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Photos from the Turkish-Iraqi borderlands, 2014
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Peer-Reviewed Articles
A Micro-Study of Territorial Control in Turkey: Rethinking Kurdish Case at the Local Level (in progress of submission)
AbstractScholarship on territorial control has long debated the mechanisms and symptoms of control in nation-state level, though a parallel discussion of similar scale is missing on the lived experiences of control in sub-national/local level. Using data from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2014 in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands, this study explores two primary mechanisms of state’s territorial control—demographic and border control—as well as their corresponding experiences on everyday lives of Kurds in Turkish-Iraqi and Turkish-Iranian borders. Understanding the lived experiences of Kurds in the borderlands can help us better explain how the nationalist-territorial logic of the state affects everyday life. (also, why space / spatial policies matter for the formation of a minority’s grievances).
Territorial control has been assessed mostly in two strands of literature in comparative politics: in ethnic conflict management (Lustick, 1979; McGarry and O’Leary, 1993), territorial control has been theorized as a component of hegemonic control, addressing state policies and mechanisms enacted at the institutional level to maintain regime stability and regulate ethnic diversity. The literature of civil wars and political violence (Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Kalyvas, 2006; Stewart, 2016), on the other hand, discusses territorial control by its connection to conflict behaviour. In the same literature, territorial control also emerges as a geographical factor (Saleyhan, 2011; Buhaug, Gates and Lujala, 2009) as limiting the state’s capacity, but scholars have not looked at how states use spatial control policies to overcome their geographic disadvantage in irregular wars and how these policies shape the everyday experiences that later become grievances. These sets of literature offer insightful analytical perspectives on territorial control, yet the application of some of these theories to the Kurdish case in Turkey is missing. My article fills this important gap in two ways: 1. It challenges the state-centric view of control by shifting the focus from state actors to the interplay between state and people at the subnational level; and 2. introduces the territorial logic of the state and its impact on everyday life in Kurdish borderlands.
Book Chapters
Book Chapters
Okçuoğlu D. (2018) "Rethinking Democracy and Autonomy Through the Case of Kurdish Movement". in: Nimni E., Aktoprak E. (eds) Democratic Representation in Plurinational States. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01108-6_10
AbstractDespite 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 that the literature on institutional redesign of ethnically divided nations is usually led by those who support the integration or accommodation of minorities but rarely frame the debate in terms of 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 into 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 analyse 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 their 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.
Photo: Veysi Altay , Diyarbakir.
Articles (Peer-reviewed, local)
Articles (Peer-reviewed, local)
- "Representation of Kurdishness in the Turkish Academia: A Quest for the Ethical Principles of Spatial Justice”, Kurds and Identity, in Birikim, January 2016, 321: 108-115
Okçuoğlu D. (forthcoming) "From Emotions to Political Action: The Kurdish Movement in Turkey" in: Tezcur, G.M (eds) Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics. Oxford University Press. London.
AbstractThe prolonged conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK), spanning four decades, has resulted in 17,000 extrajudicial killings, approx. 3000 evacuated villages, and more than 3 million displaced people (Ungor 2020; HRW 1992). Despite this profound impact, studies on people’s perceptions and emotions with regards to the Kurdish movement are still in short supply.
In this chapter, I aim to address this scarcity by fleshing out how various Kurds from different backgrounds, at different ages, and politicized to different degrees perceive the Kurdish movement, and exploring what motivates their commitment to it. Guided by interpretivist methodology and drawing on preliminary findings from a field study, I propose that everyday perceptions of the Kurdish movement are politically salient if we wish to understand how perceptions mediate the transformation of emotions into action. I conclude that by mobilizing people’s everyday perceptions and translating them into political engagement, the Kurdish movement shifts the scale of politics from a national level to transnational and subnational levels.
AbstractThe prolonged conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK), spanning four decades, has resulted in 17,000 extrajudicial killings, approx. 3000 evacuated villages, and more than 3 million displaced people (Ungor 2020; HRW 1992). Despite this profound impact, studies on people’s perceptions and emotions with regards to the Kurdish movement are still in short supply.
In this chapter, I aim to address this scarcity by fleshing out how various Kurds from different backgrounds, at different ages, and politicized to different degrees perceive the Kurdish movement, and exploring what motivates their commitment to it. Guided by interpretivist methodology and drawing on preliminary findings from a field study, I propose that everyday perceptions of the Kurdish movement are politically salient if we wish to understand how perceptions mediate the transformation of emotions into action. I conclude that by mobilizing people’s everyday perceptions and translating them into political engagement, the Kurdish movement shifts the scale of politics from a national level to transnational and subnational levels.
Articles (in progress)
Articles (in progress)
- “Why did the peace process fail in Turkey? The role of territorial control examined”
- “An insider/outsider in the field: Observations from a zero-level border town in Turkey’s Kurdistan”
- “Comparative Study on Ambiguities and Contestations of State Spatiality in Turkey’s Borderlands”
- “Control, Violence and Democratization: A Comparative Analysis"
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