Kurds in Turkey

Lucie Drechselová is postdoctoral fellow at the Czech Academy of SciencesAdnan Çelik is postdoctoral fellow at Sciences Po Lille

This edited volume of eight essays, extracted largely from dissertations completed at Turkish and European universities, is an attempt to “internationalize” the “non-military” challenges Kurdish nationalist movements in Turkey face because the civil components of the resistance’s ideology of “democratic confederalism and democratic autonomy are largely left untouched.” With references to similar challenges in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, the book is organized around four main issues: women’s participation, paramilitary groups, space, and the infrapolitics of resistance, through which the authors examine often-ignored means of civil resistance, including the cross-border smuggling of clothes, guns, and heroin between Kurds in Turkey and Kurds in Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The strongest evidence that civil tactics of resistance are gaining traction in the movement's 40-year conflict with the Turkish state is the burgeoning production of novels written in the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, spoken in Turkey and Syria. The contributors argue that this development aids not only national liberation but also the liberation of minds and language from “the destructive forces of colonial powers.” Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and graduate students.

• Chapter 1: ‘Mountain Life is Difficult but Beautiful!’ – The gendered process of ‘becoming free’ in PKK education - Isabel KäserChapter 2: The Kurdish Women’s Political Organizing from the feminist neo-institutionalist perspective - Lucie DrechselováChapter 3: The Emergence of Paramilitary Groups in Turkey in 1980s - Ayhan IsikChapter 4: Confession as disavowal: JITEM officers confessing to atrocities against Kurds during the 1990s - Yesim Yaprak YildizChapter 5: Accumulation by Dispossession as a Common Point in Urbanisation Politics in Diyarbakir - Suna YilmazChapter 6: Autonomous Spaces and Constructive Resistance in Northern Kurdistan: The Kurdish Movement and Its Experiments with Democratic Autonomy - Minoo KoefoedChapter 7: Challenging state borders: Smuggling as Kurdish infra-politics during "the years of silence" - Adnan ÇelikChapter 8: Towards A Resistance Literature: The Struggle of Kurdish-Kurmanji Novel in Post 2000s - Davut Yesilmen