engagement with the ideas, symbols and action repertoires of the Global Justice Movement, bearing testimony to the ways in which the establishment of the Social Forum should be understood as a performative political act of place-making. Likewise, in Haydar Darcs paper, performativity is discussed in relation to the issue of the multiple trajectories of Kurdish youth in urban settings. Based on an ethnographic and oral history research conducted in a migrant neighbourhood in Adana, Darc holds that Kurdish youngsters re-appropriate and construct private and public spaces by means of social struggle. In his account, the struggle of the Kurdish youth is not aimed at communicating a message to a third party, be it the state, a municipality or a political party. Instead, it is selfreexive: it creates a place of ones own. This is what David Graeber has described as rejecting a politics which appeals to governments [ . . . ] in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself pregures an alternative (2002, p. 62).48 This preguration is concerned with the current forms of domination, but instead of engaging in the traditional politics of representation, it is engaged in creating its own alternatives.49 In the actions of the Kurdish youth, the alternative that is pregured is place, and through this creation and defence of place, the youth (mainly boys) take control of their own lives. The distinction between the public and the private becomes blurred as it is politicized through the youngsters resistance to both state and family. However, as Yuksel emphasizes in her contribution, focusing solely on the role of contestation may distort the picture when looking at processes of place-making
David Graeber, The new anarchists, New Left Review, 13, 2002, pp. 61 73, p. 62. Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, Pluto Press, London and Toronto, 2005, p. 19.
49 48

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388 Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden and identity politics. The logic of capitalist reconstruction and the neoliberal project in particular also have to be taken into consideration. Looking at city marketing and urban renewal, Yuksel shows indeed how Diyarbakr is being transformed through the attempts of local actors, or more broadly, by the liberation movement organized around the pro-Kurdish BDP. The thrust here is to imagine the city as multi-cultural locus, in contrast to the assimilative and nationalist project of the state. And yet the state, through its Mass Housing Administration (TOKI) and a policy of urban commodication, has also become a major player in Diyarbakr. Through a neoliberal redenition of the city, the state facilitates the reconstruction of neighbourhoods in which the city and the values it seeks to represent are dened by market forces and processes. As such, her work connects to that of David Harvey, who refers to the neoliberal project as accumulation by dispossession. This not only includes the commodication and privatisation of land and the expulsion of peasants, the form that accumulation by dispossession takes in rural areas, but also includes gentrication of central urban neighbourhoods resulting in the loss of affordable housing and expulsion of the poor.50 As a concluding remark, it can be said that the papers in this issue do indeed follow Lefebvres insight as to the lack of authenticity of places and spaces and as to the need to study the social processes by which these are produced and transformed. We hope this special issue on place-based imaginations, appropriations and transformations will initiate more research into the spatial dimension of the Kurdish question. Far from being a scholastic exercise, such an endeavour is likely to rene analyses seeking to identify the axes around which antagonism is (re)produced and would thus help in re-orienting resolution efforts.

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Joost Jongerden is Assistant Professor at the Sociology and Anthropology of Development section of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research interests include socio-spatial and socio-technical constructions of society, with a main area focus on Turkey and Kurdistan. Address for Correspondence: Joost Jongerden, Sociology and Anthropology of Development, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: joost.jongerden@hotmail.com Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the Political Science and International Relations Department, Bogazici University, Turkey. Her work focuses on theories of collective agency in the age of neoliberal globalization. She has also studied the spatial dimensions of the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Address for Correspondence: Zeynep Gambetti, Political Science and International Relations Dept., Bogazici University, Bebek 34342, Istanbul, Turkey. E-mail: gambetti@boun.edu.tr
50 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Verso, London, 2006, pp. 43, 48.