Constituting the Political Economy of the Kurds: Social Embeddedness, Hegemony, and Identity 9780367683870, 9780367684617, 9781003137641

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Constituting the Political Economy of the Kurds

This book examines the development of Kurdish political economy and the emergence of collective Kurdish identity within a historical context through three main periods: the late-Ottoman Empire, the initial Republican Turkey era, and then the post-1990s period. It relates historical developments to the dynamics of Kurdish society, including the anthropological realities of the nineteenth century through the moral economy frame, the evolving nature of nationalism in the early twentieth century and the more recent construction of a modern political Kurdishness by means of radical democracy, and an agonistic pluralism shaped by left-wing populism. Omer Tekdemir is Lecturer in Political Economy at Coventry University London. He is a co-editor of the open-access journal, New Middle Eastern Studies, and the co-convener of International Studies of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia working group of the British International Studies Association (BISA).

Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series Series Editor: Anoushiravan Ehteshami University of Durham

44. Nuclear Politics in Asia Edited by Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani and Ariabarzan Mohammadi 45. Transition in Afghanistan Hope, Despair and the Limits of Statebuilding William Maley 46. Russia’s Middle East Policy From Lenin to Putin Alexey Vasiliev 47. Iran’s Foreign Policy in the South Caucasus Relations with Azerbaijan and Armenia Marzieh Kouhi-Esfahani 48. How China’s Rise is Changing the Middle East Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Niv Horesh 49. Iran’s Regional Relations A History from Antiquity to the Islamic Republic Seyed Mohammad Houshisadat 50. Limited Statehood and Informal Governance in the Middle East and Africa Edited by Ruth Hanau Santini, Abel Polese and Rob Kevlihan 51. Constituting the Political Economy of the Kurds Social Embeddedness, Hegemony, and Identity Omer Tekdemir For a full list of available titles please visit: www.routledge.com/Durham-ModernMiddle-East-and-Islamic-World-Series/book-series/SE0526

Constituting the Political Economy of the Kurds Social Embeddedness, Hegemony, and Identity Omer Tekdemir

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Omer Tekdemir The right of Omer Tekdemir to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-68387-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68461-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13764-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Arya Mira

Contents

List of figures and tablesviii Preface and acknowledgementsix List of abbreviationsxi Introduction

1

1 Methodology within the Kurdish narrative

13

2 The political economy origins of Kurds in the Ottoman Empire

28

3 Kurdish moral economy: historical perspectives on  embeddedness44 4 Counter-hegemonic society in the Republic of Turkey

66

5 Passive revolution: constructing institutional politics

80

6 National identity: many Kurds in agonistic pluralism

102

7 Articulating an alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere125 8 A Kurdish model: embeddedness, radical democracy, and populism

157

Bibliography180 Appendix 1: Political Historiography193 Index196

Figures and Tables

Figures 8.1 Intersections between Sub-identities

173

Tables 6.1 Strategies and Identities of the Internal Groups 8.1 Chronology of the Kurdish Hegemonic Struggle

105 167

Preface and acknowledgements

The Kurds and the Kurdish question remain one of the most controversial research topics in intellectual debate and academic research as well as within the social, cultural, political, and economic concerns of Middle Eastern-Westphalian states. Despite intense scrutiny focused on this field, trends often appear overlooked in empirical studies, and while considering nationalism or movement-oriented approaches. Previously, it has not been possible to fully and adequately cope with the significant consequences that have quietly arisen. This book delves beyond narrative-based studies and narrow understandings of the political struggles and addresses the social reality, internal institutions, and historical character of Kurdish society that surmounts general neglect and helps to explain the nature of the economy, politics, and the root of this modern, transregional, and internationalised issue. The text chronicles and employs a transdisciplinary method by engaging with historical understandings that demand reconsideration of theoretical explanations by applying an unorthodox (e.g. cultural, moral) political economy approach to explain the gradual constitution of the Kurdish political economy and attendant trajectory delineating fluid political identity straddling across two centuries. It is hoped that this book will contribute a useful analysis to the field and provide a source of critical theory-based research for future exploration and further development. In completing this project, I have received many blessings. First and foremost, I express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor and mentor, Professor Mehmet Asutay, for his incisive intellectual acumen and generous encouragement from the genesis of the original concept to the concluding result. In particular, I am thankful to him for imparting excellent theoretical knowledge (specifically regarding Karl Polanyi), along with the provision of useful academic references; without his guidance, this book would not have been possible. I am heavily indebted to Professor Asutay for reviewing the entire manuscript and for offering useful suggestions at each critical juncture. The seed implanted two decades ago germinated into this book. Its origins lie in my M.A. degree studies in International Relations and Contemporary Political Theory at the Centre of Study for Democracy, University of Westminster (London), where I developed an intellectual identity and theoretical approach. I  am especially grateful to Professor Chantal Mouffe among others (including

x  Preface and acknowledgements Professor John Kean, Professor David Chandler, and Professor Lord Bhikhu Parekh) for transferring excellent poststructuralist knowledge of Antonio Gramsci in agonistic politics and radical democracy and for her encouragement as my dissertation supervisor. However, a substantial portion of the project was completed during my Ph.D. research at the School of Government and International Affairs (Ustinov College), Durham University (2008–2013). It has continued to evolve and reached fruition, while I was taught and conducted research at the Universities of Westminster, Leicester, Bolton and Coventry. My gratitude and thanks extend to many friends, colleagues, and scholars, too numerous to name here, for their advice and enlightening conversation in the early stages of research through different social gatherings, academic and public events in the United States, Europe, and Turkey. I am particularly grateful for their challenging, thought-provoking criticism, and encouragement. I acknowledge my deepest debt and appreciation to the book’s series editor, Professor Anoush Ehteshami, and Peter Sowden, my editor at Routledge, who have provided much-needed encouragement and support, which proved invaluable. I am also grateful to Derrick Wright and Ruqaiyah Hibell for their effort and excellent copy-editing of the manuscript. Lastly, but not least, I wish to express my profound love and appreciation to my life partner, Elif, for her continual patience, understanding and encouragement through the emotional toll and intensity that this work has exacted over many years and tenderly caring for our beloved daughter, Arya Mira, who is supposed to be our “second baby” after this one. It would not have been possible to continue without her steadfast support. My deepest appreciation and gratitude go to my beloved mother, Nataliya, and father, Faruk, sister Pinar and brothers Murat and Emrah for their unwavering and unconditional love. I could not have started this journey without their (particularly, my mother’s) faith in me. Omer Tekdemir London

Abbreviations

AKP: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (the Justice and Development Party) AP: Adalet Partisi (the Justice Party) ARGK:  Arteshen Rizgariya Gelli Kurdistan (the People’s Liberation Army of Kurdistan) BDP: Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (the Peace and Democracy Party) CHP: Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (the Republican People’s Party) CUP: Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki Partisi) DEP: Demokrasi Partisi (the Democracy Party) DDKO:  Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları (the Revolutionary Cultural Clubs of the East) DP: Demokrat Parti (the Democrat Party) DTP: Demokratik Toplum Partisi (the Democratic Society Party) ERNK:  Eniya Rizgariya Netewa Kurdistan (National Liberation Front of Kurdistan) EU: European Union İHD: İnsan Hakları Derneği (Human Rights Association) HADEP: Halkın Demokrasi Partisi (the People’s Democracy Party) HAKPAR: Hak ve Özgürlükler Partisi (the Right and Freedoms Party) HEP: Halkın Emek Partisi (the People’s Labour Party) HDP: Halkların Demokratik Partisi (the People’s Democratic Party) KADEP: Katılımcı Demokrasi Partisi (the Participatory Democracy Party) KCK: Koma Civaken Kurdistan (the Kurdistan Communities Union) KRG: Kurdistan Regional Government MIT: Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı (National Intelligence Agency) MP: Member of Parliament NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NGO: Non-Governmental Organisation ÖZDEP: Özgürlük ve Eşitlik Partisi (the Freedom and Equality Party) PJAK: Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistane (the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan) PKK: Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) Post: Postposition Pre: Preposition PSK: Partiya Socialist a Kurdistan (the Socialist Party of Kurdistan)

xii  Abbreviations SHP: Sosyal Demokrat Halkçı Parti (the Social Democratic Populist Party) Sub: from a lower level or position UK: United Kingdom US: United States TBMM: Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi (Grand National Assembly of Turkey) TIP: Türkiye İşçi Partisi (the Labour Party of Turkey) TÜSİAD: Türk Sanayicileri ve İşadamları Derneği (Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association) YTP: Yeni Türkiye Partisi (the New Turkey Party)

Introduction

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Oscar Wilde

Emerging power in the changing Middle East The emergence of the new square movements in recent years that led to a political change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), particularly in the Arab world, identified a new dynamism in the region.1 In response, Turkey, a secular, democratic, and moderate Islamic country, with a neoliberal economy and as a regional power has been promoted as the model of this zeitgeist. Turkey’s hybrid identity, straddling East and West, fosters the view that the country is a prototypical exemplar for the future of the Muslim world, particularly given the ‘conservative democratic’ (Akdoğan, 2004) nature of the ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP has defined its identity in terms of moderate Islamic strategies and neoliberal attitudes and has paid particular attention to its relationship with the West with aspirations to be a candidate country for the European Union (EU). Historically, Turkey’s projection as a state that is both Western-looking and of Muslim origin remains an important subject in academic and policy debates. Its confluence as a strategic ally of the Western world, bordering the Middle East, demarcates its position as a cultural and geographical bridge between the Islamic and Christian worlds. Turkey’s Islamic liberalism and its conservative democracy might be proposed as a model that counters the claim of Huntingtonian ‘clash of civilisations’ (Ahmad, 2003). However, this favourable attitude towards Turkey has come under scrutiny, when the AKP’s right-wing populism shifted into an ethno-religious (Turkish Islam) authoritarian revisionism with a homogenising approach to the construction of new Turkey’s political identity which led to the emergence of a polarised society fuelling majoritarian and illiberal tendencies (Oktem and Akkoyunlu, 2017; Baser and Ozturk, 2017; Tugal, 2016). The AKP’s totalitarian policies have created new antagonisms and conflicts as demonstrated in the mass protest movement, in particular the Gezi Park demonstration in Taksim Square during the summer of 2013 (Hemer and Person, 2017; Cook, 2017),

2  Introduction which essentially became a hub for protest against the government and a space where the crowds chanted demands for the deepening democracy and human security (Goksel and Tekdemir, 2018). Turkey’s current dilemmas, however, are not a new predicament. Despite establishing a modern nation-state on the legacy of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, three major issues have always confronted Turkey: accommodating religion (e.g. relations between pious Muslims and secular proponents), ethnic issues (mainly the Kurds), and the economy (sustainable development).2 In terms of economic progress, Turkey has successfully managed to embrace neoliberal capitalism, adopting and promoting the market economy principles, while leaving issues concerning social welfare and distribution mainly unresolved. As for the place of religion in the public sphere, the accession of the AKP, in particular, has enabled the spread of Islamic culture and practice into public arenas (which since the founding of the Republic were largely defined as secular space), where it is now accepted and even to some extent dominates (Lord, 2018). A conservative Muslim identity has become normalised.3 However, the accommodation of Kurdish collective demands in multiculturalism remains the major hurdle to be overcome (Kuzu, 2018). The continuing Kemalist nature of the state and the fact that the mainstream political parties in Turkey only represent, in essence, differing degrees and varieties of Turkish nationalism have meant that the Kurdish issue remains unresolved despite the democratic expansion in the state since the mid-1990s as a result of the desire for EU accession (Yilmaz, 2017; Kaliber and Aydin-Duzgit, 2017). Every political movement and actor in Turkey display certain boundaries and, for most of them, the Kurdish question demarcates the starting point that marks these boundaries out.4 With a global population of approximately 40 million, the Kurds remain the world’s largest ethnic group who do not constitute their own sovereign nationstate, since Ottoman rule collapsed a century ago (Gurses, 2018). Building a nation became crucial to Kurdish politics as a hegemonic project. Amid the recent developments in Turkey and the ‘new’ Middle East, Kurds have increasingly become important players in the region as a possible emerging power, particularly after the restructuring of Iraq (Bengio, 2014; Bozarslan, 2004; Gunter, 2016). Since 2005, they have assumed sovereignty in a de facto independence under the name of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the northern part of Iraq where more than 92 per cent of Kurds voted for independence in the referendum of September 2017. A further Kurdish political front opened up during the current civil war in Syria. This led the Kurds to self-mobilise, experimenting with self-rule in the Kurdishdominated region by declaring a transitional autonomous government. The Kurds in Syria adopted a new democratic libertarian socialist ideology that promotes self-governance, decentralisation, gender equality (including LGBTs – lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), environmental sustainability, political pluralism (i.e. ethnicity, religion, and culture), along with an anti-capitalist communal economy (Öcalan, 2017; Knapp et al., 2016). This radical democratic project began to be implemented by a local assembly (culture, education, environmental, etc.) in

Introduction  3 Rojava (northern Syria) from January 2014 (Cartier, 2019; Schmidinger, 2018). The struggle of joint Kurdish forces of all persuasions in Kobane (one of the cantons which in Arabic is called Ayn-Al Arab) against the extreme violence of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS or DAESH) served to suddenly heighten international awareness of the Kurds in the Middle East (Tugal and Al, 2018; Bozarslan, 2018; Stansfield and Mohammed, 2017). Through the intensity of fighting, the Kurds gained the positive sympathy of the international community where they were seen as ‘heroes’ for upholding ‘civilised’, modern, and secular principles in the region against the ‘global’ threat from ISIS. Particular praise was given to the Kurdish women of the Women Protection Units (YPJ), an armed group of the People’s Protection Forces (YPG), who became a symbol of Kurdish resistance in Kobane (Dirik, 2018; Mojab, 2018). The Kurds (re)turned to the making of history as, if not the main, certainly as one of the crucial and strategic actors and political economic realities of the region during the ‘Kurdish Spring’ (Philips, 2015). As a result of these developments, Turkey suddenly faced sharing an exceptionally long border with the (external) Kurds. At the same time, the Kurdish model – in multiple illustrative styles – is revived and proposed as an alternative political economy project for a changing Middle East (Tugdar and Al, 2018; Yarkin, 2015). The Kurdish model implements popular sovereignty through two different political economy traditions: on the one hand, the KRG’s approach economically engages with the international market economy in a rentier sense of capitalism (Gurbey et al., 2017). While politically it aims to build an ‘independent’ sovereign nation-state by constructing a postnationalist nation as a political community (Bengio, 2014). This collective will refers to a territorial bond instead of an orthodox understanding of a nation-state in the region that homogenised the society under one dominant ethnic identity; thus this concept addresses the people of Kurdistan (Kurdistani) to include various ethnic and religious minorities (e.g. Arab, Turkmen, and Yezidi), rather than just Kurds (Kurdism). On the other hand, the Democratic Union Party’s (PYD) capital-averse communal economy, which is an anti-capitalist, homo-economicus averse, and antinationalist prototype, aims to build a collective production process and fair income distribution among people instead of pursuing a profit motive in ecological wellbeing and a needs-based economy (Cartier, 2019). It rejects a nation-state in an anarchic sense by advocating a self-governance canton regime with democratic autonomy and municipality (Knapp et al., 2016). This political system builds sovereignty through an inclusive plural society by promoting gender equality, minority rights, and ecological campaigns in order to cultivate food, reforest large swaths of land, provide alternative forms of electricity, limit fossil fuel usage, preserve the water supply, and develop waste management solutions5 (Schmidinger, 2018; Dirik, 2018) within a cooperative economy and political ecology that are founded on solidarity and direct participation based on radical plural democratic principles. Although such change, as detailed earlier, is being instituted by Kurds in various parts of their divided land, the political process of ensuring their existence

4  Introduction under the nation-states of Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries – Iraq and Syria – has taken various turns in recent history (Randal, 1998). A large number of rebellions with the aim of achieving Kurdish democratic rights (linguistic, cultural, etc.) have marked the Kurdish struggle in Turkey (O’Balance, 1996) resulting in institutional and political changes along with calls for a democratisation of democracy in radical principles by the Kurdish-led, left-wing populist political party, the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) (Tekdemir, 2019). By applying a parliamentarian device via a passive strategy, different from the tactics of Syrian Kurds, the HDP seeks to transform the existing political system. The latest Kurdish-armed struggle inside Turkey has been led by the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) since the early 1980s (Marcus, 2007; Yeğen, 2014; Saeed, 2016; Plakoudas, 2018), which became a social reality. This ‘unnamed war’ has caused the loss of more than 40,000 civilians and armed forces, with the destruction of more than 3,000 villages, and created approximately three million internally displaced individuals (Jongerden, 2014).6 Despite the policy of the AKP government in Turkey of instigating dialogue with the Kurds since 2011, the uncertainties surrounding the ceasefire and the fragile reconciliatory process have created a cautious approach to the issue and led to renewed fear that outbreaks of conflict during late 2015 (Cicek, 2018; Gurses, 2018; Dag, 2017) would continue for some time into the future. An important milestone for the Kurds has been Turkey’s engagement with the EU and attendant accession process. This provided an opportunity for the Kurds in Turkey to push the Kurdish question forward onto the agenda of the country’s political and administrative system (Barkey and Fuller, 1998). As part of such policies, the EU’s Copenhagen criteria has necessitated democratic reforms in Turkey (distinguishing the Kurds of Turkey from the Kurds in the Middle East in this case), which resulted in expanded opportunity for expression, including the voice of Kurdish society (Yilmaz, 2017; Tocci, 2011; Casier and Jongerden, 2011). The requirements of the EU accession process are mostly in line with Kurdish national demands for democratisation, the de-centralisation of political power with the aspiration of eventually achieving self-governance (pursuing democratic autonomy) in the Eastern and South-eastern area of the country (O’Balance, 1996). Subsequently, Turkey’s long-term issue, the Kurdish question, remains at the main crucial political locus of the country and is an issue that, directly or indirectly, has become part of the EU’s security, energy, enlargement, immigration, and economic concerns. Turkey’s recent engagement with the international market economy, along with the process of democratisation in the country (Turan, 2015), has further contributed to the transformation of contemporary Kurdish political identity and political economy, resulting in the gradual recognition of a Kurdish collective claim for an agonistic pluralism and inclusive citizenship. To an extent, Kurds seek to engage with the administrative and governing system of the country in order to radically transform it. As contended in this text, Kurdish transformation has progressed antithetically to the transformation of the political economy, driven by a project of modernisation/westernisation of Ottoman/Turkish administrations. Instead, the

Introduction  5 transformation of Kurdish political identity based on resistance against the neoliberal capitalism and Turkish nationalism has taken an aggressive position towards ‘others’ with the aim of creating an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983) and one to be accomplished by eliminating differences. This power struggle has created the antagonistic relations of ‘us and them’ dilemma, rather than a hegemonic articulation of agonistic adversaries (Mouffe, 2013) based on negotiation of common ground and fostering democratic institutions in egalitarianism and libertarianism. To anticipate the theoretical framework elaborated in the next chapter and used throughout the book, the method of this double movement, Turkish hegemony and Kurdish counter-hegemony projects, has created a conflict; hence, the Kurdish question dominates the political economy (Yarkin, 2015; Yadirgi, 2018) and results in a clash between the Turkish and Kurdish models (Tugal, 2016). This has transpired as the Turkish political economy has pursued a nation-building process seeking to create a single nation (Aslan, 2018) by constructing a new model of citizenship based on a Turkish–Islamic synthesis, supporting a Sunni-Hanafi Muslim trajection (Ünlü, 2018), by referring the secular banal ethnic background (Billig, 1995). A process of Turkification has been implemented since the Young Turks came to power in 1908, during Ottoman rule, which, as a policy and ideology, was adopted by the subsequent Kemalist regime of the new Republic (Zürcher, 2012; Hanioglu, 2001; Salzmann, 2004). This homogenising project seeks to assimilate different ethnic and religious actors’ divergent identities as outcomes of post-Ottoman society (Finkel, 2012). The modern Turkish state excluded various minority groups through the creation of a Turkish ‘quasi-society’. In the early Republic, the Kemalist elites could not incorporate Kurdish and Islamic demands in the public sphere; therefore, the Kemalists attempted to suppress both identities and define them as a new internal threat after they had fought against the country’s external enemies during World War I (Aslan, 2018; Caiser and Joost, 2011; Taspinar, 2005). Yet, after the 1960s, like many anti-regime groups, Kurds found more opportunities for political mobilisation in the public sphere, particularly as a result of the introduction of the multiparty system in 1946 and the new constitution in 1961. However, this was curtailed by the militarist coup d’états of 1960, 1971, 1980, and later the so-called post-modern coup in 1997,7 only resuming when Turkey opened dialogue with the EU over possible accession. Democratisation reached a climax when Turkey was recognised officially as a candidate for full membership at the Helsinki Summit of the European Council in December 1999 (Muftuler-Bac, 2014; Kaliber and Aydin-Duzgit, 2017). The desire for the EU membership and the necessity of being the part of an international market economy while extending the liberalisation of society had begun to replace the westernisation narrative of the Kemalist elite (Turan, 2015; Finkel, 2012). Ironically, Kemalist parliamentary representatives (including, the Ergenekon, deep state), who supported a military tutelage, opposed joining the EU due to concerns about ceding influence over the state and sharing sovereignty with the rest of society and the EU. This was despite the fact that Kemal Atatürk himself looked up to Western civilisation in shaping the young state.8 It appeared

6  Introduction that the European imagination and civilisation which held such appeal to Atatürk and the Kemalists consisted more of form than substance.

Populism, progressive nationalism, and a new Turkey Another stage in the Turkish model occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century when Islamists moved from their counter-hegemonic position into the centre of political power (Tugal, 2009) through right-wing conservative populism, plugging the rhetoric of a ‘new Turkey’. Under R. Tayyip Erdoğan’s populist leadership, the ‘new Sultan’ (Cagaptay, 2017), assuming power in 2002, began to use the state’s institutions and apparatus to create new cultural and moral leadership while supporting a neoliberal economy (Aydin, 2005; Adaman et al., 2017) and constructing ‘the People’ for a new regime (Al, 2019). The AKP continued the process of seeking EU membership, albeit sometimes with greater difficulties and with lesser zeal compared to the initial period. In this changing environment, the Kurdish political movement also began reconstructing its existing dominant identity, which formed within a radical political model of left-wing populism, based on an ‘EU ising9 of Kurdi10(sh)ness’. The EU-isation rhetoric does not refer to the direct impact of Turkey’s EU accession goals or to the EU itself on progressive Kurdish politics, therefore, a fortiori, the Kurdish internal political project is an institutionalisation and construction of a new collective political identity and radicalising liberal democracy in liberty and equality to all principles. The EU-ising of Kurdishness discourse addresses an internal emancipatory process of adopting and thus embedding Kurdish civil politics within the EU’s liberal democratic values and institutions, albeit within a libertarian socialist democracy. Kurdish political parties, as well as NGOs and local mayors, immediately after the re-activation of the EU accession process promoted the democratic value system of the EU, such as human rights, minority rights, cultural and linguistic rights, and the rule of law for the citizens (Miley and Venturini, 2018). This progressive nationalism in a new political grammar was supported by the EU enlargement policy and the Kurdish diaspora in Europe (Eccarius-Kelly, 2010; Baser, 2015; Keles, 2017), although this conception of the EU differed from that of the AKP and the expectations of the state. The Kurds vernacularised the liberal values of EU-origin within a democratisation of the democracy approach tailored to their situation with the aim of profoundly transforming neoliberal democratic institutions and hegemonic regime. The Kurdish-led, left-leaning populist assembly chose (Tekdemir, 2019), unlike the post-operaist analysts (Hardt and Negri, 2017; Virno, 2004), to engage with the existing democratic system rather than seek a withdrawal from (or exodus) it. This new designation of the political is also articulated as a ‘non-otherising democracy’11 – a term coined in this book – and derived from ideas of agonistic pluralism offered by Mouffe (2013). This contrasts to the AKP’s conservative democracy and neoliberal economy stance (Adaman et al., 2017). Kurdish politics places emphasis on such values as freedom of speech and expression, freedom of belief in faith/ideology, political diversity, and the rule of law that call on the established

Introduction  7 administration of the state to recognise the Kurds in the public sphere. This civil mobilisation also stimulates the EU-isation prospectus of Kurdish political identity by extending their historical bloc (Gramsci, 2003) towards an inclusive populism (Laclau, 2007). The radical democratic political discourse leads the Kurdish ‘progressive nationalism’ – which recalls the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the United Kingdom (UK) – to establish a synergy between political parties and social movements (e.g. the Gezi square movement) on both the national and international stage (Goksel and Tekdemir, 2018; Akkaya and Jongerden, 2012). This chain of equivalence, an alliance of the progressive groups, established the HDP through a horizontal and vertical politics in a global populist momentum, like its counterparts’ European left-wing populist parties and their allied solidarity movements – for instance the Syriza with Aganaktismenoi in Greece and Podemos with Indignados in Spain (Tekdemir, 2019). As a result, the political nature of the Kurds in a post-political, thus a postdemocratic period (evidenced by the crisis of party politics in Turkey whereby both left and right stances were centralised and became more nationalistic, applying tired and exhausted rhetoric) has sought new opportunities for expression within the protectionist and homogenising policies of the state. It is necessary to indicate that the vital hegemonic member of this new political formation, namely the EU, has applied soft power to influence the country’s authoritarian, majoritarian, and illiberal policies towards good governance. Nevertheless, tension escalates during the EU’s structural crisis (e.g. rise of right-wing populism, Brexit, economic and migration crisis, and anti-austerity/occupy movements), leading to disaccord over the migration crisis, Syrian civil war, and serious criticism of the country’s democratic deficiency, which resulted in decreased support for an accession process from both sides. The EU seeks a balance between these macro (Turkey) and micro (Kurds) regional actors, also observed in the case of the Afrin crisis (in February 2018) in Rojava and the independence referendum in the KRG (in September 2017). Such discord chimes with the new agonistic approach of the Kurdish, namely the political phenomenon, as conceptualised previously within an EU-ised Kurdishness discourse. The core spirit of the term referred to the metamorphosis of intra-Kurdistani, Kurdiyati, or Kurdi12 in restructuring the Kurdish democratic demands during unrest. The Kurdish public sphere is designed in a plural way, where disagreement and opposition take place in an arena of diversity, and which seeks to mobilise different democratic groups in a chain of equivalence (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). In this way, the Kurdish radical democratic model challenges the neoliberal understanding of conflict resolution, which is based on total consensus as a rational compromise (when everyone agrees with each other, antagonism and conflicts are eliminated). The Kurdish-led inclusive left-leaning populism challenges this anti-democratic liberal order by using a ‘conflictual consensus’ oxymoron approach (keeping conflicts at the centre of negotiations and seeking compromise on common principles) to promote a radical democratic citizenship project (Tekdemir, 2016). When ethnic or religious identities are used as the only common identity for citizens, it simultaneously creates a difficult environment for

8  Introduction egalitarian and libertarian principles to operate in vertical and horizontal politics. Equally, these identities are based on sentimental and sacred values and so are not open to negotiation by means of democratic politics because of their political sensitivity and rigid moral principles. This type of politics also makes it difficult for Kurdish nationalistic objectives to mobilise collective passion to create a group desire for constructing ‘the People’ (demos) for a progressive politics by using left-wing populism (Mouffe, 2018), as a tool. Interestingly, when the AKP became the governing party after the elections on 3 November 2002, large numbers of Kurds saw the AKP’s policy as a renewal of the social contract between Kurds and Turks (Yeğen et al., 2016), established when the Turks arrived in the Anatolian and Mesopotamian region (1071 A.D.). This historical social contract was based on the idea of Islamic brotherhood and only expired after the Kemalist elite sought to politically construct a ‘fictitious homogenous nation’ by the denial and suppression of all differences within society. This seemed to change when Prime Minister Erdoğan visited Diyarbakır in 2005 and during a public rally expressed his party’s commitment to a peace process, a demonstration that he officially recognised the ongoing war in the region. Incidentally, it then became a tradition for Turkish prime ministers to make priority speeches in Diyarbakır.13 This was followed by the famous ‘12 August 2005’ speech in which Erdoğan unexpectedly stated that the problem was a ‘Kurdish issue’ rather than an ‘Eastern’, ‘South-eastern’ ‘bandit/anarchist’, or a ‘terror’ problem (Yeğen, 2014; Bozarslan, 2003) and accepted the state’s mistakes in relation to the Kurds. This new discourse was an enormous step, both socially and politically, taken by the state’s executive body in terms of the historical evolution of the Kurdish situation in Turkey. The AKP administration, therefore, started to substantially change the nature of the problem, moving it to something that could be discussed in Turkish society by giving the impression of a re-Turkification of the Kurds and the beginnings of a change in the Islamic meaning of Turkishness. The AKP was attempting to portray itself as a party of the centre to gain the support of ethnic and religious members of various communities in the country, all under the ambition of reaching full membership of the EU. It was also hoped that it would provide a basis for Kurdish society to support a new style right-wing of the authoritarian populist movement. The Democratic Society Party (DTP) and its bloc that represents the Kurds in parliament gained 22 MPs in 2007 and 36 independent MPs (6 of them were jailed in connection with the Kurdistan Communities Union/KCK ‘terror case’) through its successor party, the Peace and Democratic Party (BDP), in 2011 (Saeed, 2016). This occurred despite the 10 per cent election threshold (the Kurdish-led HDP initially passed the election threshold during the June 2015 and November 2015 elections) (Gurses, 2018). In addition, nearly 100 mayors in the Kurdish-dominated regions were elected.14 Kurdish political actors and their political parties had acted as one of the essential stakeholders in the dispute resolution process, as well as one of the leading dynamics for democratisation in the country, by restructuring the existing system in a non-otherising of democratic rhetoric.

Introduction  9 In this period of developing relations between the EU and Turkey, relations between the Kurds and the EU also deepened. Some European officials visited Diyarbakır before Ankara, and Kurdish organisations and NGOs became effective in their communications with EU institutions, increasing contact which had grown under Kurdish lobbying and diplomacy. Furthermore, following the 9/11 attack in New York and other atrocities in London and Madrid carried out by political Islamist extremist groups (in particular Al-Qaida and ISIS), the EU became more sensitive to violent protest movements which had obvious implications for the Kurdish movement. This indirectly led the PKK to apply for ceasefires and seek negotiations, while the pro-Kurdish parties sought to focus on lobbying and diplomacy while employing tactics of passive struggle through civil and democratic mechanisms alongside their internal democratisation process (expanding the scope of Kurdishness). This new politics also created a redistribution of political power and provided the continuity for transformation in Kurdish political identity. Consequently, in 2009, the AKP recognised a ‘democratic expansion’, referring to it as the ‘Kurdish opening’, although later it was renamed ‘the project of national unity and fraternity’ and lost its democratic meaning. The continued EU accession process alongside the democratisation of the country saw the peacebuilding processes suddenly slowing down, particularly after the AKP gained more power by positioning itself, as its predecessor rightwing political parties had done, as part of the centre rather than on the periphery. In explaining this, it can be argued that the AKP had become a very central and ‘statist party’ turning itself into what might be called methodologically a ‘greenKemalist party’ because of its homogenising and authoritarian political behaviour and tendency towards social engineering by using the Jacobin–Kemalist institutions, like the Diyanet (Department of Religious Affairs) to regulate religious issues (Lord, 2018), the Council of Higher Education (YÖK), and the Radio and Television State Supreme Council (RTÜK) to control education and the media, which are the productions of the 1980 military coup. Not surprisingly, the AKP’s rapid policy shift created disappointment and an atmosphere of suspicion in liberal Turkish society in relation to the government and its institutions, particularly among Kurds, Alevis, liberals, and other minorities, such as Christians, antiestablishment Muslims, and some larger capitalist organisations (e.g. the Turkish Industry & Business Association – TÜSİAD). Kurdish politicians also felt disappointed because of events such as the 21 February 2008 Turkish military operation in the northern Iraq in Qandil Mountains, as well as the closure of the DTP on 11 December 2009. There were also moves against pro-Kurdish institutions, with hundreds of Kurds being arrested accused of forming PKK groups in urban areas under the name of the KCK. Pictures of them handcuffed appeared via Turkish media in 2010 which shocked Kurds and liberal Turks. The dramatic ‘Roboski (Uludere) Massacre’ by Turkish military warplanes in the Hakkari province in the border area with the KRG on 28 December 2011 claimed the lives of 34 Kurdish young boys (most of them children or teenagers, with the youngest only 12 years old) who were involved in ‘smuggling’ activities over the border. It is important to understand that such ‘smuggling’ had not been

10  Introduction considered a criminal offence by the security forces before, and Arif (2008/1968) in his poem about a similar incident writes, ‘they [Kurds] never understood the meaning of passports’ as these territories despite the borders are considered to be theirs. Peacebuilding commenced from crucial negotiations that began between the PKK (mainly with Abdullah Öcalan, the captured founder of the PKK) and the Turkish government (following an Erdoğan initiative), as well as with the BDP/ HDP, which aimed to activate the peace process (Ozpek, 2018). The PKK thus occasionally declared a unilateral ceasefire that provided a way for dialogue and conflict resolution (Cicek, 2018; International Crisis Group, 2011). The negotiations between the state and the PKK meetings in Oslo in 2010, which came to public attention in 2011, also produced a political environment more sympathetic towards the reconciliation of political issues, as demonstrated by the renewed commitment of the AKP to find a solution. Kurdish civil society (the political parties, NGOs, institutions/organisations, etc.) thus continued to use extended opportunity space in Turkey’s public sphere to pursue their demands. Political reconciliation became highly effective during the 2013 ‘à la Turca’ negotiation process (so named because of its ambiguous nature due to an on/off relationship), such as the Dolmabahçe Agreement between the state and the PKK. This initiative cited in the earlier paragraph had become vitally important for the AKP government and Prime Minister Erdoğan following government clashes with Gülenists – a transnational religious cult – after 17 December 2013 (Yavuz, 2013). Due to the power struggle between Erdoğan and Gülen (including the Syrian civil war), the process was interrupted on the part of the government through a police operation initiated by followers of the Gülen movement, which began immediately after the AKP’s decision to close private schools (Islamic-cult-oriented) that were predominantly controlled by the Gülenists. The operation by the Gülenists involved revelations of corruption in high places involving the sons of a number of ministers alongside Erdoğan’s son (Yavuz and Balci, 2018). This resulted in the collapse of the ‘hidden’ coalition between the AKP and the Gülen movement due to unease over the Kurdish peace process. This political partnership had been under strain during recent years following Gülenist demands for greater influence in the power-sharing arrangements, which ended with an attempted failed military coup on 15 July 2016 (Yavuz and Balci, 2018). The AKP government blamed supporters of Gülen’s movement – subsequently labelled the ‘Fetullahist Terrorist Organisation’ (FETÖ) – for the turmoil and violence in July that left an estimated 300 people dead (many of them civilians) and for the chaos in a post-democratic zombie politics. This attempted coup was followed by a wave of crackdowns where thousands of police, soldiers, civil servants, teachers, and journalists were arrested and suspended, accused of FETÖ membership. This incident created an organic crisis in political and civil society. Interestingly, for the first time in modern Turkish history, a conflict emerged between two main hegemonic actors in a governmental level with Islamic roots, while the country’s longer-term antagonism continued between old enemies (and perhaps

Introduction  11 with some new adversaries) such as Kemalists, Islamists, Kurds, radical leftists, Alevis, and ultra-nationalists. This antagonistic relation impacted the so-called peacebuilding process with the regional watersheds.15 The Gülen movement’s nationalist tendency towards Kurds meant that the support of the Kurds was extremely important for the AKP government and its project, as simultaneously the Gülen cult and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) as well as the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) sought to form new alliances. This political alignment was observed during the first presidential election in August 2014 as the CHP and MHP supported the same candidate (Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu) against Erdoğan or the new nationalist coalition, the ‘Republican Alliance’, built during the 2018 presidential election between the AKP and MHP.

Notes 1 Also, in Latin American and former Soviet countries, similar mass mobilisations have emerged to challenge the existing neoliberal and authoritarian hegemonic order. 2 For more details, see Barkey and Fuller (1998); Gunes and Zeydanlioglu (2014); Unver (2015); Gambeti and Jongerden (2015); Stanfield and Mohammed (2017). 3 For wider details, see Tugal (2009); Oktem (2011). 4 For more discussion, see Heper (2007); Gunter (1997); Romano (2006); White (2000); Yildiz (2005). 5 https://mesopotamia.coop/building-autonomy-through-ecology-in-rojava/. 6 www.internaldisplacement.org/8025708F004CE90B/(httpCountries)/C1E13DEC3D6 630EB802570A7004CB2F8?OpenDocument. 7 While the book was being prepared, another attempted military coup took place in Turkey, on 15 July 2016, reportedly inititated by followers of the Gülen transnational religious movement. 8 For instance, the Republic Party of People (CHP) under Deniz Baykal’s leadership and the Atatürkist Thoughts Associations (who also see themselves as the real owners of the Republic) eagerly became anti-EU and opposed related reforms. 9 EU-isation, the term, is coined by the author. It means adapting the EU’s institutional values, such as democracy, human rights, liberalism, and secularism, rather than becoming European or culturally Europeanised. This transformation is a product of the EU enlargement/accession process and the use and reference to EU-originated institutional apparatuses and NGOs, for example, the European Court of Human Rights, the Copenhagen Criteria, and the European Progress Reports on Turkey. The EU-ising rhetoric refers to an institutional political project and makes no claim that Kurdish society is culturally and socially Europeanising. EU-ising is not about constructing a social European identity for Kurdish society; rather, it represents the radicalising of EU-liberal democratic values in Kurdish political space. Ultimately, it is about establishing a political identity by various socio-political groups. 10 Kurdi is a Kurdish term and is derived from Kurdism/Kurdiyati (Kurdishness), which addresses the vernacular Kurdish nationalism in relation to the common culture and tradition of Kurds (e.g. tribalism), or Kurdistan(i). Kurdish nationalists are also known as Kurdists (pan-Kurdism), which refers to a united and ‘independent Kurdistan’. 11 Non-otherising democracy, a term coined by the author, is a democratic political system and social framework that refers to a multi-identity and pluralist civil society as a superstructure and embraces all excluded and ‘otherised’ citizens of the country, who cannot find opportunity spaces in the public sphere, such as Kurds, anti-capitalist Muslims, Alevis, non-Muslims, atheists, environmentalists, socialists, feminists, and LGBT groups. It is derived and inspired by Mouffe’s (2013) agonistic pluralist radical

12  Introduction democracy and thus challenges the existing liberal democratic approach by expanding the narrow definition of liberalism in terms of liberty and equality to all. 12 The terms refer to a pro-Kurdish and national perspective. Moreover, it addresses historical and cultural Kurdishness (Kurdiness) without the impacts and interpretations of the external dominant power such as the Turkish state. It is a term that is set against officially defined “Kurdishness”. As a result, Kurdi represents the national consciousness or sensitivity to Kurdish rights and demands. 13 This started with Turgut Özal, followed by Süleyman Demirel, Tansu Çiler, and Mesut Yılmaz (all of the representatives of conservative/centre-right parties), after being elected as presidents. They came to Diyarbakır (Amed) and recognised the ‘Kurdish reality’ by giving state promises and apologising to the Kurdish people as citizens of Turkey. 14 However, after the failed coup attempt on 15 July 2016, the country entered a state of emergency ruling by decree. During this political crisis, almost all HDP mayors and co-mayors were imprisoned along with the Party’s former president Demirtaş, 11 MPs, and thousands of party members. 15 Just at the time of writing, the peace process is again under threat due to a new ‘urban war within trenches’ between PKK’s youth branches in the cities and the state security forces, while the AKP and MHP are allied under a de facto coalition, although this goes beyond the timeline of events covered in this book. From 2016 onwards, the Turkish foreign policy also shifted and deprecated any Kurdish political achievements in Syria and Iraq.

1 Methodology within the Kurdish narrative

Let me explain the sorrows of my heart in a story.

Ahmadi Khani

Kurds beyond history: politics, economy and society The book offers a model as the outcome of the trajectory detailing Kurdish political economy and its impacts on the dynamics of alternating Kurdish political identity. In understanding the transformation of Kurdish society, ethnographic studies help to uncover the relevant facts, as the uneven development of political economy can be examined and researched through historical and anthropological accounts. Such examination sheds light on the nature of contemporary political identity and its social construction.1 It is not easy to describe complex Kurdish social relations within a chronological historical context and thus understand its modern formation (Bozarslan, 2003). The Kurdistan region is not contained within a single nation-state but is divided among various ones, even though the ancient Silk Road, which was the historical commercial route between Eastern and Western world, passed through Kurdistan and the ‘Fertile Crescent’ making Kurdistan one of the richest regions in Asia Minor. The main economic activities in the predominantly Kurdish regions have been agriculture and stockbreeding because of the nomadic lifestyle of the Kurds and geographical situation of Kurdistan (Yalcin-Heckmann, 1991; Beşikçi, 1969; Sönmez, 1992). Kurdistan is also suited to a pastoral economy, as breeding livestock has played an important part in the economic life of the region. The area remains rich in natural resources, with one of the largest oil reserves in the Middle East, and recently water has become an important political and economic element in the region as, along with oil, Kurdistan also holds rich water reserves (Ozkahraman, 2017). In contrast, apart from a few local industrial areas, Kurdistan is the least developed industrial region as an outcome of internal colonisation of the territory by Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran due to a number of political, geographical, and social reasons (Stansfield and Mohammed, 2017). This has meant that Kurdistan has not benefited sufficiently from its natural resources due to imperialism and the colonisation, especially after capitalism prevailed in the

14  Methodology within the Kurdish narrative region. The outcome of the late development and colonisation led to the economic migration of Kurdish people to more prosperous cities and countries (Saracoglu, 2010). The Kurdish historical context has been shaped in relation to political and economic realities. For the Kurds in Turkey, their early modern political history was dominated by the ‘no Shah, no Padishah; we want our Mîr’ phrase when, in the nineteenth century, Kurdish society was led by Kurdish mîrs (emirates). The mîrs as the overlords had always maintained a de facto independent relationship with the Ottoman Empire (similar to the position of Albanian and Arab emirates) as they neither paid taxes nor were part of the tımar system (land tenure), under which local landowners had to provide soldiers to the imperial army (Klein, 2011; Jongerden and Verheij, 2012) from the late sixteenth century until the modern central administration and tax farmers’ financial administration. The mîrs had control over their resources and political economy. The nature of Kurdish existence and production and its social relations did not easily adapt to a capitalist mode of production until the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Kurdish mode of production was typified by a household economy based on self-sufficiency with little mechanisation and with limited connection to the country’s western (i.e. Turkish) and international markets (van Bruinessen, 1992; Beşikçi, 1991; Yalcin-Heckmann, 1991; Sönmez, 1992). The tribal (eshiri) hence a cultural mode of production dominated the economy for a long time with economic relations remaining embedded in social relations that were feudal and religious (Beşikçi, 1969; King, 2013; Gellner and Micaud, 1973). When the impact of mîr politics declined, the control of the region passed to new actors, namely the aghas (tribal chiefs), sheikhs (religious leaders), civil servants (e.g. pashas, valis), and new notables (i.e. begs), who both filled the internal hegemonic gap and sought to deal with the external new order represented by the Republic of Turkey (van Bruinessen, 1992, 2000a). After the decline of the mîrs and their replacement by conventional aghas and sheikhs who engaged in armed response to the Ottomans, and afterward at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Republic (Salzmann, 2004), a new type of regional actors emerged (e.g. former Hamidiye pashas, provincial governors) (McDowall, 2000). These new socio-political actors took the opportunity to get involved with state institutions and opened the economy up to different markets as the central Turkish state itself was in a period of transformation (Aydin Z., 2005; Bozarslan, 2006). With this change and the commodification of land and labour, a new social and identity formation emerged. The rule of these market-economy-friendly aghas, begs (notables), and sheikhs changed the existing social structure bringing new social actors, such as the working class, syndicates, unions, youth and student organisations, into contemporary Kurdish society (Sönmez, 1992). This was particularly notable in the cities and towns to which the Kurds had emigrated during the 1960s and 1970s (CelikerGrabolle, 2015; Saracoglu, 2010). Subsequently, the nature of leadership and the strategy of the struggle changed. This was carried out in various ways by the PKK after the start of their armed conflict against the Turkish state in 1984, commencing

Methodology within the Kurdish narrative  15 one of the longest-lasting insurgencies and periods of political violence in the Middle East (Bozarslan, 2004; Miley and Venturini, 2018). From the 1960s, a modern and dominant identity formation developed under the hegemony of the PKK and its conflict with the state-oriented aghas and sheikhs. Latterly, since the 1990s and the EU accession process, civil society, in the form of political parties and NGOs such as institutions, groups, think tanks, and capital organisations, has led demands for Kurdish society to enter the Turkish public sphere in developing an emerging Kurdish identity (O’Balance, 1996), which today remains an ongoing process determining a new political path.

Research design This book aims to critically analyse the constitution of the Kurdish political economy and the construction of political identity, while theoretically it examines the society via three main narratives embedded within historical cases which cover different time spans – from the late Ottoman Empire to the EU accession process (till 2015). The book pinpoints the underlying hegemonic articulation and dynamics in the negotiation and renegotiation strategies between a range of political representatives emanating from Kurdish society and the state (Ottoman/Turkey) spanning the aforementioned historical and contemporary periods. The first case relates to the late Imperial era and early years of the Republic, predominantly the nineteenth century (being the period of modernity). The second stage examines and debates a weakening Kurdish counter-hegemonic struggle between 1923 and 1984 (modernity and advanced modernity). While the third period discusses the trajectory of political identity and the re-appearance of subaltern groups in the Kurdish political sphere from the 1990s to the present (entitled post-modernity). Establishing sub-periods of contemporary Kurdish society is an effective way of examining the emergent political project, which is considered to be the EU-isation of political culture and discourse in a radical context. These periods represent a particular strategy, actors, and hegemonic articulations in the development of Kurdish politics. The book concludes by offering an alternative model to the orthodox view of the Kurdish question (Barkey and Fuller, 1998), by bringing the conflict into the centre of politics, which could be identified as a conflictual consensus in Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism and radical democracy discourse. This has recently seen the appearance of a new political actor, the HDP, with its new political grammar (such as Turkeyfication, new life, great humanity, and we’re) and left-leaning inclusive populism, promoting a democratisation of the democracy model (decontamination of democracy from nationalism and authoritarianism) for Turkey and beyond. However, the development of this Kurdish narrative needs to be subjected to theoretical examination. The literature on Kurdish studies neither provides a sufficient theoretical perspective nor pays significant attention to the impact of political economy on Kurdish political identity and the Kurdish question.2 A political economic analysis plays a central role in this book as it builds a framework for understanding the routes of Kurdish question and emergence of the contemporary

16  Methodology within the Kurdish narrative Kurdish model within a historical context through responding to such questions as: What is the role of the Kurdish political economy in the transformation of Kurdish society, particularly in the late nineteenth century? How does this relate to the generation of new social formations and the emergence of new identities? What are the reasons for an uneven development, and who or what was responsible? What are the political economic consequences of this era for Kurdish society? In the process of searching for the answers to all these questions, it simultaneously emerged that the transformation of the Kurdish political economy was inevitably linked to the social construction of emergent identities in the respective periods of Kurdish history. The book mainly focuses on the internal dynamics between sub-identities and actors in Kurdish society, domestic affairs (and their reverberations in terms of external relations) and the societal, political, and economic foundation of the society. While conducting the research, the political leadership (mîr/agha/sheikh and later various modern organisations), the function of traditional institutions (e.g. madrasa, tariqa, eşîr, kırîv, and endogamy), and the character of society predominantly built on cultural (tribal) and religious (Islamic) values are scrutinised. As a result, this book critically explores, examines, and analyses the early development of the Kurdish political economy as a foundation for contemporary Kurdish national awakening, transformation of the political discourse, and the emergence of a new political project, which seeks to locate identity within the empirical realities through a theoretically informed understanding and wide reading of the literature in Kurdish, Turkish, and Ottoman studies.

Theoretical account and methodology of the book The research philosophy of the book proposes a sophisticated method to understand the scope of the Kurdish model. The application of one particular theoretical framework would be an inefficient straitjacket; therefore, a transdisciplinary approach, covering a plurality and heterogeneity of explanations and theories, is essential in developing an integrated analysis. Since identity is not fixed and stable but represents a dynamic process and hegemonic articulation involving various internal and external factors, it is not possible to be confined to a monist methodological approach. Three different normative accounts are utilised to respond to the dynamics of each case and period with the intention of this contribution to overcome the observed theoretical gap in Kurdish studies. The interpretation of the evolution of Kurdish society requires an appreciation of both the complex set of theories and empirical cases that constitute the specific historical context. With this in mind, the following sections of this chapter present the reader with an outline of the theoretical framework and methodology to be used in subsequent empirical chapters. A fuller justification for the use of the selected theories will be found in Chapter 8, where the appropriateness of each theory is explored in relation to the different narratives in producing an integrated understanding of the interdisciplinary issues. Each theoretical account is presented in a sequential manner from Chapter 2 onwards.

Methodology within the Kurdish narrative  17

Polanyi’s – The Great Transformation: embeddedness and moral economy Analysing Kurdish political economy requires an initial examination of its microfoundations in an attempt to explore the lack of capitalist modes of production and modern institutions and, hence, the uneven development of society during late Ottoman rule. This analysis needs to be located within the theoretical framework of The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 1944) in accounting for the political and economic origins of the nineteenth-century market economy, society, and modern nation-state (Mendell and Salee, 1991). By doing so, we can understand why this development did not take place for the Kurdish case in this zeitgeist. This examination considers an alternative cultural and anthropological political economy that focuses on a collective character and social structure in order to recognise the absence of an industrialised economy, market society, and nation-state at the end of the nineteenth century. Polanyian tools help to understand the impact of internal dynamics and social structure on constituting the Kurdish political economy. However, in our case study, the Polanyian account is not denying the impact of external factors on the transformation process but remains limited to explaining how imperialism and colonialism influenced the development of the periphery. This book aims to concentrate on the internal factors/institutions and show their role in the transformation of traditional Kurdish rural society (Aydin Z., 1986) into a modern urbanised society in term of industrialisation, modernisation, and nationalism (Gellner, 1983; Anderson, 1983). Polanyi in his seminal work identifies how societies develop into a self-­ regulating market economy, the main feature of which is the introduction of what he calls fictitious commodities and the commodification of resources resulting in the disembedding of the economy from social relations (Dale, 2018; McRobbie and Polanyi-Levitt, 2006). This economic-originated transformation of society, leading to the self-regulating market economy of the nineteenth century, paved the way for political change and the creation of the nation-state. Generally, Polanyi (1977, 1966) analyses the structure of society in terms of moral economy frameworks (Rogan, 2018) and also explains how the new system of the market economy replaced the old mechanisms of the traditional and feudal system by creating modern institutions that disembed the economy from everyday life by resulting in a new type of social formation. As a result, labour, nature, and money turned into fictitious commodities, replaced by actual transactions and the relations of real commodities. Conversely, Polanyi notes that a reaction emerges in society against the expansion of economic liberalism as it ran counter to the social values of reciprocity and redistribution that hitherto had motivated economic behaviour, now substituted by money, gain, and profit (Polanyi, 1957; Rogan, 2018). Polanyi clearly explains the resistance of society to the market economy order in terms of a double movement. It is a relationship of power struggles between liberal laissez-faire principles and social protectionist behaviour. While the market economy was transforming ­economic and social relations into relations between commodities, the societies

18  Methodology within the Kurdish narrative (e.g. English) were attempting to preserve traditional moral and human relations within the economy, launching a struggle against what Polanyi calls the ‘satanic mill’. The great transformation was accompanied by wars on an unprecedented scale as warfare and social upheaval facilitated social conversion since they weakened the existing communal formation and institutions. “History was geared to social change; the fate of all nations was linked to their role in an institutional transformation” (Polanyi, 1957: 28). The dynamics of modern society were determined by a double movement in the nineteenth century, as nature was shaped by the political economy and social history of the time (Silver and Arrighi, 2003; PolanyiLevitt, 1990). These oppositional activities aimed at protecting the existing social fabric, which sought the decommodification and re-embedding of the economy into social relations again. For instance, the double movement, represented by the opposed interaction of two main actors, laissez-faire liberals and those wishing to protect the old social formation, saw the transformation of society constituted through this dynamic power struggle. In his analysis, Polanyi employs and examines two main characteristics that defined the moral economy of pre-market societies (Dalton, 1968; Rogan, 2018), which are reciprocity and redistribution. These human codes were based on the principles of symmetry and centricity and are quite different from the values underlying the self-regulating market economy (Block and Somer, 2016), as they are typical codes of pre-market societies. Reciprocity refers to kinship, friendship, neighbourhood, tribalism, brotherhood, and other types of non-economic relationship between members of the community (Polanyi, 1977). Here, the economy is not the determining and controlling factor in social relations, implying that in a pre-capitalist society status, honour, and reputation are more important than possessions, goods, or profit. In such traditional societies, redistribution is based on the giving of gifts, where any surplus within the society is controlled by the leaders, who can redistribute this surplus to individuals according to their needs on the basis of social morals and ethical principles. Generally, goods produced by the community are centrally collected for the benefit of all the members of the community in order to satisfy their needs and requirements, and thus they neither need nor require more goods than are necessary to fulfil these demands. Surplus remains under the control of the leadership of the community where it can be used for entertaining guests or stored for a possible period of scarcity. Polanyi (1966) characterises this mechanism of pre-market economy societies in a moral economy and embeddedness, which is economy entrenched in social relations as a part of daily life by employing economic history, anthropology, and social economy disciplines. Regarding these social principles, Polanyi argues that the reaction of society against the self-regulating economy is often a desire to reestablish a moral economy based on reciprocity and redistribution (Asutay and Turkistani, 2014). Whenever a society succeeds in instituting re-reciprocity and re-redistribution, the damage caused by liberalism can be minimised. Polanyi improved the concept of fictitious commodity and the double movement, which can help to comprehend the process of transformation from a premodern/agricultural society into modern/industrialised society (McRobbie and

Methodology within the Kurdish narrative  19 Polanyi-Levitt, 2006). Within this framework, the Polanyian notion of a social protectionist-oriented counter-movement can be considered as a source of inspiration and guide for the new forms of radical socio-political organisations of today, such as new social movements (specifically nationalist, feminist, ethnic, religious, anarchist, immigrant, and other isolated or disadvantaged groups) in a postmodern, neoliberal democratic global era. Polanyi pleads for another way based on a socialist democracy (Hart, 2017), namely a third way, which can not only protect the society from the harm of capitalist order but also can stand against oppressive, authoritarian, and fundamental political regimes, such as Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s bureaucratic communism, by providing freedom to individuals and groups. Subsequently, Polanyi’s theoretical account can be critically analysed in three different stages (Mendell and Salee, 1991) for our narrative. The first stage is the industrialisation and liberalisation that occurred in the nineteenth century; a great transformation conceptualised by disembedding the economy from social, political, and legal spheres through the implementation of the self-regulating market economy (Dale, 2018). The second stage emerged through a retransformation and reconstruction of society’s substantial essence. This reverse transformation process aims to re-embed the economy into social relations through the efforts of counter-movements in a social protectionist drive. The final stage is a posttransformation of a complex society and the social democratic welfare system into a socialist (radical) democratic regime through the action of new emancipation movements. This will protect individual freedom and further the rights of others, such as minority and marginalised actors in society. In terms of this last stage, our analysis predominantly interprets this understanding of Polanyi’s democratic regime within the context of radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). It is an alternative political economy project that is compatible with the moral economy (Rogan, 2018), within an agonistic perspective and left-wing populism (Mouffe, 2018) that redefines and challenges the institutions of neoliberalism.

Gramsci’s hegemony: antagonism, power, and politics The book benefits from Antonio Gramsci’s well-known theoretical framework of hegemony (Gramsci, 2003) to explain the second important developmental stage of Kurdish society in the early twentieth century. Hegemonic articulation analyses the role of different hegemonic candidates and the consequences of the changes that took place in Kurdish society. The notion of hegemony is identified as cultural domination, intellectual and moral leadership, and an antagonistic power struggle in his groundbreaking work, the Prison Notebooks. The concept of hegemony broadly refers to a political theory of cultural, rational, and decent guidance that is exercised by an establishment and dominant groups based on coercion and consent practices (Fonseca, 2018). According to Simms (2002: 564), “Gramsci used the term of hegemony to refer a type of ideological leadership in which one class [political actors] exercise authority over another through the control of popular beliefs and worldview that is through the control of culture”. Hegemony can be conceptualised as the construction of

20  Methodology within the Kurdish narrative cultural, political, and social knowledge and the exercise of moral leadership by the dominant power to gain the support of subordinate groups who accept the dominant order as valid (Martin, 2002). The hegemony maintains domination over subaltern classes with the aid of their active consent. However, hegemony is not obtained only based on domination, it is also constituted by a consent manufacturing. Gramsci (2003) formulates the equation: Hegemony = Domination [Coercion] + Consent (Hoffman, 1984). In this respect, civil society is the site of hegemonic struggle and becomes a theatre of war, a practice of a war of manoeuvre and war of position strategies. For Gramsci, there are two aspects to society: political society (the state) and civil society (private) that together provide for the emergence of authority. Hegemony is a power relation between the dominant-ruler (hegemonic) and the subordinate-ruled (counter-hegemonic) that is rooted in political and civil society (Anderson P., 2017). Gramsci conceives civil society (including political parties) as a superstructure and argues that the transformation from one system to the new one would not be met with violence and protest but rather by a process of contentious politics, as a passive revolution. This would slowly expand and change civil society through the creation of common sense (culture), which would later turn into good sense (collective will) among the various groups (Crehan, 2016). The role of the intellectual is central to the overall direction of this process. According to Gramsci (2003), during the hegemonic struggle, the transformation of society is only possible under the moral and cultural leadership of intellectuals. However, the notion of the intellectual (like civil society) must be understood in a very broad sense involved in areas from the process of production to the spheres of culture, politics, and governance (Martin, 2002). Intellectuals, thus, carry the functions of organisation and education and are embedded in all social strata. Intellectuals have led organising and uniting functions, rather than simply being holders of knowledge or having intellectual skills, and they are not confined to a particular class. In Gramsci’s definition of intellectuals, there are two main categories. The first consists of organic intellectuals: these are mainly those who function according to fundamental class interests and become instruments of class transformation. They represent the development of public understanding. Second, there are traditional intellectuals who exist as the remains of earlier social formations and resist the new hegemonic order. Based on his personal experience of the factory councils in Turin (Tilly, 1979), Gramsci states that intellectuals cannot achieve cultural leadership as individuals; therefore, they need to establish or join ‘the Party’ that he identified as the ‘modern Prince’ (inspired by Machiavelli’s The Prince). A  party is an effective tool for the seizure of hegemonic supremacy (Fonseca, 2018). “Gramsci’s party consists of three elements: a mass base, a leadership group with a unifying and centralising function, and an intermediate element” (Martin, 2002: 24). When intellectuals create the circumstances for the counter-hegemonic movement to develop and bring all other groups under a proletarian cultural and moral leadership, they manage to bring different sociopolitical forces together, under a historical bloc (Thomas, 2009). However, the

Methodology within the Kurdish narrative  21 historical bloc needs to be analysed on two levels: “the first theoretical in which the concept helps to describe the relationship between two areas of abstract reality, the structure and superstructure, and the second concrete in the description of the linking of these two areas in real society” (Sassoon, 1987: 121). As a result, the historical bloc (chain of equivalence) becomes a social order around a collective will. Ipso facto, Gramsci conceptualises the construction of a historical bloc through two politico-military tactics: first, the war of manoeuvre or the power of force in a frontal attack, conflict, and antagonism, and second, the war of position, more akin to trench warfare, which is a restoration through the process of deep cultural transformation; moreover, it is a consensus or hegemony through neutralisation (Bieler and Morton, 2006). In the end, Gramsci, like Polanyi, suggests the development of a hegemonic order through a socialist form of democracy (Bellamy and Schecter, 1993). It is a way of the passive revolution that challenges and radically transforms a neoliberal democracy into a libertarian socialist project different from a direct revolution. In exploring hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) claim that there are two different permutations of hegemony: democratic hegemony (egomania) and authoritarian hegemony (domino). For the stakeholders of the power struggle gaining hegemony, hence the consent of the society, is not sufficient in itself to achieve sovereignty and legitimacy. The hegemonic culture also requires holding authority in equality and liberty for all democratic principles, along with a ‘democratic philosophy’ rather than simply a victory for the proletariat. The Gramscian account, thus, investigates how socio-political actors can obtain power and thereby attain acceptability within civil and political society. The analysis in this book articulates the notion of hegemony in the context of different aims and examines it in relation to the timeline of struggles. The failure of Kurdish (great) transformation created a power vacuum, thus the Polanyian account became ineffective (Block and Somer, 2016) to explain such antagonistic relations. Hegemony, therefore in the case of the Kurds, has been articulated historically in a neo-Gramscian account in terms of autonomy, independence, nationalism, democracy, and EU-isation forms, which are also articulated around the issues of ethnicity, identity, culture, religion, and ideology. Most recently, it is re-articulated in terms of a model of radical democracy that is based on Mouffe’s (with Laclau) agonistic pluralism and left-wing populism and shaped in a legacy of Gramsci. To sum up, the Gramscian methodology prepares the ground for considering the interplay and hegemonic struggle between antagonist vocalisations, both on the periphery and at the centre, and also between agents, structure, and superstructure in the negotiation of identity and the creation of opportunity spaces in the period from the formation of the Republic until 1984, a most brutal period of history for the society. However, the Gramscian account alone becomes inadequate to explain contemporary identity politics and hence requires the assistance of social constructivism to examine the complex and intermingled sub-identities of Kurdish society.

22  Methodology within the Kurdish narrative

Radical social constructivism: identity, opportunity space, and agonism After raising a number of theoretical questions, the social constructivist theoretical approach in a Bergerian and Luckmannian tradition is considered as the last theoretical framework used in this book. This notional account, within a methodology, is utilised to explore the construction, negotiation, and shaping of Kurdish political identity in the post-1990 period. The book does not omit Gramsci’s legacy; however, it argues that since the armed conflict between the centre (state) and periphery (Kurdish agents) and dissident relations is between Kurdish intraactors, this phase is under the sway of identity politics and thus requires more theoretical tools for analysing it. As Miley (2007: 2) states “taking the social construction of identities seriously requires more. It requires analysing just whose specific interests are being served whenever demands are made for the ‘recognition’ of any ‘collective subject’ ”. Social constructivists argue that the concepts of identity, social reality, and knowledge are all constructed as products of social actors that reflect their social, political, and economic interests, as seen through their socially constructed perceptions, opinions, and understandings (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). This implies that any social group and political actors attempting to construct (or de/ reconstruct) a collective identity need to realise that the building of their social and political values are nourished by the experiences of their social group and nation (Motyl, 2010; Hung et al., 2011). The theoretical insights provided by the social constructivist perspective are explored with the aim of applying them to the key puzzle of the recent identity, strategy, and political mobilisation of Kurdish society. In analysing current developments and the role of new types of political agents, organisations, and institutions in the social construction of Kurdish political identity, the research finds itself in a new postmodern Kurdish society and hence finds it is essential to employ social constructivism with a Gramscian account. Postmodernism is here addressing the post-transformation of modern Kurdish demos in a new political reality. Kurdishness became more complex, particularly after the impact of external and internal factors such as Turkey’s EU accession process, the democratisation of Kurdish intra-politics (Tezcur, 2010), and explicit appearance of the different form of identities in the public sphere as well as multiple expectations of its representative subordinate groups. The EU is referenced as a discursive external dynamic that has an indirect influence on domestic affairs and provides opportunity spaces to Kurdish political agents and democratisation of the public sphere. Undeniably, Kurdish political culture has undergone a transformation since the internal process of liberalising among the main political agents began. Consequently, new actors have (re)appeared and exercised democratic values in a radical plural concept and, hence, are involved with the national(ist) struggle by widening and deepening the scope of leading political identity. This grassroots wave constitutes grounds for agonistic adversary relations between multiple Kurdish political agents during the emergence of the HDP as an actor of

Methodology within the Kurdish narrative  23 the EU-ising of the Kurdishness project for collective ownership within a holistic approach while keeping the conflict (dispute/differences) at the centre of consensus in society. Risse and Wiener (1999: 778) describe social constructivism as “a meta-­ theoretical approach offering an ontology which differs from, say, rational choice”. Social constructivism is concerned with the sociological theory of knowledge, and hence, social constructivists see the creation of social reality, including the process of building an identity, as arising from cognitive categorisation and discourse (Adams, 2006; Burr, 2003). A social constructivist approach focuses on the dialect between social practice and social structure (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Searle, 1995). It is applied here to understand how social realities and political discourses, specifically new political identities, emerge. It also provides useful insights into the creation and nature of social movements. To this theoretical perspective, the social construction of reality can be added that both arises from and sustains social practice, which follows Foucault (Smart, 2004), founded on the basis of power relations. The social constructivist approach allows us to re-read social, political, cultural, and even economic issues by reconceptualising them as problematic questions and opens up debates about reality, belief and knowledge, and the relationship between agency and structure (Kukla, 2000). This method suggests that the existing hegemonic order can be challenged through counterhegemonic social movements that create a new social reality to question the nature of the state and society and that offer alternative conceptions, including the possibility of resolving conflict by redefining adversarial relations in an agonistic rather than antagonistic affair. The book examines the role of sub-identities and their relations of opportunity space in the public sphere and antagonism by focusing on the sub-identities and their political actors in order to discuss how they challenge and expand dominant and hegemonic Kurdish identity in the public sphere, while the mainstream political actor(s) seek more opportunity spaces in the macro Turkish public sphere. The study focuses on the capacity of these adversaries who wish to use the opportunity spaces in both micro and macro public spheres. Yavuz (2003: 52) explains that “opportunity spaces are not simply mobilising structures because the manner by which they adhere is through social interactions and expressive space rather than through formal or informal organisational structure”. The opportunity space here means finding new political, economic, social, and legal possibilities in the public sphere for different agents and structures to develop an identity. In this regard, opportunity space and its expansion play an important role in process of re-negotiation on the border of hegemonic Kurdishness. Here, the social constructivist position has a different appeal to that of the Gramscian interpretation. It is allowing the possibility for new actors to come into existence through the expansion of the opportunity spaces within the public sphere, rather than having only active actors seeking to manoeuvre themselves into positions of hegemonic dominance. This account matches with our previous theoretical debate that argues that the Polanyi’s capitalist self-regulated market economy is constructed in a Gramscian hegemonic order for the industrialised society. Besides,

24  Methodology within the Kurdish narrative the social constructivist framework also fits well with our Mouffeian concept of agonistic discussion despite being based on the legacy of hegemony and antagonistic relations. In a nutshell, our use and articulation of this social constructivist framework benefit from the influential work of Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966) (see also Berger, 1969; Luckmann, 1983). However, this social constructivist method also benefits, although to a lesser degree, from the work of Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist approach, as a common ground (like the Polanyian and Gramscian theoretical accounts). This reflects the complexity of the subject under analysis with its postmodern and multi-identity nature and its dynamic process of transformation and identity politics of the post-1990 era. Along with the other critical perspectives discussed (that of Polanyi and Gramsci), the book seeks to explore and examine a number of problematic areas using an outline derived from the three different angles to analyse the constitution of political economy, transformations of Kurdish political identity, and the emergence of a Kurdish model in a historical and contemporary context.

Structure This book is presented in eight main chapters with an introductory section: The Introduction briefly sets the scene by explaining the foundation of the so-called Kurdish question. It elucidates the origins of the nationalist hegemonic struggle between the states (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran) and Kurdish political actors. By examining recent socio-political progress in the ‘new’ Middle East, it discusses the role of different contemporary Kurdish political agents (e.g. PKK, PYD, KRG) and their trans-border struggle in the region with the involvement of external powers (i.e. the United States, the EU, Russia). This initial chapter provides a general understanding of the Kurdish question in general by introducing the main issues, which include nationalism, the state, populism, and political stakeholders, and uses the most recent works in the field to provide an overview for readers. Chapter 1 delivers a background to the study with a brief historical trajectory of Kurdish political economy. The chapter provides a rationale for the theoretical frames; it explains the notion of three main notional accounts (Polanyi, Gramsci, and social constructivism) that constitute the central pillars of our proposed model by producing a critical approach. It familiarises readers with the book’s specific terminology and offers a synopsis of the individual chapters and provides an overview of the book’s structure, while highlighting the emergent arguments. More specifically, it elaborates the key concepts, chronologies, and themes to guide the readers by analysing three main periods in the format of the case study. Finally, it identifies the method and methodology of the book as a fruitful tool to understand the scope of the Kurdish model that emerged as an unorthodox and alternative practice in the Middle East. Chapter 2 critically analyses historical and external factors (e.g. Ottoman rule) that retard the transformation of Kurdish society from a traditional to a market economy society. It investigates the imperial social, political, and economic

Methodology within the Kurdish narrative  25 structure and (great) transformation by examining the central governance, judicial, and socio-religious structure of the Empire. This account creates an opportunity for readers to understand the relations between centre and periphery (Ottoman Kurdistan). Besides, the chapter offers a foundational analysis of the next chapter. It draws mainly on an economic anthropology and social economy perspective which provides insight into the reasons behind the failure of Kurdish society’s transformation and its ‘underdevelopment’ during Ottoman economic projects incorporating institutionalisation and the self-regulating market economy under a modern imperial policy and colonial rule. Chapter 2 provides an analytical understanding of Kurdish society’s conventional institutions, political leadership, and its relation to the macro-economic structure from the Polanyian standpoint of embeddedness and double movement approach. Chapter  3 identifies the internal dynamics (i.e. tribalism) and political elites (e.g. mirs, aghas, and sheikhs) behind the resistance of the base (society/grassroots) to change into an industrialised and modernised nation of the nineteenth century. It examines the characteristics of Kurdish society such as economic behaviour, social relations, and political leadership as well as the role of traditional non-economic institutions in the political economy of self-governance. It focuses on Kurdish reluctance to accept a market economy by their insistence on maintaining an embedded economy based on reciprocity and redistribution principles. Furthermore, it examines the historical and social structure of the Kurdish moral economy during the Ottoman Empire and argues how cultural and religious values were embedded in the economy during the pre-capitalist era. Kurdish political economy is considered part of a double movement which was protectionist and set against the self-regulating market economy in order to rescue land, labour, and money from being fictitious commodities. On the contrary, the Kurdish leadership was unable to respond to the society’s needs and expectations, as some leaders subseded power to the state while others started to serve the state (civil servants or landownership). The lack of visionary leadership meant that the Kurds were unable to integrate into the new world order and its modern institutions that were forming around them. As a result, the linear modernisation process could not be copied in Kurdish territory. Chapter 4 argues that missing out on opportunity within the nineteenth century’s new world order resulted in a hegemonic gap (e.g. not having a sovereign nationstate), which was replaced by the Republic of Turkey as a new external power in the early 1920s. This period of Kurdish history ended with great transformation being imposed by the new Turkish state under Kemalist ideology as a new form of hegemony (Gramscian concept). The ‘great regression’ of Kurdish society in the nineteenth century – which is explained within the last two chapters – created an absence of self-governance. Chapter 4 analyses the war of manoeuvre strategy of the Kurdish socio-political agents as a direct armed response to the Turkification of Kurdishness and the Kemalist ‘imagined community’ project – particularly the Sheikh Said, Ağrı, and Dersim rebellions – during 1925 and 1938. It also moves on to the resulting power struggle in order to explain the new antagonistic relations between the state and society.

26  Methodology within the Kurdish narrative Chapter 5 examines the post-insurgency era that can be identified as a heavy assimilation period of the Kurds in Turkey from 1938. This authoritarian oneparty regime and ‘silent years’ of Kurdish politics are continued until the democratisation process when the pluralist election system is introduced in 1946. The chapter benefits from Gramsci’s notional legacy in explaining how ideological and intellectual contests operated among the various Kurdish political representatives, while the power struggle continued against external cultural supremacy. It is contextualised in terms of the concepts of the historical bloc, war of position (passive revolution), organic and traditional intellectuals, common sense, and the modern Prince. Moreover, it examines the construction of the modern Kurdish political identity that disembedded from Turkish ‘ethno-national imaginaries’ by organic intellectuals through operations in the media, civil society, and political parties in a passive way during the 1950s and early 1960s. The chapter investigates the new strategies and tactics employed by a new intellectual and moral leadership, which challenges the official state definition of Kurdishness in a submissive way until 1984. The previous chapter explored the constitution of modern Kurdish political identity in terms of hegemonic articulation. In the post-1990s, the Kurdish question was embedded in identity politics and democratisation of the country, while the scope of collective will on Kurdishness became a hot topic among members of society. However, Chapter 6 outlines the dominant political identity of the postmodern Kurdish society and inner groups, who espoused the hegemonic Kurdishness. It investigates the multi-diverse social structure and fragmental politics of the society. The chapter spotlights the political pluralism in the social construction of complex Kurdishness that emerged in various forms, such as the national, cultural, political, economic, and social stratas, during the post-1960s until 1984. This dynamic political identity was constructed and developed in the 1960s and 1970s by revolutionary organisations and finally completed and redistributed in the 1990s by the PKK, through contextualising it within the ‘newrozification’ process. The chapter ends with the concept of ‘many Kurdishnesses’ (which appears particularly in the mid-2000s) by drawing a map of identity; focusing on leading manifestations of Kurdishness; and analysing its actors, strategies, discourses, and behaviours. Chapter 6 clarified how the dominant identity has emerged in the political realm. Secular and leftist Kurdishness became a hegemonic power in society, particularly after the PKK’s armed struggle during the 1990s. Moreover, Chapter 7 turns attention to the social construction of EU-ising Kurdishness rhetoric since the early 2000s and evaluates the alternative discourse and articulation of Kurdishness by two main stakeholders of the society: those who embraced conservative Islamic Kurdishness and those who opted for a state-linked or opportunist Kurdishness. The Muslim Kurds and ‘white Kurds’ demand expansion of the borders of existing political identity, particularly after the 2000s. These different socio-political agents internally challenge dominant politics in an agonistic relationship rather than antagonistic to expand the borders of Kurdishness. The chapter also focuses on the symbolic impact of the EU’s discursive politics and

Methodology within the Kurdish narrative  27 institutional policy on macro and micro politics as well as indicating the EUoriginated opportunity spaces that provided an EU-isation of political Kurdish identity alongside the inclusive left-wing populism. A peculiarly Kurdish model is identified as representing a ‘real’ alternative to the illiberal, authoritarian, and majoritarian understanding of the nation-state prevalent in Turkey, the Middle East, and beyond. The final section, Chapter 8, synthesises the theoretical formula and narrative of the book. Likewise, this chapter offers a general theoretical discussion and provides an integrated attempt to contextualise the entire research through a further interpretative method. However, this is accomplished not by discussing the subject in more depth or merely summarising the previous parts, which has already been done in each empirical part’s closing paragraphs. This chapter demonstrates and justifies the respective theories used for each of the different periods and indicates the logic that links them to each other. It also briefly discusses the recent political issues and creates an opportunity for further research questions and debate.

Notes 1 See, Prince Sharaf al-Din Bitlisi (2005/1597), Sharafna’ma or History of the Kurdish Nation; Ahmed-i Khani’s (1694), Mem u Zin Epic; E. M. Noel (1919), Diary of Major E.M. Noel on Special Duty in Kurdistan; Arshak Safrastian (1948), Kurds and Kurdistan Kurds; C. J. Edmonds (1957), Turks and Arabs; Derk Kinnane (1964), The Kurds and Kurdistan; Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou (1965), Kurdistan and the Kurds; İsmail Beşikçi’s (1969), Doğu Anadolu’nun Düzeni; Ismet Cheriff Vanly (1971); Survey of the National Question of Turkish Kurdistan with Historical Background. 2 For example Kirisci and Winrow, 1997; Barkey and Fuller, 1998; Ahmed and Gunter, 2007; Gunes and Zeydanlioglu, 2014; Gambetti and Jongerden, 2015; Unver, 2015; Stanford and Shareef, 2017; Yadirgi, 2018.

2 The political economy origins of Kurds in the Ottoman Empire

Nineteenth-century civilisation has collapsed.

Karl Polanyi

The macro political economy and social structure As the first empirical section of the book, this chapter critically analyses the external dynamics that retard Kurdish self-development from a traditional to a market economy society by citing historical factors. Polanyi’s ideas provide a good starting point. The Great Transformation thesis (1944) aids an understanding of the constitution of Kurdish political economy and its transformation by focusing on the changes within the Empire when Kurds were also part of the Ottoman millet system, a cosmopolitan, multi-religious, and plural–legal classification. The chapter examines the following questions: What was the nature of the social formation and the form of political economy in the Empire? How does the macroeconomy impact its satellite territories, particularly Kurdistan? Answering these questions provides opportunity to explain the changing relations of the state and Kurds during the nineteenth century alongside exploring the uneven development of Kurdish society. It is necessary to apply historical norms to Polanyi’s thesis to identify macro dynamics and the social and political economic development of the periphery, along with the bond between Ottoman and Kurds. The imperialist economy was premised on a low degree of monetisation and delimited transportation and markets which incurred difficulties for an interurban commercial traffic and transforming agricultural surplus into cash in this large territorial arena during the late eighteenth century. The Islamically regulated socio-political relations were embedded in the macro economy of the Empire (Salzmann, 1993, 2010; Birdal, 2010). However, economisation started in the nineteenth century and destroyed the fabric of society. The newly commercialised land, labour, and capital created a fictitious commodity which triggered crisis and clashes with society. Previously, these elements of the mode of production were limited by customs, law, kin, religion, and moral values as well as the mercantilist state policy. Like Marx, Polanyi also identifies them as a foundation of humanity. The following sections,

The political economy origins of Kurds  29 therefore, seek to provide an understanding of the dynamics of the external nexus that influenced the Kurdish political economy.

The socio-religious structure of the Empire It is hard to produce any firm evidence in favour of a homogeneous ethnic and religious Ottoman identity, even though Turkomans and Sunni Islam dominated ethnic and religious identity and oriented the state and society. However, the Ottomans benefited from other traditions and systems in developing their socio-­ cultural identity and social structure. In evidencing this, Inalcik (1985), among others (e.g. Quataert, 2000; Islamoglu-Inan, 1994; Karpat, 1973), argues that the Ottoman Empire inherited distinct traditions from the heirs of the Muslim Turkic/ Arabic Empires, the Persian Empire, and the Christian Roman Empire. As a result, two distinct sections, ruler/elite (saraylı) and ruled/subject (teba/reaya), could be found within the social structure of Ottoman society.1 The masses (reaya) represented the lower layer of Ottoman society, concerned predominantly with agriculture and commerce, and were rarely seen in the political sphere. The subjects, who had to pay taxes and serve in the army, came from different socio-economic groups, and the people of the Empire were divided but co-existed in social harmony along lines of religious belief and faith, which were quite different from modern divisions of race, national identity, and class. The daily lives of people varied according to lifestyles and places where they lived. Generally, the middle class, such as merchants, craftsmen and artisans, lived in urban areas which were the focus of strong political, economic and social relations. However, most of the population comprising peasants or farming families were located in rural regions and worked in the agricultural industry (not dissimilar to life in medieval Europe) (Glavanis and Glavanis, 1990). In the nineteenth century, particularly after the Tanzimat (in 1839) by Sultan Mahmud II, which is followed by Islahat (in 1856) reforms in centralisation of the Ottoman Empire, the traditional social structure of the Empire started to change as the result of significant internal and external factors (Faroqhi, 2005; Karpat, 1973). These included the emergence of a new population demographic due to rapid territorial expansion, the appearance of new internal actors (i.e. Supreme Council for Judicial Regulations, which limited the sultan’s power), technological developments, increase in transportation, and an industrial revolution (Karpat, 2000). Changes to the economic structure and the emergence of new political powers (e.g. Young Turks) became major factors in triggering the transformation of Ottoman society (Karpat, 1973; Mardin, 2000), which designated citizens (tebaa) without categorising people their religious identity and establishing a constitutionalist (Meşrutiyet) regime in 1876 and 1909. This reform project was largely concerned with the centralisation of the administration and the reinforcement and restructuring of the military aimed at unifying the society and with the objective of regaining the Ottoman’s previous imperial power. In the Empire, Muslims were the dominant group in society, but under

30  The political economy origins of Kurds the distinctive millet system they did not have privileged legal status over other religious groups (Miller, 1913). Despite this, the psychological superiority of Turks remained an important political reality, although the special position – de facto independence – of the Kurds, like other Muslim communities Albanians and Arabs (Edmonds, 1957), had been acknowledged by the centre through granting large-scale autonomy in those areas where the Kurds were in a majority, namely the geographical territory of Kurdistan (Culcasi, 2006). Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, although the social structure of the Ottoman system had fundamentally changed (Karpat, 2000; Miller, 1913), the millet system remained formally valid incorporating a new social and economic foundation. However, this new social order arising from a combination of external and internal factors could not stop nationalist aspirations that had been awakened in the Empire, and nationalist uprisings continued to mutate the millet system (Sirman, 2007).

The imperial administrative and judicial structures At first glance, the Ottoman political system can be described through the following constituents: a dynastic tyranny, praetorianism and the rule of religion, the sultan, and a corrupt bureaucracy (Inalcik, 1985). Under the Ottoman system, sovereignty was practised in both a religious (sharia/sher’i) and secular/ cultural (örfi) mode, legitimated in, and attributed to, the name of Allah (God) and implemented by the sultan. Religious legitimacy was an essential source of the sustainability of the Empire. Through the institutions of the caliphate, sultans enjoyed extensive hegemonic power over the members of the ummah (the worldwide Muslim ­community) (Sykes, 1915). Accordingly, the Kurds as Muslims were loyal to the sultan sustained by an implicit religious contract. This particular religious link meant that Kurdish society, especially Sunni Muslim, was given special protection until the dismantling of the caliphate. Fundamentally, the administrative system of the Ottoman Empire was constituted in terms of both central and peripheral (local) powers, with the sultan, an absolute ruler whose authority was vested in various agents, representing the centre (Faroqhi, 2005; Miller, 1913). Local administrations constituted another aspect of the bureaucratic system and were based on a judge (kadı) in charge of the legal system and a commander (subaşı), who was in charge of the political structures. This double mechanism particularly applied to newly conquered and distant territories, such as the Balkans, other areas of the Mediterranean, North Africa, Kurdistan, and Arabia (Barkey K., 1994; Edmonds, 1957). Until the later move towards centralisation occurred, some peripheral territories were controlled by local leaders, who had de facto autonomy and shared the administration with regional civil servants (uçbeyleri). Such were the mîrs (emirates) of Kurdistan who assumed the privileged role of governing the region with an official self-governance since the agreement between Sultan Selim I  and Mîr Idris-i Bitlisi in the Çaldıran combat between Ottoman and Safavid Empire in 1515 (Ozoglu, 2004; Bitlisi, 2005/1597). During

The political economy origins of Kurds  31 the reforms of the nineteenth century, the new modern state system made it easier to organise, administrate, tax, and control the large population within the Empire’s massive territory. In the second half of the eighteenth century, another actor became effective on the public stage: notables (ayans, eşrafs, esnafs, begs etc.), who replaced the devşirme janissaries (sipahis) and came to occupy positions of power that were neither in central government nor in the sub-government civil service by controlling the lands tenure (tımar-mirlik-yurtluk-ocaklık) (Karpat, 1973; Quataert, 2000; Hanioglu, 2010). In the regions of the periphery, ayans started to share some of the roles of the state and to manage public land and collect taxes for the state (Islamoglu-Inan, 1994). In this capacity, they brought a perspective different from that of the more conservative state through the liberalisation of economic relations, the universalisation of trade, changes to the methods of production, the development of market economies, an increase in capitalist enterprises, and attempts to invest in sectors besides agriculture. In the expansion of the self-regulating market economy during the early nineteenth century (Pamuk, 2000, 2009), the transformation has already been initiated by the international capitalist agents (Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015), with the collaboration of notables. Both central and local actors sought to bring protection for an individual property, freedom of trade, and the mobilisation of goods and labour in the imperial territory, including the area of Kurdistan. This is probably the most fundamental stage in the transformation of the Ottoman structure from its absolutist, semi-feudal, agricultural character into a modernist and capitalist one through the processes of industrialisation, mechanisation, mass production, and integration to the international market economy, which gradually replaced traditional non-economic institutions (Fleet, 2006). Expanding markets through monetisation dissolved the old land-based system, sultanic law, and fiefs (tımar) by projecting new classes, political actors, and legal authority (i.e. juristic law). Nevertheless, Istanbul was unable to influence principalities, until the Tanzimat institutional centralisation policy (in 1839), where the government underwent a journey into the formation of the market economy and restructured the provincial bureaucracy in Kurdistan (Ozok-Gundogan, 2019), while some of the notables were executed and replaced by civil servants, instituting paths to the modern state. As a result, the tendency towards centralisation and standardisation had an impact on the financial and political autonomy of the peripheral terrains (including Kurdistan’s de facto position) (Kasaba, 1988). Before this transition took place, there was a social, political, and economic agreement between the centre and the periphery that had been preserved in law (supported by religion and custom) and provided a form of self-autonomy, with the state providing financial and military support (Deringil, 1998). The judiciary constituted a major segment of the Ottoman bureaucratic class and was responsible for the application and explanation of law throughout the Empire’s domains, a task of profound importance in Islamic societies.

32  The political economy origins of Kurds

The economic structure of the central power In major rural areas, the economic structure in the Empire was largely based on agricultural and pastoral nomadic modes of production, that is pre-capitalist relationships, although in urban settlements there were domestic and some foreign merchants engaged in commerce (Faroqhi, 2005; Fleet, 2006). Primarily, the Ottoman economic system was formed in the non-capitalist mode of production as a semi-feudal type different than its European counterparts (Salzmann, 2010; Islamoglu-Inan, 2008; Kasaba, 1988). The surplus from agricultural production was redistributed by the central authority through a local apparatus, which took a certain amount in taxes, thus ensuring political control over the economy. This function of the state was organised through the land-based tax assignments (tımar) system (Inalcik, 1985; Islamoglu-Inan, 1994), which became a key fiscal, financial, and political system for sustaining hegemonic power along with the implementation of state policy. The tımar (yurtluk-ocaklık) system was a political economic mechanism for integrating social agents into the state structure, thus also enabling state involvement in the mode of production and the distribution of surpluses. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, privatisation and a new type of land structure started to emerge for economic and military reasons, which reflected the cumulative changes within the state–society relationship. As Yadirgi (2018: 67) argues “since the rural economy, both agricultural and pastoral, was the principal source of wealth for the imperial treasury, the destabilisation of the rural economy and life created the condition for disaster” in the Empire due to increased military expansion and a growing population. The tımar system was not adequate and was replaced by a tax-farmed leased system, which was called iltizam, and meant that the sultans farmed out the collection of taxes to private bidders via auction. This gave tax-collecting rights to local potentates (mültezims), holders of iltizam that were predominantly controlled by the notables (ayans, eşref families, etc.) (Barkey K., 1994; Bayraktar, 2016). This transformation of the tımar system, from janissaries to ayans, made the ayans an important player in the domestic market. Later, they were to become an alternative political power against the centre, transforming Ottoman traditional agricultural relations of production and social formation via integrating them into the international (primarily European) market economy by exchanging surpluses for money in response to the demand for goods by foreign merchants and thus utilising labour productivity in a money-dominant economy (Pamuk, 2000). This new system grew into a money-based economy and became a cash source for the government through the ayans, rather than the government itself. Moreover, such ‘fiscal-institutional options involve internalisation into a highly bureaucratized state” (Salzmann, 1993: 395). The abolition of the tımar system and the introduction of a new legal code with regard to land in the middle of the nineteenth century made it easy to obtain land as private property, which deeply affected the nature of the land-based economy and society (even impacting on Kurdistan although it had not exactly been part

The political economy origins of Kurds  33 of the tımar system) (Faroqhi, 2005). In this newly emerging system, land could have a price and be rented out, and thus turned into a fictitious commodity, hence moving from the embeddedness of the Ottoman moral economy to the capitalist economic relations that separated social values from the economy (Pamuk, 2009). However, Kurdish social structure was based on traditional land relations, and under the new system, the Kurds were forced to change too as a periphery of the centre (Barth, 1953). This was encouraged by big landowners (sheikh/aghas), who had superseded the emirate (mîr) leadership and had developed a new type of relationship with the state (Eppel, 2016), particularly during the centralisation of governance and a self-regulating market economy. After the new arrangements on landownership, especially when some aghas were given large tracts of land by the central government for their collaboration, these new actors introduced sharecroppers and many small farmers disappeared to become unemployed. As a result of the changes to landownership and use, labour and land started to become commoditised all over the Empire, although the economy remained embedded in the socio-political relations of the periphery (Birdal, 2010). The production process remained predominantly aimed at producing goods needed for Ottoman economic life rather than to raise money in the international market (Barkey K., 1994; Pamuk, 2009; Fleet, 2006). At this point, production was not fully involved in a money–commodity cycle in terms of laissez-faire market principles. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the political economy of the Empire, subjected to the dynamics of the European global market rather than just to the needs of the Empire itself (Birdal, 2010), progressively evolved into a multifaceted socio-economic system; although up until its demise, the Empire’s political economy only had a peripheral status in the complex international market (Inalcik, 1985; Islamoglu-Inan, 2008; Fleet, 2006). European merchants became an essential intermediary in the relations between the local Ottoman market and European global markets in the late nineteenth century (Owen and Pamuk, 1999; Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015). The self-regulating market economy had started to become a dominant feature of the Ottoman economy with the banking system, commercialisation of agriculture products, and industrialisation and engagement with European markets.

Kurdish social protectionism drive The transformation of the Ottoman socio-political mechanism was followed by a policy of centralisation and intervention by state institutions in the Kurdistan region that prompted Kurds to try to eliminate the new external threat to their cultural structure and political authority. This capitalisation momentum shifts economy vis-à-vis society, as the economic liberalism project was disintegrating communities, rupturing solidarity and despoiling nature. The self-regulating market economy was destroying livelihood from the ravages of the market. The Kurdish non-economic institutions were a leading force in the resistance and struggle for protection. The regional political agents (i.e. the mîrs, aghas) replaced the role

34  The political economy origins of Kurds of the state in the taxing and distribution of income in the region. The majority of principalities became very responsive to the demands of the central government (Ozoglu, 2004). The struggle occurred between the centre’s marketisation, which aimed to disembed the economy and control the provincial governors (emirates/ tribes), and the peripheral counter-movement that wanted to protect the native socio-economic relations and political autonomy and, hence, keep an embedded economy within social institutions and maintain self-determination against this external peril. The Kurdish principalities mobilised tribes to defend their community and habitats, and their cross-class bloc aimed to preserve self-sufficiency and livelihood against the imperialist-led income-oriented system. Abdulrahman Pasha, the Prince of Baban, had started the initial opposition to the centralisation and marketisation pressure in 1788; this continued with a protective counter-attack by Prince İsmail Pasha Badiani in the areas of Ahmedy, Duhok, and Akra in 1830. This conventional counter-movement was followed by the well-known rebellion of Mîr Muhammad of Rawanduz in 1834 (Jwaideh, 1982). These counter-attacks occurred after the empire had changed its policy towards the region; while at the same time the centre was having difficulty in establishing its new arrangements for the constitution of Ottoman society. The state was able to defuse the mîrs’ uprisings due to the region’s fragmented politics, its individual and multi-headed style leadership, and its unstable unity and complex social structure. There had always been internal hegemonic power struggles among mîrs (or tribes) (Eppel, 2016), who were seeking to gain the intellectual, moral, and political leadership of Kurdish society. The struggle between Kurdish internal actors to obtain political leadership was a determining socio-political factor in the region that became a guiding reason behind the establishment of alliances with outsiders. This proved a handicap both to Kurdish unity, leading therefore to a lack of coalitions, and to winning the struggle against external powers. Nevertheless, the mîrs endeavoured to extend their legitimacy over all other tribes by building a bloc that acted as a ‘tribune of Kurdish people’ during the struggle with the Ottomans (Gunter, 2016). With some successful politics in the region, mîrs, such as those of the Bedirkhan dynasty, started to control the political economy of the region. Besides, locals, who were under the protection of the emirates – including non-Muslim Yezidis and Nestorians – also encountered the Tanzimat reforms (Acikyildiz, 2014), such as the colonial census, which aimed to control the population and individuation of fiscal responsibility (i.e. taxing) in the mid-1800s (Ozok-Gundogan, 2019). The armed struggle was generally adopted for the protection of the Kurdishembedded economy, hence socio-political structure. After the suppression of Mîr Muhammad’s insurgency, the famous Bedirkhan Beg, the Mîr of Botan (McDowall, 2000), who was another powerful leader in the region, continued the demand for sovereignty in 1847. After his failed revolt, the resistance was taken up later under the charismatic leadership of Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri in 1880 to stop the imperialist tendency of the Bab-i Ali government, which was the last battle against Ottoman imperialism undertaken by charismatic conventional leaders

The political economy origins of Kurds  35 (Ozoglu, 2004; Klein, 2011). However, these charismatic individual-led combats did not change the result of the rebellion; neither did the previous ventures that resulted in the suppression of the Kurdish polity in the Kurdistan region. Consequently, all the principalities disappeared, and Kurdish territory and society became completely subjugated to the central rule of the Ottomans, as the Kurdistan Province (Jwaideh, 1982; McDowall, 2000). The self-governance rights of the Kurdish emirates vanished and the leadership lost its privilege (Eppel, 2016) that led the politics of the region to be increasingly controled by the Istanbul administration. Hilmi (1998) claims that in such an environment, Sultan Abdulhamid II aimed to obliterate the Kurdish principalities and their national cohesion as this would provide an opportunity for the Ottoman power to gain legitimacy in the Kurdish ‘counter-geography’. This top-down transformation of the Kurdish political economy provided an opportunity for a new type of leadership to emerge in Kurdish society such as the aghas/sheikhs, who superseded the mîrs and took the opportunity to lead the bloc of the protectionist movement (van Bruinessen, 1992, 2000a). These new internal agents seized the opportunity to achieve full supremacy over civil society to generate leadership by protecting the social structure and economic system. This independent leadership was legitimised in society and was rooted in religious knowledge, common identity, social charisma, and protectionism. The new political actors, as influential agents, sought to fill the gap that had emerged after the decline of Ottoman legitimacy and endeavoured to reverse the state’s reformist project, even if necessary, through an armed struggle. As a result, there were continuous uprisings, led by new actors such as Sheikh Said Barzinja (chief of the Hamawand tribe in Sulaymaniyah) in 1908, Sheikh Abdulsalam in Bitlis, İbrahim Pasha of the Milli Tribal Confederation in 1909, and Abdulqadir Ibn Derae, the leader of Karackachili tribe, as well as the resistance around the River Euphrates (Jwaideh, 1982; Gavan, 1958; Olson, 1989; Mella, 2005), and the remarkable rebellion of 1913 in Bitlis. These reactions also demonstrate that the marketisation/centralisation project of the Ottoman state was declining in the region. Nevertheless, these rebels did not completely impair and obstruct the relationship between the Ottoman sultan/caliphate regime and the traditional/religious Kurdish ruling class. The Hamidiye Alayları (cavalry corps) as imperial local troops played a crucial role and became a key part of the state’s security agenda in terms of domestic and cross-border (Armenian and Russian) issues in the early 1900s (Aytar, 2000; Deringil, 1998; Süphandağ, 2006). The Kurdish untidy armed forces were also responsible for the ‘Armenian genocide’ (Akcam, 2018; Gocek, 2014; Ungor, 2011; Bloxham, 2007) and internal colonisation of the Kurdistan region, as they enjoyed the political and judicial protection of Istanbul. Abdulhamid II’s autocratic regime utilised an educational strategy, such as Aşiret Mektepleri (Imperial Tribal Schools) in 1892 (Akpinar and Rogan, 2001), to engineer the cultural and moral leadership of the Kurdish people. Abdulhamid also used the Hamidiye Cavalry as tools in his hegemonic aspiration, while not giving up on his two-prong approach. The Hamidiye strategy clearly demonstrated the state’s policy on Kurdish matters and its potential outcomes in society (Duguid, 1973).

36  The political economy origins of Kurds Such policies were aimed at giving full authority to the centre through powersharing and political cooperation, with the co-option of internal agents who were the supreme power in the region, by using an appeal to a pan-Islamic culture. Besides, Abdulhamid’s Hamidiye Cavalry became a vital vehicle of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) against the Armenians in the region; these irregular armed tribal alliances (some of them criminals, like Mustafa Pasha, see Klein, 2011) were responsible for the slaughter of the Armenians in Diyarbekir in 1895 (Ungor, 2012; Gocek, 2014; Akcam, 2018). While the Young Turks, later, as one of the main components of the CUP, emerged as a progressive movement that shifted into a nationalist and socialDarwinist movement in Ottoman politics during the later stages of the Empire to challenge the sultan’s absolutism (Zürcher, 2012; Hanioglu, 2001; Ahmad, 1969). They formed an intellectual leadership that pursued a revolutionary programme through the 1876 and 1908 coup d’états that sought to establish a new order, a constitutional monarchy, based on westernisation, positivism, enlightenment, and a reformist culture. This first came into being through the declaration of the constitutional regime (Meşrutiyet I in 1876 and Meşrutiyet II in 1908). This new regime was based on a parliamentary system, constitutional rules, and modern citizenship relations between the state and its subjects. Kansu (2000) claims it was a continuing battle between the old, absolutist mentality and the new, liberal worldview. Kurdistan as a region still recognised the semi-independency. The conservative and traditional Kurdish leaders in the imperial capital were not eager to be a part of the new CUP movement as it constituted a threat to their internal hegemonic power which had already been approved by the sultan. On the other hand, the involvement of Kurdish actors (as a Kurdish counter-movement against traditional Kurdish domination) in the establishment of the CUP was motivated by a belief that they could seize power, with the support of the Young Turks, and participate in the central power struggle between the old and new polity (Bajalan, 2010). Consequently, the Kurdish elites divided into two camps, seeing on the one side sultan/caliph supporters as conservative, religious, traditionalist Kurds, keen to hold onto autonomy (e.g. Seyyid Abdulkadir, Milli İbrahim Paşa). On the other side, the pro-CUP comprising nationalist, secular, and modernist Kurds wanted to form a sovereign nation-state (e.g. Şerif Paşa, Bedirhanis). While the city notables (i.e. eşraf families, begs, craftsmen), Cemilpaşazedeler, and Pirinçcizadeler (Jongerden and Verheij, 2012) became effective in the public sphere. This division also demonstrates that the Kurdish elite groups sought an opportunity through the Empire’s power struggle to pursue their regional demands. The victory of the CUP postponed the antagonistic relations between components of the CUP, who adhered to several political traditions. The Social-­Darwinist approach of the CUP’s leadership led this new hegemonic power which lost its legitimacy and consent in the eyes of Ottoman society (Bayraktar, 2013), especially among non-Muslim and non-Turk populations, when the Unionists started to utilise Islamic discourse in detriment to the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire (i.e. the ‘Armenian genocide’), who dominated the economic and political spheres

The political economy origins of Kurds  37 (Akcam, 2018). The issue of ethnicity arose with the notion of an ethnic ‘Turkishness’ promulgated by the Unionist members of the Young Turk movement to create a post-millet, homogenous nation (Luke, 1936; Lewis B., 1961; Zürcher, 2012), while they entered the First World War (WWI) in 1914 siding with the Triple Alliance of Germany to regain imperial power and lost territory (General, 1919). This was enacted, for example, by changing place names written in Greek, Bulgarian, Armenian, or altering Muslim Arab and Kurdish names to Turkish ones in 1915 (Nişanyan, 2011). A deportation law was declared, designed to be implemented in areas dominated by Armenian, Assyrian, and Kurds (Ungor, 2012; Aboona, 2008). The Kurds experienced their fair share of suffering as a result of the CUP’s policies. During this period of oppression and ultra-nationalism, Kurdish organisations, schools, and publications were prohibited and notable ­figures imprisoned or exiled (Bajalan, 2010). Significant numbers of Kurds looked up to the Liberal Union led by Prince Sabahaddin in opposition to the CUP’s centralisation and homogenising politics. Of all the uprisings that took place in the late Ottoman era, the rebellion of 1920–1921 in the Koçgiri region led by Alişan Beg and Nuri Dersimi became a crucial point in the resistance of the Kurdish counter-movement against the interventionist market and bureaucratic administrative pretender. This was the last battle between the Empire and Kurdish elites and the beginning of a first serious clash between two new hegemonic actors, the founders of modern Turkey, the Kemalists and Kurdish nationalist agents (Dersimi, 1999; Öz, 1999). It can be posited that the counter-movement of the Kurds not only opposed the Kemalist Republic but also resisted the CUP’s constitutional monarchy as a successor to the archaic traditional sultanate/caliphate of the Ottoman regime, as under all of them the Kurds had always been the subject of oppression. Following Kansu’s (2000) arguments, the Kurdish socio-political movement had struggled since the late Ottoman era into the Kemalist nation-building process. There was no break in the Kurdish counter-movement between those two periods; only the actors, goals, and demands were different as the nature of the struggle emerged in a different form, arising as social protection, in the Empire dislodged by the hegemonic political articulation in the Republic. The political, cultural, and hegemonic struggle between Turkification and Kurdishness effectively started through a strategy based on a war of manoeuvre in Gramscian terms (see Chapter 3). Under these aforementioned circumstances, the Kurds attempted to sustain their own cultural and national values as well as their moral economy. However, when the Kurdish leadership miscarried during subsequent armed clashes, authority ceded to the middle classes (merchants, landlords, etc.) and small industrialists arose along with an urban lifestyle. This resulted from the creation of new commercial relations arising from the use of the surplus from their household economy (Yüksel, 1993). Attempts were also made to form a Kurdish intelligentsia by sending their children to metropolitan or European schools to be educated in environments where nationalist discourses prevailed (Alakom, 1998). Kurdish society shaped their political economy and desire for cultural freedom through engagement with various opposition parties during the Empire’s political

38  The political economy origins of Kurds transition and through political mobilisation aimed at protecting their cultural heritage (for instance via the Bedirhan uprisings by Botan emirates, 1840). Despite this, the Kurds during the late nineteenth century could not disband traditional socio-economic structures nor replace them with modern institutions, such as a market economy and nation-state. On the contrary, the society challenged the formation of a market economy, occasioned by economic liberalism arising from industrialism and capitalism, and insisted on protecting their moral economy based on tribal cultural codes and religious (Sufi-oriented) values (van Bruinessen, 2000b; Beşikçi, 1969; Yuksel, 2009). Kurdish resistance and rejection of this new economic reality and their desire to preserve their embeddedness meant that the economy remained instilled within social relations while economic activity and agricultural production were not compatible with a capitalist mode of production. Production was insufficient for the market economy, or to gain competitive advantage, which adversely compromised integration into the international economic system. Industrialisation of the region was hampered by insufficient capital, entrepreneurs, and modern institutions. These internal facets (alongside the well-known external factors) delayed the modernisation of Kurdish society leading to its late development in relation to the modern industrialised world.

Ottoman Kurdistan in the fin de siècle The account of great transformation holds considerable promise for theorising the Kurdish case. It helps analyse the form and content of the social formation through an examination of its pre-capitalist mode of production from a moral economy in a cultural and anthropological economic perspective during the emirates’ de facto autonomy (Eppel, 2016; Eickelman, 1981). Polanyi as a guild socialist, like Marx, emphasises the social struggle between marketisation and cross-class movement for protecting the structure of society and an economy embedded in non-economic institutions and norms. This account identifies the reasons behind the resistance of the ‘base’ (i.e. the grassroots) to change and their reluctance to accept a capitalist society via their insistence on maintaining an embedded economy based on reciprocity. This social foundation had not changed significantly since the Kurdish dynasties converted to Islam (during the tenth to twelfth centuries), and, as a result, the society retained traditional institutions (Özer, 2009). Consequently, the Kurds were not integrated within (or interested in) modern institutions, as everyday life was experienced and conceptualised in terms of spiritual/religious values and customs, rather than capitalist and materialist matters. The major reason offered by scholars within a Eurocentric, essentialist, and orientalist approach (whether consciously or unconsciously) for the failure of Kurdish society is attributed to a lack of modern institutions, capitalist economy, national unity, durable state and bureaucratic culture (Vanly, 1971; Jwaideh, 1982; McDowall, 2000), and determining the impact of external dynamics (Britain, Russia etc.). However, this chapter provides a ground for the next one which pursues a different direction by highlighting the intrinsic behaviours of the society in the

The political economy origins of Kurds  39 political economy of the Kurdish historical trajectory, thereby analysing the cultural dynamics which encompass a staunch loyalty to tradition, feudal social formation, and a reciprocity-based moral economy. Acknowledging the intra-elements of Kurdish society is important in understanding the development of the political economy. The extant literature in relation to understanding this uneven development proves inadequate, as it mostly refers to external factors primed as major influences. In responding to this core question, the modernist and linear developmentalist approaches (Culcasi, 2006; Jones, 1998/1857; Bird, 1891; Dickson, 1910; Hay, 1921; Leach, 1940; Barth, 1953) argue that it was the absence of modern political institutions, such as a nation-state, a bourgeoisie and working class, civil society and the lack of capitalist modes of production, with a concomitant process of industrialisation and urbanisation, that has constituted an obstacle to the process of Kurdish societal and political economy transformation. It also claims that “the absence of railroads and the expensive forms of transportation in these regions as playing a determinate role in the underdevelopment in these areas” (Yadirgi, 2018: 123). According to this dependency theory, which shaped in a positivist, statistic, and de-humanised economy approach, the transportation barriers created difficulty for the Kurdish subordinate economy to maintain commercial activities and, hence, integrate the Empire and the European market. “Thereby delayed the destruction of the selfsufficient nature of the rural economies, the commercialisation of agriculture and the rise of demand for imported manufacture” (Yadirgi, 2018: 123). We are not disapproving such facts but argue that predominantly the internal institutions drove the Kurdish resistance to the great transformation. Our analysis here goes beyond the only external dynamics and macro factors perspective by scrutinising the domestic aspiration to avantgarde as expressed and articulated through society’s foundation. The first evidence of a Kurdish attempt at transforming the premodern society into a market economy society cannot be seen effectively until the market economy principles was pushed by the new policies of modern Turkey in the early twentieth century. It is a time when the failure of Kurdish leadership and counter-movements to instigate change within Kurdish society was becoming widely acknowledged. This period is also known as a time of missed opportunities for the Kurdish society to integrate into the new world order (e.g. form a nation-state). Consideration given to the role of the Kurds in the Ottoman Empire helps to explain how their political economy emerged separately until the Empire’s crisis of existence. The Ottoman modernist administration characterised the Kurdistan region as unruly, tribal, and primitive which was governed by ancient Kurdish chiefdoms (Ozok-Gundogan, 2019) in Ottoman Kurdistan during the late 1800s. Kurds, similar to the other minority groups (e.g. Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Albanians, and Arabs) of the Ottoman Empire (General, 1919; Aboona, 2008; Bozarslan, 2006), lived within the millet system. This system divided society into different ethnic and religious communities; each group maintained its own regulation in education, religion, or justice. It granted legal and political autonomy to different religious communities allowing systems of self-rule run by their

40  The political economy origins of Kurds own ethnic and religious authorities. However, the rise of nationalism as the new political ideology in the nineteenth century triggered the emergence of nationalist movements wishing to build their own nation-states, from the Christian Balkans to Armenia and later extending as far as the Muslim-Arab lands (Al, 2019; Bozarslan, 2006). Unlike other ethnic and religious groups, however, the Kurds opted to stay with the Turks and fought with them in Anatolia. During the late era of the Empire, political actors were searching for ways to save the state and maintain the unity of society (Mardin, 2000). These political actors advocated the political and social modernisation of the imperial system under various political concepts and models. Out of this process, the Young Turks and the CUP founded by the Unionist members of the Young Turks became an important actor in the intellectual and political arena, while different suggestions and approaches were debated in the Empire regarding the reformation of the state’s political structure (Ahmad, 1969). For instance Ottomanism (Tanzimatisation), Islamism (Ummah; the Islamic community), and Turanism (the unity of Turkic world) were suggested by different groups as a way of saving the Empire (Al, 2019; Hanioglu, 2001). While the Empire and various ethnic and religious groups were undergoing historical change, the Kurds, particularly the Kurdish elites, supported the efforts of the Ottoman ruling class to assure the conformity of these ethnic groups as demonstrated through their willingness to integrate into the new modern world order. The Kurdish elites sought retention of their power within the new system, which was interrupted by the emergence of Turkish nationalism partly via Unionist members of the CUP, who influenced by a Western model of nationalism aimed to homogenise Ottoman society in terms of ‘Turkic’ values through constructing a new type of subject fit for the new regime of Triumvirate that formed within constitutionalism (Meşrutiyet I-II) (Kansu, 2000). This new subject would be an ethnically Turkish Sunni Muslim (perhaps adhering to the Hanafi school of thought) (Ahmad, 2003; Gingeras, 2016). The Unionist leader cadres of the Young Turk government and bureaucratic elites began to exclude the identities of non-­ Muslims, namely Armenians, Rums, Assyrians, and Jews from the public sphere, while assimilating non-Turkic Muslims, particularly Kurds, as well as Laz, Arabs, and peoples from the Balkans and Caucasus (Ahmad, 1969; Hanioglu, 2001). This resulted in resistance from non-Turks, especially the Kurdish people, and eventually led to the dispersal of the Ottoman Empire and instigated the ‘Armenian genocide’ (Gocek, 2014; Ungor, 2011; Bloxham, 2007). The CUP’s progressive transformation policy of the Empire shifted into Social-Darwinism (Bozarslan, 2018; Bayraktar, 2013) that permeated every aspect of life. This destroyed the fundamental nature of Ottoman society, accompanied by an emergent political mobilisation of ethnic and religious minorities previously marginalised by this new direction (Karpat, 2000).

Conclusion Discussion within this chapter focussed on how the Ottoman rural economy transformed into a business opportunity for the industrialised emerging global

The political economy origins of Kurds  41 market economy. The international self-regulating market economy system forced the Empire to integrate, for example, through capitulation2 (Birdal, 2010). The Kurdish political economy became independently constituted during the Empire and afterwards was forced to transform under the subjugation of imperialism and colonisation during the marketisation process (this led to the confiscation of the land and the institution of the census), as a part of the neoimperial project. The janissaries were supplanted by ayans in the socio-economic life of the Empire through the Sened-i Ittifak (Bill of Alliance) agreement in 1808, while the political power granted to the ayans transformed them into an important feature of the Ottoman socio-economic structure (i.e. the land law in 1858). Meanwhile, the Kurdish rulers (mîrs) enjoyed their de facto independence in controlling the region. However, they failed to develop the economy of Kurdistan to meet the needs of the international market, and they could not commercialise Kurdish agriculture production nor change the mode of production to form society alongside liberal principles. In the late nineteenth century, the self-governance of Kurdish political leadership and relations between Kurdish society and the state shifted and developed through imposed changes to the political economy within the Kurdistan region by the Ottoman modernisation and capitalisation process. The tımar-yurtluk-ocaklık land system was under the control of mîrs (Ozok-Gundogan, 2014). The Ottoman state, following the centralisation and liberalisation project of the Empire, attempted to introduce the fundamental elements of reformism into Kurdish society, injecting a market economy, industrialisation, capitalist transition, and a bureaucratic state organisation. This external-oriented transformation process continued and allowed individual property rights concerned with land ownership patterns and tax revenues for the central authority to emerge by disrupting traditional social structures and economic relations. The self-regulating market order came to dominate the Ottoman (macro) political economy (Birdal, 2010), while Kurdish society resisted, remaining characterised by local traditional nomadic and semi-feudal types of production. Primarily, Kurdish society was a peripheral economy with an underdeveloped background that resembled the political economy of other colonised countries (Beşikçi, 1991). It also lacked a nation-state and modern institutions and the appropriate conditions such as industrialisation, commercialisation, a legal framework for economic relations, and the productive forces necessary for a liberal economy to develop in the region. The existing legal, political, and economic conditions were strongly in opposition to liberal principles, such as the commercialisation of agricultural products and wages based on labour, and so were difficult to integrate into the society. Kurdish society did not demonstrate a need to build financial institutions and an efficient capital market, nor to reduce the transformation costs both in terms of production and trade, as their embedded economy was locally self-financing. The economic relations of society, embedded as they were in social relations, did not accommodate a shift from the traditional structure of the economy to a modern capitalist one, nor

42  The political economy origins of Kurds encourage the development of modern political, social, and economic institutions despite the ongoing economic progress at the centre and in the rest of the Empire. Transformation within the Kurdish economy could not occur until self-regulatory market principles were embedded in the modes of production and pre-capitalist modes of production began to dissolve. The leadership (mîrs, aghas, and sheikhs), which formed the superstructure of Kurdish society, emerged as social protectionism against attempted destruction. Refusal to share local power and pay taxes to the central government and resistance to the internationalisation of regional markets ensued, alongside resistance to the commoditisation of labour and land. Such attempts inspired a rebellion against the centralising policy of the Empire. In this way, the Kurdish leaders challenged the central authority of the Empire to protect the social structure, keep the economy within existing social relations, and continue to maintain their political power, and thus sustain quasi-independence. Rather than pay taxes to the Ottoman state emirates, levies were collected from their own people and utilised for their own purposes (Eppel, 2016). These leaders retained economic control by deploying local resources for their own development programmes. Nevertheless, from the Tanzimat Reforms (in 1839), which called for equality for all ethnic and religious nations, the Empire gradually imposed its centralisation process reducing the political impact of the Kurdish leaders and changing the nature of kinship relations which would eventually transform the social structures of society in the twentieth century (although the full transformation did not occur for many decades). Like the Caucasus and Balkans, the Kurdish province’s centuries-old regional autonomy had been cast away by reforms. The transitioning political and economic formations within the Empire, which resulted from the intervention of external European capitalists as well as internal challenges, such as the ayans, raised a number of questions in relation to the Kurds. Examination here considered Kurdish responses to those new principles and rejection of the self-regulating economy system in their region. Formation of communication with new actors or ruling classes during the state’s initial policy in the region was discussed. In the preceding run-up, Kurdish leaders were deeply involved in the Ottoman state apparatus and became members of the Meclis-i Ayan (parliament), diplomats, pashas as well as local governors. Distancing themselves from the masses, they became civil servants on the state’s payroll. ‘Istanbulian Kurds’ possessed an ambiguous perspective on the future of Kurdish society, as the Empire adapted to the changing balance of power in Europe (Alakom, 1998) with some Kurdish leaders unwilling to relinquish privileged positions gained under this system after the reduction of the mîrs’ powers in the region and the triggering of modernism and Kurdish nationalism.

Notes 1 Primarily, the ruling elites comprised, on the one hand, the sultan’s household, the military segment (seyfiye), and religious institutions (Sheikh ul-Islam), and on the other hand, they comprised middle power actors, scientists (ilmiye and kalemiye), and dönme/

The political economy origins of Kurds  43 devshirme (converters), a civil- and military-oriented elite, formally defined as kapıkullu, who were respectively trained at the madrasas (religious schools) and Enderun (palace schools) as scribal officers for their professional education. 2 The economic privileges were given by the Empire to other states, such as Britain and France, in commercial activity and trade which was granted by law.

3 Kurdish moral economy Historical perspectives on embeddedness

The discarding of the market utopia brings us face to face with the reality of society. Karl Polanyi

Embeddedness in the Kurdish social formation The previous chapter highlighted the duality of movement between the Ottoman marketisation and the social protectionism of Kurdish political agents. “The economic penetration of Europe into the Ottoman Empire deepened, and the Ottoman state had diminished its international position as well as its territorial possessions” (Yadirgi, 2018: 93). This political–economic change posed an external threat to Kurdish society, who deemed it necessary to oppose. However, understanding societal transformation requires analysis referencing internal factors. Existing literature on Kurdish studies lacks anthropological, cultural, and moral economy input, thus the requisite tools to understand the impact of internal dynamics and social structure on constituting Kurdish political economy are absent. Rather the literature on Kurdish political economy employs a realistic approach to evaluate the society within the macro political economy as a part of the trajectory of the state (Ottoman/Turkey) (Yadirgi, 2018). Yet, it is difficult to explain when deploying such an essentialist theoretical framework (e.g. dependency theory) how the political economy is ‘separately’ and internally developed by the Kurdish emirates and shaped by Kurdish tribal and Islamic values and non-economic institutions. Consequently, pertinent questions arise while seeking to resolve the aforementioned issues, which include: (i) What role did Kurdish internal dynamics play during the nineteenth century? (ii) How did the embeddedness and traditional social structure of Kurdish society affect the great transformation process? (iii) Why did the leaders fail to lead society into the new world order? Responses to such questions require an investigation of influences embedded within social, cultural, and religious institutions (e.g. kin/tribal relationship, consanguineous marriage, and leadership characteristics) and human impact on the economy. These non-economic institutions as internal dynamics (including the traditional socio-cultural institutions and political agents) resisted the transformation of society into a self-regulating market economy. Further examination includes the

Kurdish moral economy  45 characteristics of Kurdish society, economic behaviour, social relations, and the role of regional institutions in the economy and political structure of the Kurdishdominated region (Ottoman Kurdistan) in order to understand the origins of embeddedness and the moral economy model (Rogan, 2018), therefore elucidating subsequent Kurdish resistance to change. The economic structure of the Kurdistan region was (and still remains at a certain level) dominated by self-sufficient agricultural and livestock farming, where production was for local consumption (Beşikçi, 1969; Sönmez, 1992; Majeed, 1976). In searching for the reasons for the absence of capitalisation and modernisation, one can see political, social, cultural, and economic factors, compounding a situation which led to uneven development of the society (Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015). While in the last century of the Ottoman Empire when the great transformation had already started at the centre, the Kurds clung to their traditional social economy based on semi-feudal relations at the periphery. As economic relations remained indistinct from social relations, the economy was socially and politically embedded in tribal cultural relations. Kurdish civilisation was dominated by informal and ethical codes quite different from an industrialised market economy, with the behaviour of individuals representing one of the major differences between the two models. The concerns of tribal women and men with economic issues were related to social statutes, values, and customs, rather than a monetary, material advantage, and thus this form of traditional society was marked by a moral economy which refers to the economy embedded in social relations through the Polanyian reciprocity and redistribution principles (Rogan, 2018). Transforming traditional modes of production into an industrial and capitalist one implies first destroying the existing social structure of society. For example according to Polanyi (1957), the Indian social structure was not directly destroyed by British colonialism, but rather the societal relations and social formation of society were ruptured after the traditional common land system was changed through privatisation by dividing it between clan members. How the Polanyian mechanism works within the Kurdish case via understanding the role of conventional non-economic institutions and political agents is examined in this chapter.

The foundation of everyday life: non-economic institutions Kurdish social structure was (and still is to some extent) based on kinship relations that are governed by customs, religious values, and lineage. It is also divided into a number of tribes and then subdivided into houses (mals) (Yalcin-Heckmann, 1991; van Bruinessen, 1992; King, 2013). The houses are the basic political and economic units, formed in Kurdish common law (adat), while the tribes are the politico-economic institution of society par excellence and the dominant social organisation constructing kinship ties between members (Beşikçi, 1969; Dubetsky, 1976). Mrs Bishop Isabella L. Bird (1891: 314) observed Kurdish society in the late nineteenth century and wrote that Kurds “are wild and lawless

46  Kurdish moral economy mountaineers, paying taxes only when it suits them; brave, hardy, and warlike preserving their freedom by the sword; fierce, quarrel-some among themselves”. On the other hand, van Bruinessen (1992: 53) remarks on the social structure of the Kurds: “If one looks from the bottom up instead of from the top down, the role of kinship is more obvious”, while Yalcin-Heckmann (1991: 39) indicates the importance of kinship: “Kin ties are part of the total social tie between individuals, which allow for services, goods and sentiments to be cultivated and which demand maintenance through frequent contact. The kinship terminology does not differ for the tribal and non-tribal people”. Besides, Mehmet E. Bozarslan (2000) argues that even modern Kurdish society was divided into four parts, which he compares with the Indian caste system and identifies: aghas (chieftains or tribal leaders); spiritual leaders (sheikhs, melles, or dedes); the bourgeois class (although it had not yet emerged in the European sense); and, in the end, the masses (such as peasants, farmers, and labours), who suffered most from this hierarchical scheme. More recently, social relations, according to Ekinci (2006), were determined by feudal values, although the traditional mode of production had turned into a capitalist one, and modern institutions had appeared in the Kurdish region. It shows that the pre-capitalist institutions remain strong in Kurdish society and that the capitalist transformation process is mainly based on a feudal superstructure (Beşikçi, 1991; Sönmez, 1992). Ekinci (2006) continues to claim by example that there are 75,000 village guardians, comprising Kurdish tribesmen whose loyalty is to the Turkish security forces, compared to approximately 6,000 militia members of the PKK who fought against the Turkish state. This demonstrates that the system prevails till the present day. Village guard tribes are mostly led and influenced by aghas/sheikhs, despite other reasons for their actions, which are economic and related to security, state authority, and personal clashes. Undoubtedly, the modern Kurdish tribal structure still dominates the political, social, and economic institutions of the Kurdish region. Various scholars argue that the base of Kurdish society is shaped by tribes (including non-tribesmen) and blood relationships, embedded in a religious context. For instance van Bruinessen (1992: 51) highlights: The Kurdish tribe is a socio-political and generally also territorial (and therefore economic) unit based on descent and kinship, real or putative, with an inner-oriented characteristic with emphasis on internal structure. This sociopolitical and informal structure is naturally divided into a number of subtribes, each in turn again divided into smaller units: clans, lineages, etc. The tribal social structure was founded on the unity of tribal members through an unspoken understanding of relations of reciprocity, redistribution, and solidarity which provided protection against external threats. Kinship affiliation was defined in terms of genealogical distance, although non-tribesmen also existed in the society (Belge, 2011). However, those not affiliated to any recognised tribes hoped that others would treat them as part of the system. Contemporarily, this tribal political economy still operates in the region to a certain extent (McDowall,

Kurdish moral economy  47 2000; Bozarslan, 2006). For example, when deciding on how to vote for a political party, some members of the tribe’s political allegiance are determined via a collective decision, which is usually decided by the tribal chief or other prominent members of the tribe. Consequently, the tribal formulation of society provides a crucial determinant of economic relations: including the mode of production and surplus within the rural economy, reciprocity, and redistribution through symmetry and centricity principles embedded within a tribal understanding of the nature of society. The tribal leader was one of the first internal actors to play an important role in the Kurdish social context after the emirates had gone (Eppel, 2016). Besides, aghas as a leader of their community played the role of mediator between the outside world and the tribe in terms of transforming the tribe and integrating it into the world economy (Minorsky, 1987). Like Polanyi, who analysed archaic and tribal society in a socio-economic and anthropological guise, comprehension of the historical and cultural characteristics of Kurdish tribal life and the structure of society is necessary in order to understand the impact of these internal institutions and socio-cultural and political factors on the political economy route of the society (Jongerden and Verheij, 2012).

Anthropology of the Kurdish social economy One institution of great importance in influencing the nature of Kurdish society and the political economy is that of marriage (Barth, 1954). It allows a new person to become a member of a house (the extended family within a household economy). Yalcin-Heckmann (1991: 99) sees the house (mal) as the “first communally recognised level of tribal membership and remarks that a mal is not a propertyowning group. Nevertheless, it is the social unit where a person or household’s tribal membership is most clearly defined or challenged”. The single extended household stands at the foundation of the Kurdish social structure. The institution of mal is also involved with the economy via household relations. Different types of marriages have been present in society, with one of the most common being intermarriage within the kinship group, typically to a dotmam (i.e. a female cousin, in particular, the daughter of an uncle) (Barth, 1954; Tas, 2016). The reasons for this are economic and cultural. The person getting married into the house will not be an outsider and will easily adapt to the family and its customs when living in the same house with the other family members and contributing to the household economy. The family wealth is neither split up nor goes to a foreigner (xerib); accordingly, the family’s property and land can be transferred onto the next generation of family members. Anthropologically, representing a characteristically Kurdish feature embedded within a famous proverb – ser çevan ser seran – signals a form of welcome and means ‘over my eyes and head’. It is illustrative of Kurdish hospitality (mevanperverti) (Jones, 1998/1857; Stuart, 1876; Noel, 1919; Hay, 1921) as a noted feature of Kurdish character.1 Hospitality remains a defining characteristic of the Kurds in the regions of Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Middle East. It was particularly

48  Kurdish moral economy commended by European/Western missionaries and travellers and was mentioned among the diaries and reports of secret agents in the nineteenth century. The accounts detail in particular the generosity of emirates/aghas and guesthouses, where the travellers could find food, tea, and shelter. Many historical incidents prove the hospitality of Kurdish leaders towards their neighbours and visitors, which also provided a political and economic opportunity for the Kurdish leadership to gain respect and legitimacy in society as a political agent.2 Nonetheless, the emphasis on hospitality had its negative consequences. The notion of hospitality (prizing social relations over economic ones) was an important factor in the society’s reluctance to adopt the principles of a self-regulating market where relations are primarily seen in economic terms of exchange rather than reciprocity and hospitality. In addition, the propensity towards welcoming outsiders, which could be seen as deeply embedded in culture, is cited by Kurdish nationalists as a reason why they so warmly welcomed the Turks when they first arrived in Anatolia from Central Asia, treating them as (i.e. Muslim) brothers and harmless guests, but which eventually led to the Turks becoming established in the region and becoming the dominant hegemonic power (Bedirhan, 2003; Jwaideh, 1982; Vanly, 1971). Another relevant aspect of the Kurdish character is generosity, which differs in practice to that offered by other tribal societies, such as the Arabs and Albanians (Bozarslan, 2006; Eickelman, 1981). Predominantly, Kurdish tribal structure resisted industrialisation and nationalism and proceeded by common action with the Empire to uphold religious and cultural codes. The nationalist and positivist Kurdish leadership could not convince the society to break the social contract with the state, which is based on the caliph institution (religiously), millet system (socially), and de facto autonomy (political economy) pillars. On the contrary, the Arabs and Albanians already sought sovereignty as a right of nations and seamlessly integrated into the new international market economy absorbing its benefits, for instance, by creating a nation-state. Generosity complements hospitality and solidarity and supports the community, while sharing goods, as a gift (xelat) economy, on various occasions strengthens the reciprocal nature of society that also shows the tribe’s function as an economic entity. This generosity can be seen in the giving of gifts when someone suffers an accident in times of hardship and at weddings, funerals, and the celebration of the birth of a child (especially if it is a boy). Sweetnam (2004: 117–118) explains: An important factor in interpersonal relationships, closely intertwined with the idea of generosity, is a balance. Balance can be achieved by reciprocity in gift-giving and in other kinds of giving as well [. . .] Reciprocal obligations, such as exchanging gifts or favors, are also very weighty for related people. Sunnet (the circumcision of a young boy) plays an important role in Kurdish society, and the institution of kırîv (a form of godfather) extends the family beyond blood relations through the process of bringing a non-family member, who supports the boy through his circumcision, into the family circle.3 This practice

Kurdish moral economy  49 creates a strong annex kinship between families and the tribe, forming strong connections, even in the absence of blood ties. It even can occur between members of society who may be of a different religion; for instance between Muslims and Yezidis or Alevi and Sunni, though it is mostly practised among Alevi and Yezidi minority Kurds (Jenkins et al., 2018; Acikyildiz, 2014). Respect, shame, and honour are other important features of Kurdish society. Honour can primarily be expressed as şeref or sikûm. For instance every single mîr as a governor enjoyed their own hegemonic space and were unwilling to show obeisance or loyalty to one single power (i.e. a mîr a mîran, a grand seigneur) (van Bruinessen, 1992; McDowall, 2000). However, neither would a mîr recognise another mîr’s leadership, as to have done so would have been regarded as insulting, and, indeed, it became one of the important obstacles to creating unity and therefore consolidating society in terms of modern institutions and the nation. Blood feuds (xwûndar) present an important obstacle to creating alliances across Kurdish society. The blood feud asserts the honour of the tribe against the disrespect of others, which helps to create concord within the tribe (Meho, 1968; Beşikçi, 1969; Sönmez, 1992), although it destroys the possibility of consensus across the different tribes due to the conflict and violence engendered. The establishment of a confederation of tribes assembled and united against outside threats was an exception and was adopted only in extreme situations, such as when there were threats to the general security of the society. Pride and arrogance have also been factors working to create division among the Kurdish elites and have been formidable impediments to unity and the development of a modern nation. Other distinct cultural factors of Kurdish society are relevant in understanding the lack of marketisation and modern institutions, although this is also the case for other tribal civilisations;4 however, what makes the Kurdish example different is that the society insisted on retaining authentic values and resisted change for an eon. The record of daily life in Kurdish villages and towns was mainly based on oral tradition practised through classic song (stran) and story (çîrok) by a minstrel (dengbej) or elder that evoked a communal lifestyle (Kreyenbroek and Allison, 1996). This oral tradition constructed an opposing lifestyle and culture to that offered through the transformation of the traditional and local institutions and indicated a confrontation to the modernist institutions of the nineteenth century (Sweetnam, 2004). The Kurdish way of life was dominated by nomadic or seminomadic life and pastoral village life (Jwaideh, 1982; Meho, 1968) that did not depend, and in fact for a long time offered opposition, to the external market and its political institutions, such as the nation-state. Consequently, all these relations, ties, and traditional institutions created a resistance against the market economy, capitalist society, and modern institutional changes alongside with the armed struggle in protectionism against the new order (Chapter 2). The link between social and economic relations remains an important factor in the transformation process. The crucial point here is that the members of society, including its leaders or elites, were bound by these traditional values, which thus shaped the actions and reaction of the Kurdish leadership, including the political chieftain; aghas, religious conductors; sheikhs/sayyids (or dedes in

50  Kurdish moral economy Alevis); and intellectuals who had always been treated with great respect and loyalty by the Kurds (van Bruinessen, 2000b; Bozarslan, 2006; Dressler, 2013). This meant that there was a lack of common interest and leadership in transforming the Kurdish political economy into a self-regulating market society, and ultimately a nation-state, as the prominent production of the great transformation of the nineteenth century. The argument offered here challenges the claim made by modernists that it was Islam and its value system that was responsible for the failure of Kurdish society to transform economically, socially, and politically in the late Ottoman era. Whereas Muslim Arabs and Muslim Albanians were equally controlled by the Ottoman authority (e.g. caliph) and achieved political and economic change that transformed their societies from an Ottomanist, politically scattered and agriculturally structured environment to a nationalist Arab Ba’thist or Albanian tribalism, integrating industry and political sovereignty thereby propelling a market economy (Bozarslan, 2006). It becomes extremely problematic to explain the failure to develop a modern political economy and attendant political and economic institutions only by reference to a religious context and external factors. The sui generis character of Kurdish society and its idiosyncratic institutions, customs, values, rituals, and culture played the most important role in this ‘lost transformation’, during the emergence of a new order in the nineteenth century.

The political agents in modernisation In the historic political structure of the Kurds, the concept of the state is not embedded strongly in society, and a united Kurdish state has not existed in the region historically. For Kurdish society, the idea of having a state was shaped within an ‘anarchic’ context (Öcalan, 2017). The attainment of statehood was not as important as the attainment of emirate/tribal independence, freedom of movement, control of territory, and the maintenance of their cultural and religious institutions. These characteristic signs of Kurdish civilisation indicate a different form of governing bodies and societal expectations in economy and politics, which did not synchronise with the newly emerging international self-regulating market economy society and its governance. As Hay (1921: 36) notes in the earlier part of the twentieth century: The Kurds are one of the most virile races in existence [. . .] they are a collection of tribes without any cohesion and showing little desire for cohesion. They prefer to live in their mountain fastness and pay homage to whatever government may be power, as long as it exercises little more than a nominal authority. The Kurds possessed privileged rights of self-governance provided by the Ottoman archaic regime up to the late nineteenth century. This political status functioned instead of the state for Kurds until the collapse of the Empire by defining the political relations between the centre and the periphery (Gingeras, 2016). This

Kurdish moral economy  51 self-determination statute had worked since pre-Ottoman times when the major imperial powers such as Byzantium and Seljuk had dominated the region (Jwaideh, 1982). Historically, the Kurds had no enduring state culture; instead they had strong de facto independent principalities that had long been present in Kurdistan. The Kurdish mountains are remote and difficult to occupy by foreign forces; thus, the Kurds have always been able to maintain their own power and internal hegemony in the region (Ghassemlou, 1965; Jabar and Dawod, 2006). The mîrs (later replaced by aghas or sheikhs as well as urban elites) were prominent in Kurdish society, especially during the ayan political period from the eighteenth century to the early of the nineteenth century (Islamoglu-Inan, 1994), and became significant political figures in the Empire. Unaffiliated with the tımar system, principalities did not pay taxes nor provide men for the Ottoman military. This situation existed up until the Ottoman political reforms and modern land regulations which were implemented in the region as part of the centralisation policy (Ozok-Gundogan, 2014). Such regulation affected Kurdish society, particularly its leaders, in a number of ways: socially (the relations between agha and tribal members), politically (self-governance), and economically (the loss of tax advantages). In fact, the mîrs and aghas never possessed unlimited power over their subjects, unlike the Persian shah or the Ottoman padisah. Certain tribes did not have an agha, while others had many who were elected. The Kurdish writer and member of famous Bedirhan family Kamuran Bedirhan (2003) observed that “we have even seen a republic in the region of Şırnak, where the chief was elected by the people”. A tribal confederation existed as a political organisation for administrative and security reasons alongside the mirlik (principality), as a part of the Kurdish societal structure. According to van Bruinessen (1992: 163), there was an implicit social contract between the tribes and their rulers: The Rojeki (unity of tribes) had the reputation of being more loyal to their mîrs than any other tribe of Kurdistan, but when they were dissatisfied with any particular mîr they deposed him and appointed one of his relatives in his stead. These alliances were not effective in bringing political unity by constructing an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) and so did not develop modern political institutions that might have achieved a dynamic transition in the nineteenth century. The struggle between small-scale powers and lack of unity among the leadership was an important reason for this failure. Mechanisms to regulate Kurdish socio-political economic life across the different tribes did exist. An example is the institution of majlis (council), which was formed by rûspîs (which literally means ‘white beards’ but actually means ‘wise men’), elders of the society possessing the power to take decisions on legal, social, and political-economic issues by making suggestions to the leader of the tribe, as well as to the members of society, in a quasi-official position (Tas, 2016). However, according to tribal custom, this institution was respected and obeyed by the members of tribes. Each tribe had one consisting of natural members, who

52  Kurdish moral economy had gained the respect of tribal society. The main function of the institution was to resolve conflicts through a mechanism of justice that was legitimated by tribal customary law. These local institutions replaced the gap in the state’s judicial apparatus to become one of the most important features of the tribal system in preserving customs and values. Characteristically, the tribesmen preferred not to be ruled by an outside ruler or state; accordingly, they would often unite against external threats to their freedom, despite the antagonism between them. However, as the power of the mîr political system declined (Eppel, 2016), the Kurdish leadership came under pressure from the centralisation policy of the Imperial reformist movement, and mîrs lost their sovereignty in the early nineteenth century, resulting in Kurdistan becoming another province within the Ottoman bureaucratic system (McDowall, 2000; Karpat, 1973; Hanioglu, 2010; Gingeras, 2016). In spite of this, new social actors emerged on the Kurdish political scene in the late nineteenth century as the Istanbul-based palace sent pashas and begs (Ottoman military commanders or provincial governors) to the region to impose an effective Ottoman authority and establish hegemony over the Kurdish leaders. The new urban-based elite emerged, which incorporated eşraf families, merchants, big farmers, and begs (Bayraktar, 2016), while some of the Kurdish aghas were deployed within the system by collaborating with the Ottoman lieutenant colonel and district governors (i.e. pashas, kaimakams) to send their sons to the capital to make them regional pashas, which resulted in changes to socio-economic relations, communication and social networks among the Kurds, and the relationship between the periphery and the centre, with the last factor also increasing the power of the central feudal system (Ozoglu, 2004). Alterations to the Kurdish traditional social structure were enacted alongside Sultan Abdulhamid’s formation of the military corps of the Hamidiye Alayları (light cavalry) among Kurdish tribes in 1890 (Aytar, 2000; Deringil, 1998). For the first time, a central authority directly drove Kurdish political actors. This imperialist project aimed to protect Ottoman territory against the external Russian threat, as the Kurds were always seen as a buffer zone by the Ottoman and Persian state administrations. More importantly, with the establishment of the Hamidiye irregular tribal regiments, the sultan sought to direct colonise the irregular Kurdish Sunni–Muslim tribes, which always represented a challenge to the imperial authority, turning it into an arm of the state in order to mitigate the internal ‘Armenian threats’ (Klein, 2011; Bayraktar and Cora, 2016). Abdulhamid opened up the Aşiret Mektepleri (tribal schools) in Istanbul, in 1892, to train children of Kurdish aghas so they could take up administrative and military positions, which would allow them to exercise considerable authority (Akpinar and Rogan, 2001). Abdulhamid created a large-scale cavalry among the Kurdish tribes, in particular among the Sunni tribes who had religious ties with the sultan and the caliphate. These changes provided an opportunity for new socio-political agents to arise and prosper in Kurdish society under the authority of the state. The policy had a hidden and more important agenda from the more noticeable one of creating the Hamidiye regiments to protect the Empire against Russian attacks and Armenian national demands, namely to counter and control

Kurdish moral economy  53 any Kurdish awakening (Anter, 2000; Süphandağ, 2006). Through the use of religion, balancing power relations and conflicts between tribes, and slowly convincing the Kurdish leaders of the benefits of centralisation, the Ottoman state sought to eliminate the supremacy of the Kurdish leaders and control the Kurds and thus counteract any political demands for an ‘independent’ Kurdish state in the region. Alongside the mîrs and aghas, religious institutions and their leaders were equally important in the internal dynamics of Kurdish politics. The most effective and noteworthy agents were the Sufi tariqas (predominantly featuring the Sunni Qadiri and Naqshbandis) (van Bruinessen, 2000b; Beşikçi, 1969). They were the most influential sectarian representatives in the region because of the large number of Kurds with Muslim Sunni backgrounds, who followed the dominant Shafi Mezheb School (Kreyenbroek and Allison, 1996). Among Kurdish Alevis, the Qızılbaşlık proved an equally effective force in society (Dressler, 2013; Jenkins et al., 2018). Besides these two major religious groups, a minority group followed an ancient Kurdish religion, the Yezidi (Acikyildiz, 2014), alongside other followers of major religions less influential than Islam, such as Eastern Christianity and Judaism. The spiritual leaders, such as the sheikhs, sayyids, mullahs, dedes, and pirs, appeared as prominent actors on the socio-political ground, acting sometimes as representatives of religious groups (tariqa or jammat, for example) or sometimes independently. In addition to their religious role, the Sunni sheikhs, in particular, directed and organised society by introducing a different system to that of political sovereignty, especially after the authority of the mîrs had declined and disappeared. They came more to dominate the public sphere through their social networks, claim to knowledge, charisma, rhetoric, attributes, and the loyalty they engendered. These social religious actors also gained socio-political power through their position in the established social structure based on religion, rituals, and customs (Jongerden and Verheij, 2012). The sheikhs were also knowledgeable in non-religious, scientific, and artistic matters and were able to advise tribal leaders, whether they were devout Muslims or not (McDowall, 2000), a skill derived from their deep knowledge of religious and scientific literature that was useful for society. As Hay (1921: 38) notes, the “Kurds are normally by no means fanatical; though they are powerfully influenced by their religious clerics (i.e. sheikhs, mullahs) in whom they place most implicit trust”. In society, the influence of religious leaders was at times more important than the religion itself with the interests of the tribe on the whole stronger than religious sentiments. Religion was not politicised. The concept of ‘sovereignty belongs to Allah’ utilised by political Islamic movements5 to mobilise the masses was not widely accepted by devout Kurdish Muslims who were inclined to view religion in terms of its spiritual aspects rather than its political forms (Yeğen et al., 2016). The Kurdish religious leaders did not limit their influence on religious matters but extended it to secular matters and subsequently played a crucial role in the emergence of Kurdish nationalism and the organisation of a rebel counter-movement through promoting a cultural and moral leadership (Ahmed and Gunter, 2007). Their role was extended beyond the religious aspects

54  Kurdish moral economy of life to include the political, social, economic, and artistic spheres, while always remaining embedded within the traditions and customs of Kurdish society. In summary, the various types of Kurdish leadership, mîr/agha/sheikh, exerted a special influence on Kurdish society and its political economy, even though they could not totally unite society. However, as a largely conservative force in terms of the social formation of society, since despite their different leadership forms they were dependent upon tradition, religion, and custom, it is not surprising that the leadership failed to use the opportunities for marketisation and modernisation that arose in the nineteenth century and were unable to reconcile the traditional mode of production with capitalist values or to move the society towards a modern nation-state. The transformation of the centre also influenced the social strata of the Kurdish periphery by having new classes, such as Hamidian begs, tribal chiefs, urban notables, rich families, traders, and intellectuals alongside Kurdish pashas and local governors of the provinces, which gained vast amounts of political power and economic advantage (i.e. landownership).

On a new political economy: land dispute and violence Mass violence inflicted on minorities, particularly the wide-scale massacres of Armenians between 1894–1896, constituted a dramatic rupture (Bozarslan, 2018) and impacted on the political economy through a land dispute. Homogenising the multi-ethno/religious millet brutally started with the deportation orders of Ottoman Armenians by the CUP government in 1915, which was followed by the internal displacement of the Kurds in 1916 (Akcam, 2018; Bloxham, 2007; Gocek, 2014; Ungor, 2012). This Social Darwinism (Bozarslan, 2018) project of the Unionist elites continued in the economic arena as the government encouraged a market economy as part of economic liberalisation, while providing incentives to Turks to establish businesses with the object of creating a nascent Turkish bourgeoisie (Bugra, 1994). The Unionists employed the mercantilist model within the national economy. There was a particularly antagonistic Kurdish response to these changes. Reacting to the state-led industrialisation and economic development activity in the region, the authentic Kurds sought to protect their politico-cultural identity and pursued conflict in the context of a double movement. Some internal agents (emirates, later aghas and sheikhs) engaged in armed struggle to express their discontent with the establishment both in the last stages of the Empire (McDowall, 2000). As a consequence, the transformation of the Kurdish political economy took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a responsive form to the semi-capitalist state. Two essential characteristics of this double movement defined the dynamics of society during the period of transformation: on the one hand, an oppressive state policy seeking to forcefully introduce a selfregulating type of market economy, and on the other, the socio-cultural protectionism of Kurdish activists that sought to counter the destructive changes taking place within the embedded economy.

Kurdish moral economy  55 Accordingly, the political economy of Kurdish society in the Empire needs to be understood in this context. Kurdish resistance to the state projects [initiated by Tanzimat in 1839 and Islahat in 1856 reforms and CUP’s liberal constitutionalism (1889–1913) and ethnonationalism (1913–18)] was framed within centralisation, social engineering, and wider politico-economic parameters. During these changing policies of the Ottomans, the Kurdish leaders attempted to promote aspirations of establishing national unity, territorialisation, and power-sharing. The risings and rebellions of the Kurds were also an attempt at redistribution of economic resources in the context of reciprocal relations through protective local institutions. The Kurdish social formation with its traditional character plays an important economic, social, and political role as part of the micro dynamics of change. The social formation was in part a response to the new system of market exchange encouraged by the CUP and sought to protect the local economy from state interference through its traditional institutions. The Kurdish social formation, hence, aimed at rejecting the new external capitalising and nationalising order and instead reinforced the internal agents’ determination to defend the traditional form of society including tribal and religious institutions. This counteraction was aimed at retaining the existing nature of Kurdish society to which the new Ottoman-Turkic formula posed a threat since it could undermine and even dissolve the organic structure of Kurdish society by disembedding its economic, social, and political practices from everyday life. New rules, laws, and regulations that had been introduced earlier under the new management were evidence of their imperialist colonial interventionist tendency that included the centralisation of administration, land law (1858), and the mechanisation of production (Ozok-Gundogan, 2014). The problem for the Kurds was not exactly the industrialisation process of the economy and being the subjects of the state, rather the counter-action emerged after the new relationship between the centre and periphery became problematised. The state wished to impose centralised politics, a capitalised economy and homogenise society through an unfair, despotic, and disparate policy regarding the nature of the social, political, and economic system, within a perfunctory self-regulating market economy. Considering all these dynamics, applying an anthropological economic perspective allows a much-needed historical perspective on the conversion process of Kurdish political and economic life in institutional change to emerge. This moral economy perspective provides an alternative view of pre-capitalist societies (i.e. clan, tribe, and indigenous groups) and their responses to new social, economic, and political order imposed on them. Accordingly, the Kurdish ethnological political economy was embedded within a larger social context and form of resistance. The Kurds chose to negotiate, renegotiate, and develop a social, political, and economic alternative, rather than uncritically accept the top-down political economy that was offered/forced through self-regulating market economy principles. According to our theoretical perspective, these Kurdish counterattacks were attempted to protect the old social structure, cultural identity, and authentic mode of production in a double movement approach against the extension of the market economy.

56  Kurdish moral economy Returning to the Ottoman’s social and political structure and its relation to the Kurds, it should be mentioned that the evolution towards liberal economic principles in the Empire began when the local powers (i.e. ayans) started trade relations with the European international market (Fleet, 2006). However, this evolution was not so effective in the Kurdish region despite some attempts by the Kurdish political agents to develop the bazaar and other existing economic relations in terms of surplus production and exchange. Traditionally, the nature of the socio-economic relations between merchants, tribesman (peasants and farmers), and urban people was defined according to the traditional customs, values, norms, morals, and religion, which structured daily activity and were not ordered by formal law. A monetarised economy did not fit well into the Kurdish political economy compared to the economies of other subjects of the Empire, such as the Christians and Jews, who controlled almost all of the large-scale finance, industry, commerce, and trade of the Empire at that time (Bugra, 1994). For instance Issawi (1980: 67, as cited by Yadirgi, 2018: 119) states “Armenians held 80 per cent of the agriculture, 20 per cent of the livestock breeding and, out of the fifty moneylenders, thirty had also been Armenian”. Interestingly, the Kurds did not even attempt to fill the economic gap, which occurred after these non-Muslims, particularly Armenians, were violently excluded from the political economy, a fact which noticeably demonstrates that money-based relations held little attraction to traditional Kurdish society. Even so, the Ottoman economy remained peripheral in comparison to other modern-Western liberal economies (Pamuk, 2009), and, as a result, the economy of the Kurds, who were a dependency of the Empire, became a so-called ‘periphery of the periphery’ as there were no strong economic relations between the central economy of the Empire and the secondary one within the Kurdistan region (Majeed, 1976). The relations between the two were mainly dominated by politics (Mardin, 2000; Aboona, 2008), although that itself was not strong. The political and economic relations largely developed without state intervention or formal regulation, although this is not to say there were no regulation or restriction on socio-economic relations in the society, rather social networks and informal conventions existed through kinship affiliation between members of the tribes, and this provided protection and regulation that sustained the economy. The impact of the Ottomans became more visible in the region after the political changes that took place in the Empire during the nineteenth century (Ozoglu, 2004). In particular, the Tanzimat Reforms brought a new arrangement to the relationship between the society and state, as the top officials tightened their control. The state restructured the function of the mîrs and organised the region into districts (sanjaks) under new administrative units. The sultan (especially Abdulhamid) became more involved in Kurdish politics with tax collection and the conscription of soldiers becoming ordinary state practice in Kurdistan. This became a crucial factor in ending the mîr’s political dominance (Eppel, 2016) and instituted a period of leadership under the aghas/sheikhs. Some scholars (Beşikçi, 1969; van Bruinessen, 1992; McDowall, 2000) argue that the situation turned the region into a semi-feudal or feudal formation. Within this new arrangement,

Kurdish moral economy  57 the mode of production, particularly sharecropping, fell under state control rather than remaining in the hands of the producers or owners when the power over the redistribution of land was transferred to the state and its local representatives, the pashas and aghas (later more effectively by modern Turkey). Power was sustained through property, contract law, and the transposition of economic surpluses from the regional to the central economies. This new order reversed the de facto autonomous administrative system to more centralised governance, causing a change in the relations between the leaders and the rest of society. The new state-linked internal agencies, such as the aghas/sheikhs and the Hamidiye Cavalry, provided the means for the state to control and protect its authority (Aytar, 2000). This restructured Kurdish society by transforming their leadership into ‘officers of the state’, which directly affected the political and economic origins of the Kurdish transformation, as the elite was co-opted into the system, on the one hand, and the state was provided with legitimacy in the eyes of the Kurds, on the other. Later in the early twentieth century, the CUP (1889–1918) had reached the reins of imperial power through a coup in January 1913 and established a ‘dictatorial regime’ in the same year (Kieser et al., 2015), thus ending the 1908 constitutional revolution of Young Turks. In the process of developing the CUP’s nationalist front power base, with reference to their economic agenda, they became ‘the vanguard of the nascent Turkish bourgeoisie’ (Bugra, 1994). For instance, according to Kieser et al. (2015), there was a conspiracy that the Armenian intellectuals were creating a security issue for the unity of the Empire and Armenian bourgeoises were abusing the country’s economy. The CUP government sought to maintain the Empire’s sovereignty by preventing any international intervention which promoted nationalism, thereby, dividing the Ottomans (Al, 2019). The CUP decision-makers did not insist on the superiority of Turkish ethnicity but rather combined pan-Turkish nationalism, Social Darwinism (e.g. enlightenment, revolution, human progress), and de-Christianisation of Ottoman society (Bayraktar, 2013). They attempted to engineer a new political economy based on Turkishness, as up to this point the economy was dominated mainly by non-Muslim subjects (Inalcik, 1985; Faroqhi, 2005) with demographic engineering. This caused a feeling of distrust among these subjects towards the state, as they were perceived as a threat to the political and economic system of the Muslim-Turkish nation.6 Consequently, the new order in the Empire, under the CUP, aimed to create a native, namely Turkish, bourgeoisie by excluding the Greek and Armenian minorities from the economic sphere (Ungor, 2012; Keyder, 1981; Bugra, 1994), while the land issue became an important problem in the integration of the Ottoman economy with the global capitalist order. “The Kurdish notables with the backing of the Ottoman authorities employed economic means to increase their wealth and land as they bought the land of the Armenian inhabitants” (Yadirgi, 2018: 119). Such land disputes influenced the Kurdo–Armenian relations (Bayraktar and Cora, 2016) and Kurdish tribes-led Hamidian Cavalry. This was reorganised by the CUP administration under the Tribal Light Cavalry Regiments, which transferred wide-scale Armenian property and reduced the Armenian labour force and

58  Kurdish moral economy sharecroppers, culminating in a massacre during 1894–97 (Kieser, 2014). Even Kurdish nationalists, like Seyyid Abdulkadir, participated in this outrage, fearing the prospect of an Armenian state being created (Bozarslan, 2018). The most influential CUP leaders introduced anti-Armenian policy and violence (Akcam, 2018), such as the Adana massacre in 1909 and extermination, deportation, and genocide in 1915. Subsequently, the majority of Armenian subjects were exiled, defused, and assimilated after or during the last phases of the Empire, followed by the direct control of the economic system by a Turkish bourgeoisie dependent on the state and who became part of a national development project (Bugra, 1994). The CUP tradition of creating a nascent Turkish bourgeoisie with the help of the state continued under the new Turkish Republic. The social and administrative transformation of the Empire was sustained by the Young Turks, who had become the hegemonic power and had superseded the sultan’s regime to control and start to configure the transformation of the state and society (Luke, 1936; Lewis B., 1961). A crucial point is that they utilised nationalist discourse to centralise and reshape the structural dimensions of the state and society and implemented capitalist principles through the ‘Turkification of industrialisation’ (Ahmad, 1969; Bugra, 1994). The emphasis was placed on the importance of developing an economy for the ethnic Turkish population and the construction of a Turkish national economy, which by definition excluded and colonised Kurds as well as other ethnicities (Pamuk, 2009; Hanioglu, 2010). Ultimately, the Turkification policy of the CUP determined the character of the political economy of the state through the promotion of political, economic, and social changes.7 For instance, the law to encourage industry in 1913 in the Imperial era and another promoting industrial development in 1927 (4 years after the establishment of the Republic) provided the legal and formal face of this policy.

Political and economic origins of the Kurdish moral economy During the transformation of the Kurdish political economy in the late nineteenth century, social, political, and economic structures were also forced to change within the wider Empire with the modernisation of the central administration and the project of capitalisation. In response to such changes, the response of the Kurds was shaped in an evolutionary manner that could be formulated as a transformation in resistance, where a dual transformation took place between the core and the edge that defined the double movement nature of the developments. Within such a changing environment, the transformation of the Kurdish political economy can be read from different perspectives. On the one hand, the position adopted by the Kurds can be seen as a resistance to the active market manipulation and intervention by the Ottoman state as it attempted to force the region to adapt and integrate into an international market system through various actions, such as the 1858 land law, detribalisation, deterritorialisation, the commercialisation of land and labour, the redistribution of economic surpluses, and economic dependency on the centre (Pamuk, 2000). On the other hand, the slow progress in the

Kurdish moral economy  59 transformation of Kurdish society can be viewed because of the internal dynamics of that society. The traditional character of the Kurds and their leadership led them to preserve the existing structures against what they perceived as the harmful influences of liberal economic principles, as the society was not prepared, ready, or did not need such external-oriented transformation. However, eventually, this meant that the leadership and the society had missed the opportunity offered in the nineteenth century to modernise in line with the rest of the Empire and Europe, and they failed, therefore, to have a bourgeois revolution. In retaliation, this does not mean that changes were not taking place in the Kurdish political economy, after missing the opportunity of the nineteenth century’s new order. After the Abdulhamid and Young Turk governments sought to control the Kurdish tribes through the centralisation policy, later, the Kemalist modern Turkey started to give economic power to the aghas/sheikhs and the upper strata of society by providing ownership of the land. Such actions destroyed the meaning of land as common property according to the tribal value system at the beginning of the twentieth century (Keyder, 1981). Consequently, following their acceptance of the centralisation project of the state, the aghas/sheikhs not only gained lower levels of taxation for their territory but also began to act like landowners through the use of a sharecropping system among the tribes, some even directing this from a distance as they moved to urban areas (Sönmez, 1992; Beşikçi, 1969; van Bruinessen, 1992). As a result of this shift, the leadership began to lose touch with the masses becoming distant from the problems and demands of their own people and destroying the traditional social network and ties between Kurdish leaders and their subjects. Relations that were once social had now become much more purely economic in nature. However, despite these changes in relations, the Kurdish leadership did not produce conditions that were conducive for the development of a wellestablished merchant class that might play a key role in commercialising agricultural products and achieve its own great transformation. The political elites – who didn’t rebel against the authority – used their economic advantage only for themselves and their own household. They did not use land revenue to invest in production or to develop capitalist enterprises, so such driving forces as the bourgeoisie, urban middle class, and factory labourers who could transform society from one stage to another through internationalisation, industrialisation, and modernisation were not encouraged by the Kurdish leadership. In the end, they became agents between the centre and periphery, rather than leaders of the Kurdish region. They failed to move towards a market economy or push for the development of a modern nation-state and so hindered the transformation of Kurdish society into a modern political economy over the entire society. At grassroots level, cultural values worked against a modern transformation in Kurdish society. The house (mal) was the social and economic unit in Kurdish society. It was composed of extended family members, including married sons and their families, and the unit assumed a crucial role in the economy. The majority of houses worked on their own land for their own household economy, rather than for crops or animal products to be used by others outside of it. The notion

60  Kurdish moral economy of money was not an important one for the family, and the idea of, for example, producing cottage cheese (thoraq) for the purpose of creating a surplus to be exchanged for money was not a priority. The total cost of production, which depended upon the inputs of land, labour, and capital, was not seen in terms of its economic or monetary value as such but bound up with existing social relations and religious values. This view of production and economic behaviour created an obstacle to the adaptation to a market economy. Before the centralisation policies of the Empire and the changes to land ownership discussed before, agriculturalism was a dominant economic activity articulated through various forms of social and political units. Kinship ties were also essential to economic relations, predominantly in exchange, and were regulated in the context of cultural and religious norms which guided individual behaviour (Glavanis and Glavanis, 1990; Dubetsky, 1976). For instance, each house had a socio-economic connection through informal activities, involving such things as solidarity, collaboration, mutual support, cooperation, giving of gifts at births, weddings, and deaths. Rights such as the inheritance of agricultural land and endogamous (dodmam) marriage were notable cultural values that also served to maintain economic relations.8 Any economic move towards the commercialisation of crops in the Kurdish regions was not sustained by social relations. Social conventions were deeply rooted in the existing economic mechanisms where, to give one example, the use of the village fountain was a matter of kinship cooperation provided at communal expense rather than calculated as an individual cost. Furthermore, society’s economic relations operated through the femaledominated household economy and the locally organised bazaars (market). The economy was embedded in social relations which regulated economic transaction without the need for self-regulating market economy principles. The institution of the bazaar could be located within traditional, cultural, and kinship settings (King, 2013; Jongerden and Verheij, 2012). It genuinely could be classed as a tribal mode of production that shaped in a non-wage and non-capitalist form. However, from a modern point of view, it bore a number of distinctive deficiencies, such as the absence of formal (legal) rules, for example, contract law, a lack of standardisation of prices and quality, no clearly defined division of labour and skills, no largescale entrepreneurs providing capital, and no framework provided by the liberal state. It was a distinctive system without self-regulating market principles, and one based on trust, friendship, affinity, validity, and cultural values that sustained traditional reciprocity and relations of redistribution protecting it from the impact of the market economy. This long-established non-economic institutional structure was encouraged by political and economic relations. However, economic relations were not considered separate from social relations, and, in terms of the Polanyian approach, these social relations were not conducive to liberal principles. We argue that the Kurdish tribal and traditional system is best analysed from a Polanyian moralist approach within an institutionalist theoretical perspective; that is the internal leadership and local/traditional institutions of Kurdish society were unable to accommodate marketisation and modern institutions. However, this raises the question of how the

Kurdish moral economy  61 Kurds have survived until now among the major powers and international market economy if their traditional tribal system was so inimical to such an environment. In the Kurdish anarchic social order, there was no notion of a state. This has led to doubts about the benefits of modernity and its institutions as they may constitute a danger to the essential elements of the ‘mountain society’, particularly the feeling of freedom to range over a wide territory and the sense of solidarity and kinship. During the nineteenth century, the Kurdish people shared traditional local norms and values within reciprocal relationships and for them, individual behaviour, especially in the market, was aimed at neither monetary goals nor profit. The motivation of the tribesmen was shaped by the socio-religious concept mostly defined in terms of spiritual, traditional tribal (eshir) kinship, where altruism played an important role in influencing social norms, experience, and knowledge with regard to economic relations. Economic behaviour in the form of the market, exchange, and other economic activities existed, but individual behaviour was not determined in the utilitarian sense of maximising utility in the form of money, wealth, or profit. Instead, behaviour was influenced by social status based on reputation and religiously derived obligations, constituting embeddedness. It was against the background of this peculiar Kurdish social and economic formation, and its contrast with a modern central government and international self-regulating market economy, that the Kurdish social structure, cultural anthropology, and non-economic institutions became the main reasons for the resistance of society to undergo a modern transformation in a social protectionist response.

Conclusion In this chapter, the focus centred on internal factors, such as ancient non-economic institutions, distinctive characteristic features of society, tribal and Islamic values detailing resistance to the marketised global order, derived externally through Ottoman governance. The Kurdish region (in large quantities) was not subject to direct control from the tımar system where bureaucratic agents were heavily involved in every aspect of the political and economic system. The bazaar economy involved local trade where exchange was not dominated by economisation. In terms of trade, Kurdish society had self-sufficient regional trade networks that did not attempt to engage with the international market economy, while its tribal economic system was an alternative to capitalist modes of production based on a moral economy set within the parameters of its own conventional ethical and religious value systems and deeply inimical to modernist discourses. The system was in a regional economy where individual and social interests were embedded within each other. Its internal dynamics could not easily allow the region’s resources to be exploited through economic institutions that were more adapted to the international economic system. The previous chapter explained how the Ottoman traditional political economy shifted into the self-regulating market economy system. However, the Kurdish internal dynamics, reluctant to be part of such changes, remained loyal to their own moral economy, despite the

62  Kurdish moral economy fact that changes were imposed by imperialist policies. The responses of the noneconomic institutions towards these imposed changes in protection attitudes and their reciprocal and redistributive principles in order to understand the different civilisation and uneven development of Kurdish society were evaluated. In the region, the division of labour and the commodification of products and land, which represent crucial factors in the capitalist mode of production, did not occur, and society therefore could not have adapted to the self-regulating market economy. The Kurdish way of life did not integrate with a market society as nomads, and tribesmen were not materialists in the sense of wishing to produce a surplus for capitalist purposes. There was little evidence that homo-economicus as a behavioural norm took priority over the social relations between members of society or the kinship of tribes. For much of the nineteenth century, the concept of behavioural economism and individualism did not deeply penetrate or become embedded in social relations. The tribesmen failed to become new ‘economic men’. This is not to say that there were no economic institutions in Kurdistan as local markets existed in the region, but they operated within a pre-finance and noncapitalist mode of production, based mostly on verbal agreements. The market involvement of people and the commercialisation of agriculture (both arable and pastoral) were limited, even though the commercial demands from the centre were increasing, especially demands to supply goods to Europe. A market economy would have required the tribal agricultural mode of production, such as sharecropping and as practised in terms of kinship relations, to be articulated as a functional unit of the capitalist system and thus disembedded from the social formation and tribal kinship. This helps to explain why there was a shortage of merchants, traders, and a business (bourgeois) class in Kurdish society, and why they failed to occupy the positions left by non-Muslim subjects (such as the Armenians and Greeks) involved in trade after they were excluded from Ottoman political and economic life because of the modern nationalist policies. This uneven Kurdish development can be defined in a contrary institutionalism context. It is a story of the political struggle between disembedding and re-­ embedding the economy in social relations. In Polanyian terms, analysing the peripheral political economy of the Kurds brings out the critical importance of social structure and its distinctive characteristics and relations with the centre. It is important to understand the social protectionist nature of society in two dimensions (conventional social institutions and political leadership) with regard to social actors and human interactions and the persistence of non-modern, traditional, and informal institutions that are embedded in its cultural history and transmitted from one generation to the next. The persistence of these institutional patterns that had developed through tradition, customs, and values plays a fundamental role in the evolution of Kurdish society and accounts for the political, social, and economic system of society with its informal networks. The emirate system located within the tribal tradition and spiritual Islamic values constituted two main pillars of the moral economy and stood in contradistinction to the modern self-regulating market economy

Kurdish moral economy  63 principles. This regional embedded model of the economy attempted to counter the great transformation of the nineteenth century and was allied to a desire to protect a traditional structure against the introduction of a capitalist economy. In the nineteenth-century societies, specialisation increased as the agricultural mode of production needed only small numbers of the labour force, and markets became international. However, the rising costs of living stimulated the masses to mobilise and rebel against the central political authority. Kurdish rebellion against Ottoman bureaucratic administration was directed towards the decentralisation and the redistribution of power. The centre started to internally colonise the region that left society subject to poverty, disparity, and tyranny through transforming into the capitalist mode of production externally while the society remained ill-prepared. After the disappearance of mîrs in the region, aghas and sheikhs emerged as a new power, but as outlined, by the early twentieth century the relationship between tribal leaders and peasants/farmers changed and the Republic of Turkey replaced the hegemony of Kurdish leadership politically after the failure of the uprisings until 1938 (this will be discussed in the next chapter). Such events, as detailed earlier, began to weaken the traditional tribal relations of reciprocity and redistribution. In turn, the land became a commodity and gained economic meaning rather than being part of social relations. In relation to reciprocity, redistribution, and the exchange relationships of society, the meaning of land was particularly significant, which carried strong social, emotional, and political economy connotations and was strongly linked to agriculture and animal farming as predominant economic activities. This uneven and combined transformation caused the small farmers and peasants to become economically dependent upon others as they gave up their surplus products to new actors: big land-owning elites who exerted socio-economic control. The state institutions saw agricultural and stockbreeding products as part of the capitalist process in line with central policy, and the peripheral Kurdish economy became affected by this new situation. It began to destroy the Kurds’ household economy and commoditised their surplus. Second, the redistribution process held by the central power did not materialise unilaterally, rather than being controlled by the local authority (e.g. aghas). In this context, the transformation had slowly started superficially at the state-linked upper-class level, rather than at the grassroots of society. The declining political power of the leadership by losing the war against the state forced the economic system to depend on a central system or dominant leadership by creating a kind of semi-feudal relation and increasing labour division rather than kinship relations based on self-contained household economies. Most of the leaders were transformed per se from being traditional, regional, and tribal chiefs to become urbanite, modernist, and capitalist by using the channels and opportunities provided by central government. The new Kurdish state-linked leadership played the role of agents situated between the structure and superstructure, providing an opportunity for the Ottomans to comfortably establish their political domination and to manipulate agricultural revenues through direct involvement in distributing surpluses or exchanging and regulating land. By the beginning of the twentieth century, institutional transformation to some extent had taken place

64  Kurdish moral economy in this pre-industrial society and resulted in the region distributing surpluses, with trade and revenues coming under the control of state institutions rather than sociocultural institutions. The internal dynamics, such as the reluctance of the traditional institutions towards a self-regulating market economy and subsequent miscarriage of leadership within Kurdish society, played a major role in the failure of the self-­evolving transformation process to occur in the nineteenth century and develop the necessary institutions after the move towards a capitalist economy had started in the main part of the Empire. Nevertheless, the society was externally forced to undergo such transformation, according to the Polanyian argument that the economy must be part of political/social relations and that any changes to the Kurdish political economy needed to gain legitimacy from society. This cognitive–historical analysis of the Kurdish social structure made it easier to examine the transformation process of pre-industrialised economic relations (e.g. modes of production, exchange, the cost of transformation) and the relations of the Ottomans with global capitalist development that impacted the region (Chapter 2). Furthermore, it demonstrated whether it was possible to derive a unilinear development of a pre-capitalist Kurdish society. Consequently, the origins of the Kurdish political economy can be discovered in the social formation of their internal institutions and socio-political relations, which also created a ­counter-hegemonic movement. This new era changed the relationship between Kurdish society and the state by creating a counter-hegemonic struggle of new Kurdish leadership (e.g. modern organisations). When this power struggle was lost, the Kurds remained without internal leadership and became a late-developed society, without new political (e.g. nation-state) and economic (e.g. market economy) gaining in the modern world. As can be seen in the following chapters, the Kurdish modus operandi has perhaps been successful in creating a knowledge which informs strategies for each period, indicating their response to state hegemony.

Notes 1 As British Commander J. F. Jones (1998/1857: 143–209) notes in his memoirs in 1857: “Our friend Kader Pasha, who received us very kindly and entertained us with true Kurdish hospitality [. . .] in manners he is mild and gentlemanly and like all Kurds, frank and hospitable”. Equally, British Officer Robert Stuart reports (1876) in his private journal that hospitality was their [Kurds’] first thought. Another British (secret) officer, Major Noel (1919: 11), indicates that “it was very noticeable that every British traveller refers to the friendliness, hospitality and kindliness of the Kurds” (1919: 11). Hay (1921) afterward said that hospitality was one of the finest features of the Kurd’s character. 2 Nationalists argue that even enemies of the Kurds come to Kurdistan to find shelter. They know it is a custom of the Kurds to forgive their enemies when they are guests in their homes (Randal, 1998; Kinnane, 1964; Laizer, 1991; Safrastian, 1948). 3 When boys are circumcised, parents ask a respected male who is known to them and who wants to be a part of their family, through co-opting or as an ally, to hold the boy on his lap while the boy has the operation, which is usually performed by a local circumciser.

Kurdish moral economy  65 4 ‘Tribal’ is not used as a negative connotation here to differ from a modernist reading, rather it is used to denote a different civilisation and premodern (not as a pejorative term) society. 5 Such as the present-day Hizbullah, for example, see Kurt, 2017. 6 According to Osman Nuri Pasha, the Governor of Hicaz and Yemen vilayet (1882–1899), “Turks constituted the ‘fundamental element’ (unsur-u asli) of empire. He bemoaned the fact that the majority of the soldiers in the Ottoman armies were Turks, for this meant that they were to be withdrawn from the agricultural labour force, and ‘as those versed in the science of economics well know, this is detrimental to the production of wealth for the state as a whole’ ” (Deringil, 1998: 328). 7 The founder of the Republic of Turkey and source of Kemalist ideas, Mustafa Kemal, stated in one of his speeches to local traders in Adana (Kilikya) on 16 March 1923 that “this country [Turkey] in the end stayed in the hands of its real owners. Armenians and others have no rights in this country. This fertile homeland is genuinely and intensely Turkish” (Hür, 2011, my translation). 8 “In kin-based societies, relations cast as filiations and affinity regulate most of their social interaction including politics and economics. Kinship acts as a social code that defines social positions as well as rights and obligation among society’s members” (Sirman, 2007: 178). Eickelman (1981: 175) states that “institutions such as kinship, community, tribe responsibility and trust are subjectivity held ideas about social relations shared by members of society and embodied in rules, customs, symbols, actions, such as ritual and most everyday actions”.

4 Counter-hegemonic society in the Republic of Turkey

The old is dying and the new cannot be born.

Antonio Gramsci

Development of political sovereignty The hegemonic gap in the Kurdish political realm was created after the uneven and combined process of the great transformation of the society at the end of the nineteenth century. This lack of transformation and absence of the political leadership after failed uprisings created the power vacuum that was supplied by the new Turkish state. This external hegemonic culture, which was derived from Kemalism and emerged from the principles of its founding leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,1 had not obtained the consent of Kurdish society (Aslan, 2018). Although Kemalism itself started as a counter-hegemonic movement that had transformed the state system from a traditional and religious imperial sultanate into a modern and secular nation-state (Aslan, 2018; Lewis B., 1961), it had failed to (re)establish a social contract with the Kurds. Instead, this new hegemonic power opted for the continued oppression of the Kurds by reference to a new imagined community (Anderson, 1983) based on Turkishness. In response, there arose various Kurdish counter-hegemonic candidates in the region whose aim was to gain local power through assembling a historical bloc among Kurdish society to challenge this new actor. Having employed a Polanyian unorthodox political economy approach, let us to identify the trajectory of the Kurdish society during the Ottoman Empire that examined in the last two chapters (Chapters 2 and 3); however, the Polanyian embeddedness and moral economy account could not respond to the new antagonistic relation (i.e. violence, assimilation) between the state and Kurdish society in the republican era. Social protectionism had not responded to the injustice reeked by colonial state policy. Polanyi misframed the counter-movement by neglecting imperialism, while his approach failed to conceptualise resources on hegemony and antagonism. This chapter considers Gramsci’s hegemony theory as useful to analyse the power dynamics between the new state (Roger, 2015) and the Kurdish political movement that also fulfils, moreover develops, the Polanyain approach

Counter-hegemonic society  67 within another time frame and social reality. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, labelled by Edward W. Said (Sorensen, 2009) as a ‘traveling theory’,2 is considered appropriate for exploring and analysing both the dynamics of Kurdish society under the state hegemony as well as the intersubjective political process. Hence, Gramsci through traveling theory allows us to challenge the Eurocentricism and essentalism in a historical context. By utilising such an approach, this discussion, as the second empirical case of the book, provides a fresh theoretical framework by exploring how it helps to locate the dynamics underpinning Kurdish identity formation in modern Kurdish political history from 1923 to 1984. However, Chapter 4 is organised chronologically according to the various important turning points and aimed mainly at conceptualising, and hence exploring, the period from 1923 to 1938. The position of the Kurds, as well as the state, had changed with the establishment of a modern Turkey; now the political Kurds were in a subordinate position under the central authority. An entire paradigmatic change had taken place as the state enjoyed the fruits of its own great transformation experience which represented entirely different realities and parameters for Kurdish society. It is equally important to understand that the collapse of the Ottomans in the region resulted in the division of Kurdish territory to be ruled mainly by four emerging nation(alist) states, namely Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria (Gambetti and Jongerden, 2015; Randal, 1998). The chapter set its sights on answering some of the following relevant questions: (i) How did the Turkish state dominate Kurdish society without gaining its consent? (ii) What kinds of responses were mounted by the Kurdish opposition? (iii) What strategies were applied by Kurdish agents in their struggle to gain both internal and external hegemonic power? Such questions constitute the main discussion of this chapter, which provides the basis for the next chapter’s critical analysis on the trajectory of Kurdish political identity. The neo-Gramscian historical analysis shows the socio-political agents in the society employed aggression as a tactic to express their discontent with the evolving political developments. This ranged from traditionalist religious leaders, such as Sheikh Said in the early stages, to the modern organisations.

Emerging a counter-hegemonic culture Sheikh Said religiously and politically rationalised his uprising against the new Turkish state in his fatwa by stating that a social contract existed between the Kurds and Turks since the Turks had arrived in Anatolia (Özer, 2009). In this social contract, according to Said, religion was the determining factor, as the relationship had been conceptualised and then socially constructed through the institution of the caliphate and other religious sub-institutions (e.g. the madrasa, taqiyya) (Olson, 1989). For him, the substance of the social contract was religion, namely Islam. However, Kemal Atatürk abolished these institutions based on the heritage of a multi-religious, multi-cultural, and multi-ethnic imperial structure

68  Counter-hegemonic society embedded in Islamic values and then introduced new, modern institutions (Luke, 1936; Lewis G., 1974). According to Sheikh Said, the implicit social contract no longer existed and so affected the religious fraternity between Kurds and Turks that had existed for a long time. The Kurdish leadership claimed that this hidden social agreement, and therefore Turkish hegemony, had expired, and they used this argument to legitimise the idea that Kurdish society had a right to claim self-determination. Such a narrative and claim sought to essentialise the Kurdish right to self-determination which they could catch up and converge, just as the Turks had done and with whom the Kurds had enjoyed the similar status under the Ottomans. The new circumstance that the two sides found themselves in indicated inconsistency in the historical narrative, and it was therefore the duty of the Kurdish movements to overcome such an inconsistency and form a developmental path to resolve the ‘fate’ of society. However, despite such demands, the rules of the game and the parameters of the political culture were not something to which the Kurdish politics could easily respond in terms of their traditional value system of a moral economy, as Kemalism had already infiltrated every part of daily life. Hegemony can be equated with ideology and strategy, which is based on the consciousness and consent of society. Cultural leadership becomes a crucial factor in the hegemonic struggle. Hegemony can basically be formulated as the culture of dominant actors, such as their beliefs, values, and morals, which need to be accepted by sub-groups and, moreover, by society (Gramsci, 2003). Yet, this culture ought to be confirmed in a reciprocal relationship; hence, the culture can turn into common sense and become a social reality. In this respect, if a candidate for hegemonic power hopes to gain that power they must generate a new (counter) culture through common sense, or the good sense, to challenge the existing hegemonic culture and so be able to gain the consent of the masses. Within this framework, the understanding of the notion of hegemony must be seen as an amalgamation of consent and coercion, particularly in terms of the history of the Kurdish counter-hegemonic movements. In each of the historic periods chosen to analyse the Kurdish case, it is necessary to conceptualise and define the notion of hegemony in a different way for each of the periods because of the different parameters that define the changing Kurdish experience (Tables 6.1 and 8.1). The tactics and methods used in the Kurdish hegemonic struggle are based on reactive and situational politics aimed at an external power. This does not correspond exactly to what Gramsci had designed for the proletarian struggle where, in this Gramscian world, the insurgency is generally considered the only way of responding to the new order (Roger, 2015). However, there is a consistency between the Gramscian account and the Kurdish counter-hegemonic movements, which can be seen in the strategies of the war of manoeuvre and the war of position. According to this chronological formulation, the first main stage of a modern hegemonic power struggle between the state and Kurdish political actors started shortly after 1923 and continued until the end of the Dersim rebellion in 1938 in a war of manoeuvre. The aghas and sheikhs, with the support of the Kurdish

Counter-hegemonic society  69 political institutions, began an upheaval against the state hegemonic order. This response played an important role in defending the cultural, social, political, and economic order of society against the new regime which aimed at the denial of the existence of Kurdishness in all aspects of life. The rebellions became a significant feature in the social and political memory of Kurdish society by articulating their distinctiveness as Kurds.3 The hegemonic struggle of this period will be examined as a dual strategy. On the one hand, the 1923–1938 modern period was oriented towards the activities of political organisations in institutional politics but without the organisational structure of contemporary political parties, which was predominantly shaped by nationalist rebellions. On the other hand, during the 1938–1960s period, Kurdish society entered another stage of hegemonic struggle in Turkey. This second period can be identified in Gramscian terms as a war of position and a process of passive revolution which will be discussed in Chapter 5.

The frontal attack in the Kurdish political formation Before delving into the emergence of the modern counter-hegemonic movements and institutional politics intrinsic to the Kurdish struggle, it is important to remember the pre-1923 climate, particularly after the Tanzimat Reform of 1839 and CUP constitutional regime. It is a substantial cause of the post-1923 Kurdish armed struggle and resistance. In the last decades of the Empire, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the Kurdish power centres sought to extend their authority in Kurdistan by challenging Ottoman domination. However, the religious link to Islam was heavily embedded in Kurdish politics as common sense, mostly around caliphate institutions, and the challenge achieved was of little success, since the Kurds also considered the role of the caliphate as important in maintaining Muslim unity (van Bruinessen, 2000b).4 In fact, the Kurdish leading cadres held highstatus positions in the Ottoman bureaucratic system, and this in turn impacted on the nature of the struggle for decades to come (Özer, 2009). A new agreement or social contract emerged providing de facto independence for Kurdish mîrs, which paved the way for the emergence of the long-term autonomic structure of the Kurdish ruling system that emerged under the Empire. According to van Bruinessen (1992), Jwaideh (1982), McDowall (2000), Houston (2001, 2008), and Ahmed and Gunter (2007) among others, there was a strong link between Kurdish political agents and the Ottomans regarding the internal dynamics of Kurdish society which constituted an obstacle to raising the demand for a separate national state and full hegemonic power. A more detailed examination follows discussing this tussle between internal and external hegemonic powers in relation to the Kurdish national struggle.

A new era of politics: Kurds in the Republic Institutional politics for the Kurds started in the pre-1915 period. The genesis of the modern Kurdish drive for hegemony, as previously noted, traces back to the Young Turks’ Revolution of 1908. Via such activism, Kurdish leaders were

70  Counter-hegemonic society inspired and influenced by their admiration for modernism and Western ideologies, including Social Darwinism, nationalism, and positivism (Bayraktar, 2013). Kurdish thinkers and activists, emanating from important families such as the Shemdinans, Bedirkhans, and Babans, had participated in the founding of the CUP.5 The previous feudal-oriented Kurdish revolts had not been organised by political organisations in a political framework until the revolution of the Young Turks and the institution of a constitutional monarchy. The Kurdish institutions emerged and actively engaged with this new, relatively flexible, political, and intellectual environment, with the constitutional back-up of society in mind (Mardin, 2000). The Kurdish counter-movement was radically shifting from a cultural Kurdism to a more political Kurdish nationalism (Ozoglu, 2004; Koohi-Kamali, 2003; Ahmed and Gunter, 2007). The constitutional period can be perceived as the source of Kurdish enlightenment with the Kurdish intellectuals who lived in Istanbul in their organisations (cemiyets) producing magazines and newspapers within a cultural and historical context that rejected Ottomanism in favour of Kurdishness (Alakom, 1998). The Kurdish ruling class established socio-cultural organisations in the same way as other ethno-religious subjects of the Empire did during the Empire’s disintegration.6 This leadership derived mainly from traditional religious roots such as from the mîrs, aghas, begs, sheikhs, and the newly rising bourgeois families (Bayraktar, 2016). However, the institutional politics of the political organisations began to take over from this traditional and individualised leadership in its search for internal hegemonic power and in doing so embarked on a shift towards modern ideas and forms. The institutionalisation of Kurdish interest in the creation of new organisations to assert their cultural identity also became possible because of the policies of the Young Turks towards other ethnic groups, which provided an opportunity for the intellectuals to create a new moral and cultural leadership in Kurdish society. The first of such organisations was established in Diyarbakır (Amid) in 1908, and in 1909 a political party, the Liberal Union Party, was established by a group that sprang up from the CUP and included the Kurdish deputy, Lütfi Fikri, and a famous Kurdish intellectual, Abdullah Cevdet, who was one of the founders of the CUP but not one of its ideologists (Zürcher, 2012). These organisations mostly focused on social identity, literature, and education and published magazines and newspapers on Kurdish-related issues. The majority of Kurds in Istanbul were labourers and street porters, who represented an important power in their own right; however, through the social activities they conducted these new institutions educated these Kurds (as well as the general Kurdish population beyond the Istanbul diaspora), while preparing the ground for the establishment of a countermovement and hegemonic power which served to raise the consciousness of Kurdi, Kurdiyati, and Kurdistani society. These new institutions sought to conceptualise the meaning of Kurdishness and to incorporate Western values, particularly nationalism, which provided a means for the cultural leadership to engage in a new hegemonic struggle which envisaged the formation of a new Kurdish identity.7 Initially, there were two important

Counter-hegemonic society  71 groups formed in this progressive process. One was based on religious principles within local affiliations (supported by people such as Abdulkadir from the Şemdinians family/tribe) that supported regional autonomy while assembling around the Committee for Liberation of Kurdistan in Egypt in 1918. The other was based on notions of nationalism and secularism within modern, Western liberal values, supported by the Bedirkhan family (such as Emin Ali Beg) who sought an independent state (Ozoglu, 2004; Bajalan, 2010). Both groups remained heavily influenced by Kurdish tribal–cultural values and continued to be active under the leadership of the Committee for Kurdish Independence. The main goal of these socio-political organisations was to create and develop an alternative hegemony by using a variety of strategies against the Turkish administration and by engaging in politics at both the centre and the periphery. Simultaneously, they sought to acquire the support of society by promoting a new intellectual and moral leadership. Their understanding of nationalism emerged as a tool to educate society through its intellectuals with a view to establishing a foundation from which to struggle, initially, against the CUP. The intellectual’s function became vital to secure such an aforementioned outcome as Kurdish revolts offered responsive reactions; but when the CUP produced a national culture promulgated by traditionalist intellectuals, the Kurdish organisations, which had replaced the traditional rule of the mîr/sheikhs, created their own organic intellectuals and counter-hegemonic culture within the consciousness of the masses at the same time. The Kurdish leadership sought to unify society through a preliminary version of identity politics via promoting Kurdishness (Jwaideh, 1982). Establishing institutions that promoted Kurdish identity as a separate identity resulted in an apparatus of hegemony in Kurdish society as, for the first time, organic intellectuals helped produce hegemonic discourses in society by applying intellectual and moral leadership. These institutions were led by the organisers and teachers of tribal society and acted as mediators between the central-Istanbulian Kurdish elites and the peripheral-Kurdistani subordinate subjects (Alakom, 1998; Bajalan, 2010). They were organically linked in a society that was divided by religion and sects, and different dialects and ideologies. In turn, it provided the appropriate conditions for society to define its new sociopolitical identity. In the twentieth century, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the nationalist perspective of the new Kemalist state triggered a Kurdish counter-movement based on a nationalistic politico–military foundation (Belge, 2011; Ahmad, 2003). The Kurdish leadership (e.g. political associations) defended the Kemalist movement due to its Jakobin nature. The Kemalist cadres had adopted an authoritarian nationalism and market economy that appealed to secular and colonial tenancy and attempted to impose their sovereignty over the Kurdistan region in various ways (Bozarslan, 2003; Keyder, 1981; Lewis B., 1961; Zürcher, 2012). The Kemalist institutions imposed their new cultural forms within every strata of this religious and tribal society, and, consequently, a modern homogeneous form of the central Turkish state’s political project appeared in the region. Kemalism acted as a representative of modernism in the ‘uncivilised’ region by rejecting the ancient

72  Counter-hegemonic society socio-political structures of Kurdish society, as Turkification required the creation of a particular setting and a specific type of society (that they themselves might have to construct) and a certain type of state.8 The disappearance of the native mîr/agha political system and the religious institutions in the Kurdistan region was one of the major consequences of Kemalist dominance. The introduction of Kemalism triggered an intellectual and cultural resistance to the rejection of traditional values and caused an extreme and brutal hegemonic conflict between the two sides. The new state lost its legitimacy in the eyes of Kurdish society by embracing a policy of Turkification and aggressive secularisation (laiklik) through its social (civil) and political (state) transformation of the private and public spheres (Finkel, 2012). For the Kurds, the post-1923 period (unto 1938) was shaped by the politics of rebellion (Kahraman, 2004) through the means of an armed struggle.9 The movement had effectively moved into institutional politics, that is to say a more collective, albeit aggressive, response to the state, which intellectually empowered the people, who, in turn, provided legitimacy for the modern nationalist, cultural, and moral dimensions of leadership (Houston, 2008). The Committee of Independence (Azadi Cemiyeti) established in Erzurum in 1923, whose founders originated from military backgrounds (exOttoman pashas and the Hamidian Cavalry), provided a crucial example of this. The response of the new actors, as has been suggested, indicates that the power struggle with the nation-state was embedded and expressed in terms of nationalist demands (McDowall, 2000; Luke, 1936). The establishment of various institutions can be considered a natural outcome of the Kurdish concept of collectivity or unity that was embodied and articulated in the political culture by the clubs (cemiyets).10 The hegemonic leadership of these socio-political institutions attempted to challenge the colonisation policies and change the political and economic control of the region, which was still shaped by traditional values and leadership. The state as an external power provided no space or opportunity within Turkish politics itself for Kurdish actors to become engaged in the political mechanism of the country while retaining their own ethnic and religious identity. This double nature of hegemony leads us to redefine and develop the concept of a power struggle in order to elucidate how governance was exercised over the Kurds. The external Kemalist state embarked on particular strategies to dominate the Kurds based on situational (positional) politics, rather than allowing an opportunity for the Kurdish regional actors to determine their own political responses. This resulted in the emergence of a number of different positionings by the Kurdish nationalists. The hegemonic strategies comprised either a war of manoeuvre or a war of position exercised by the political agents in response to the actions of the external power. Some of the tribes did not stand with the Kurdish bloc because of their particular position vis-à-vis the state, as the state had co-opted some of the tribes to bolster its own legitimacy in the eyes of the society by educating the members of such tribes and giving them the chance to adopt the ‘new civilisation’ and new forms of society. The state sought new alliances in the political structure of the periphery to gain legitimacy and substantiate its own hegemony by the idea of creating a new order.

Counter-hegemonic society  73 It was necessary for state institutions to extend their supremacy over the entire area of the country and, most importantly, over the Kurdistan region.11 As a consequence, the local leaders came together in terms of shared customs and values to create a cultural leadership to defend their existence as distinctively Kurdish against the new ruler. When they succeeded through the use of force against the outside forces, they began to gain the consent of all internal agents. In this process, religion was turned into identity politics and became a means of responding to external demands, because the centre’s aim of excluding religion from the new identity provided an opportunity for the society to use religion in expressing their protest. The two main religious identities (Sunnism and Alevism) led the Kurdish mobilisation, particularly after the establishment of Kemalism. The dynamics of Kurdish internal hegemonic power were apparent, as shared by different segments of society in terms of religion, dialect/language, ideologies, tribal splits, and diversities. It indicates the external actor, the Turkish state’s context of hegemony in the region after the post-imperial era and aims to illustrate the hierarchy of the constituents of authority and the situational positioning between the antagonistic actors.

Assimilation as a colonial practice Atatürk followed the nationalistic ideology of the Young Turks, despite the fact that he had set up the first independence congresses in the Kurdish region, such as Erzurum and Sivas in 1919, under the institutional association called the Defence of the Rights of Anatolia and Thrace with the object of saving the entire country from external occupation (Lewis G., 1974; McDowall, 2000; van Bruinessen, 2000a). Ironically, later, this implied struggle for an existence free of external occupation became an essential strategy against the Kemalism by Kurds (Aslan, 2018). Kemal’s strategies and policies culminated in the formation of the principles of Kemalism that meant the exclusion of the Kurds from (or melting in) the social, economic, and political life of Turkey, resulting in a strengthening of their separate culture and identity, which in turn positioned them as a threat by the state. On 29 October 1923, soon after the end of the military clashes with the Entente powers, Kemal Atatürk declared a new assembly and a new state based on ethnic Turkishness (Aslan, 2018; Ünlü, 2018). The new state was officially and internationally recognised by the Treaty of Lausanne on 24 July 1923 after renouncing the previous Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920. Eventually, on 3 March 1924, the institution of the caliphate, which had remained as a leftover from the Ottoman state and which had bonded various Muslim ethnicities together, was abolished. All religious associations, madrasas, and other similar organisations were banned, including Kurdish schools and publications, as they were deemed to be within the religious sphere and, furthermore, speaking the Kurdish language in public was prohibited. Turkish ethnic identity became central to the state discourse in terms of the nation-building process (Yeğen, 2003), while religion as the bond between Turks and the Kurds disappeared from the public sphere, implying the removal of an implicit contract between these two ethnicities.

74  Counter-hegemonic society Denial of Kurdishness and the promotion of Turkification with regard to the Kurds became official policy in 1924. However, under the Lausanne Treaty, the Kurds could not be recognised as a minority which was defined as a non-­Muslim community, therefore the Kurds could not be protected as a minority group. For example, the Turkish government changed the names of Kurdish places into Turkish, one of the main characteristics of Turkification in a cultural–historical context (Oktem, 2011). Such assimilation practices resulted in the denial of the cultural heritage of ‘others’. The state defined political reconstruction and socially engineered a culture in terms of a modernist–positivist approach in order to create a new identity for a multi-layered society. Nevertheless, such policies caused a legitimacy problem for the state in the Kurdish region. Accordingly, the new Kemalist policy that destroyed the trust between the two nations also caused the termination of the implicit social contract that had been renewed, from the perspective of Kurdish nationalism, during the War of Independence between 1919 and 1923 (Bozarslan, 2003), a war that had the aim of establishing a new state after the collapse of the empire but did so without questioning the role of religion and the caliph (Özer, 2009). With the nation-building undertaken by the new Kemalist administration, the legitimacy of the state vanished, aided not only by a prohibition on using the Kurdish language, but also, in order to prevent any counter-hegemony from developing, this led to the exiling of Kurdish leading actors (religious and tribal leader and intellectuals) to the western part of the country, believing that they constituted a serious threat to the new nation-state. The suppression of all religious institutions, the closing of all madrasas, tariqas, the abolition of the caliphate and sharia law, and the imposition of the Latin script implied that Kurdish social and cultural capital in the form of essentialised knowledge had to disappear. While this was also the case for the Turks, at least they had the opportunity to redefine themselves within the new parameters, including their religious tradition, in terms of an essentialised ethnic group. This was not the case for the Kurds. Consequently, the new regime aspired first to ‘empty’ the concept of the traditional Kurdi(sh) identity and, second, to secularise and assimilate Kurds (Vali, 2003) by offering a ‘Turkification of Kurdishness’. With such policies, the authority of the internal Kurdish leaders, based on their local, traditional, and tribal kinships underpinned by religious principles (either Sunni or Alevi), became implicitly invalid. As the deterministic power, Kemalism attempted to win control over the post-Ottoman multi-religious and multi-ethnic society through the construction and imposition of a new value system in terms of which the new hegemonic power strove to gain the consent of Kurdish society too (Kuzu, 2018). This new ‘Prince’ was required to unite the country and provide legitimacy, and therefore, as a ruler, the new power could foster consensus within Republican society. It did not work for the Kurds. The Kurdish history, the language, and identity were redefined by the state that claimed that Kurds had a Turkish ethnic background but had lived in the mountains (thereby gaining the title ‘mountain Turks’) and mixed their language with Persian and Arabic and so were considered uncivilised in terms of Kemalist discourse (Chailand, 1994; Bozarslan, 2003). The hegemony

Counter-hegemonic society  75 of Kemalism, which had once been opposed to the ancient regime of the Ottomans, turned into a ‘fictitious nation-building’ project in the Kurdish region. The Kemalist system had produced domino/coercion rather than egomania/consent. Spontaneously, it energised the Kurdish intellectual and cultural leadership who now sought to act against this coercion and endeavoured to exercise the right of self-determination. In their new attempt at defining identity, secularism and Turkish ethnicity remained as essential cornerstones (Ahmad, 2003; Jacoby, 2004). This can be formulated as: Modern Turkish Citizen  =  Secular Muslim + Turk/Turkified Ethnicities + Statist If a group was considered not to have this defined identity or to be within its cultural circle, it was easily excluded from the public sphere and would simultaneously lose the opportunity to engage in the state’s institutions. Interestingly, the Kemalists started as an Anatolian counter-movement, opposed to the Istanbul government’s imperial order; hence, it created its own alternative amidst secular and nationalist cultural domination. Indeed, such a process was a natural result of a dialectic movement between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic actors. Under the heavy force and domination of the new Republic, the Kurdish regional leaders, whose power was limited to their areas of influence, were unable to achieve rulership over society because the leadership lacked the sovereignty to gain intellectual and cultural authority needed to construct a new socio-­political structure and develop a proper and stable hegemony (Belge, 2011). In order to protect their own identity against the new Turkish forces, the political actors perceived no other option than to take up a rebellious position against the new authority.

War of manoeuvre: freedom, organisational revolt, and defeat The resistance of the Kurdish socio-political movement was not formulated and shaped by modern nationalism but set in opposition to it as it emerged in a protective, reactionist, and counter-hegemonic context. For example, the very first major uprising was the 1925 rebellion by Sheikh Said of Piran (or Palu) which had the objective of combining the sharia, a code of law based on the Qur’an (religious text), with Kurdish values (Olson, 1989). It rejected the Kemalist cultural project of Turkification by an appeal to Islamic principles in opposing laicism. This rebellion, which had a strong internal consistency and legitimacy, shook the foundations of the new Kemalist regime during its founding year. According to Olson (1989), Sheikh Said’s rebellion differed from the pre-1923 ones, as it possessed the best-armed and most consistently skilled military and was organised by the Azadi nationalist organisation, while the confederated structure of the Kurdish tribes enabled the organisation to become a bloc. However, Sheikh Said was captured by the state security forces in June 1925, the rebellion only lasted about 4

76  Counter-hegemonic society months, and the mutiny became ineffective (McDowall, 2000; Mella, 2005). But this rebellion was by no means the last in Kurdish counter-hegemonic history nor the end of resistance politics: despite resulting in heavy losses for the Kurdish leadership, it inspired the Kurds to challenge the Republic to the present day through developing new leadership cadres even after the majority of the Kurdish leadership had at times been wiped out through execution, imprisonment, or exile. In the post-Sheikh Said period, the Turkish state became actively involved in Kurdish politics and restrained the development of Kurdish nationalism (Kahraman, 2004). In an attempt to respond to these factors, the Khoybun/Xoybun (Existence) organisation was founded in Beirut in 1927 by exiled Kurdish intellectuals. It started to prepare for another initiative, using first a strategy of the war of position by forming alliances between Kurds and outsiders (such as Europeans and Armenians) to make another frontal attack. According to Mella (2005: 103): “In order to gain victory the Khoybun organisation created internal, regional and international relations with chiefs of the Kurdish tribes and friendly neighbouring people”. They invited all the members of society to join the new movement under the policy based on the notion that ‘all Kurdish wo/men are warriors’ (to echo Gramsci’s phrase that ‘all men are intellectuals’) which also signified the fact that one need not be a professional to fight for one’s values. The Khoybun league attempted to expand the bloc to include non-Kurds, particularly by involving the Armenian national movement, the Thasnak Party. The party was also searching for international alliances, via Greece, Italy, the United States of America, and Britain (McDowall, 2000). As a result, another frontal attack began near Mount Ararat (Ağrı) in the 1930s in which the Khoybun actively participated by leading the Ararat rebellion (see, Pasha, 1992; Çamlıbel, 2007a) having effectively coordinated a comprehensive bloc.12 The organisation even managed to form a provisional state for a short period under the name of the Republic of Ararat with its own flag and state apparatus. The rebellion became a trans-Kurdish movement with support from Kurdish tribes in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Alevi Kurdish tribes in the region (Yuksel, 2016). However, the Turkish regime succeeded in neutralising the revolt which ended in widespread imprisonment, exile, and executions. The failure of the Ağrı rebellions in the early 1930s was followed by the Dersim uprising under the leadership of Alevi Kurds in 1937 (van Bruinessen, 2000a). While during this period, the quest for hegemonic power in the region by the Kemalist regime through Turkification had been continuing at full speed, in Dersim (Tunceli) it was more rigorously implemented because Dersim had always opposed Ottoman/Turkish authority in the rugged terrain of the region. The new state began by deporting the leadership to other parts of Turkey to facilitate the process of assimilation, while at the same time there was a state policy that forbade the use of the Kurdish language and cultural practices in daily life (Dersimi, 1999; Belge, 2011). It is further evidence that again the struggle between the powers in the Kurdistan region resulted from Kurdish demands for hegemony. After the uprising, about 40,000 Kurds were killed, and 3000 local civilians were deported (Kahraman, 2004). In fact, Dersim was less a rebellion, than a ‘massacre’. It is

Counter-hegemonic society  77 important to identify that, with the suppression of the Dersim revolt, a particular period in Kurdish modern history came to an end (McDowall, 2000), and Dersim became the last so-called war of manoeuvre – the frontal attack – against the Kemalist state for a while.

Conclusion This chapter (along with the next chapter), as the second empirical case, examines the response of the Kurdish counter-hegemonic movements and their strategies through a historical account in terms of a neo-Gramscian approach. The power struggle is the centre of the concept of hegemony. The Kemalist administration as a dominant group exercised its hegemonic culture over society through coercion at a time when the system was losing its legitimacy. The authority utilised oppressive, authoritarian, and colonial policies towards the Kurdish people without gaining the consent of society in order to keep momentary power during an organic crisis, which created a reaction. After setbacks of the rebellions, the Kurdish leadership groups, whether religious or secular, were all removed from any influence in the political sphere of the region (Bozarslan, 2004; Romano, 2006). The post-rebellion period witnessed a heavy assimilation process by the Kemalist regime. The consequences arising from the suppressed rebellions are essential in understanding the Kurdish strategies and the next period of the historical, hegemonic, political context since. Despite this, there still remained the probability that a small group of people would remobilise around their hegemonic articulation in the post-rebellion period, even though there was a lack of cultural leadership. For the Kurdish case, the nature of the hegemonic conflict appeared in a different form in each period. The chronological order – including the next chapter – examined within this critical analysis have not been arbitrarily chosen; rather, they are determined by the crucial events and fundamental turning points in Kurdish political history in relation to the nature of the struggle for power. Modern political actors opposed the Kemalist institutions, although the Kemalist movement itself emerged and developed as a counter-movement to confront the Ottoman imperial ruler. However, the Kemalists employed domineering policies rather than gain the approval of the people which was a regressive form of hegemony. The outcome of this top-down process of transformation towards modernisation was the establishment of a secular and nationalist regime. The absence of consentbased hegemony in Kemalist ideology in the Kurdish region generated the basis for the reactionist movements seeking alternative governance. As the factors identified earlier, the period 1923–1938 has been signified for particular attention. In the years preceding 1923, internal hegemony was exercised by the Kurdish leadership in the form of the traditional charismatic leaders, who held power over most of the tribes and the different religious groups. This political leadership had battled first against the Ottoman external powers under the emirates and later against aghas and sheikhs to gain political unity and autonomy for their subjects. The reaction arose when Istanbul imposed a policy

78  Counter-hegemonic society of centralisation on the region, and the struggle for hegemonic power reflected the dichotomy between the centralising policy of the Ottoman government and the de facto independence of the periphery in political economy. The central power started to rule the society, but the government (i.e. CUP) redistributed power in the region through new actors (begs, pashas, etc.). The period just after 1923 was still a period based on a strategy of the war of manoeuvre but within an identity politics for this era, even amidst the emergence of organisational politics, and thus rebellion and armed struggle continued to be used as a tactic to oppose the hegemonic power of the Turkish state, particularly during the uprisings of Sheikh Said (in Elazığ in 1925), Ararat (in Ağrı in 1932), and Dersim (in Tunceli in 1937). At this time of a war of manoeuver, the war of position was not a feasible option because of the aggressive stance of the government. As Gramsci noted, Eastern countries did not have a civil society that was effective in providing a base for hegemonic change. This was the case for Turkey where the Kurds were not represented as citizens who could be Kurds nor allowed to participate in the new administration because of the enforcement of Turkification and the policy of assimilation and homogenisation. The failure of the Kurdish uprisings brought about the ‘silent years’ for Kurdish politics and caused the entire Kurdish leadership to disappear, while heavy state oppression ensued.

Notes 1 Atatürk is Mustafa Kemal’s surname and means the father of Turks. 2 Said in his critical work highlights the role of theory in practice and underlines how theories travel to challenge essentialist and fundamental approaches. A theory was somehow misread by people but at the same time inspired another person to employ it in a different perspective. Moreover, Said suggests that “the first time the understanding of a cultural event or phenomenon is filtered through a theoretical formulation, this formulation’s strength derives directly from the source of concrete, historical context. Focusing on Georg Lukács’s theory of reification” (Sorensen, 2009: 58). In response, my aim in this chapter is to use Gramsci’s hegemony theory to explain the trajectory of Kurdish political identity through my interpretation of the hegemonic articulation between the state and Kurds through a historical context. 3 “I never liked and still dislike violent methods” Emir Kamuran Ali Bedir Khan (quoted, in Gavan 1958). 4 To understand the potency of the caliph towards the Kurds, one must look up to Muhammad Pasha of Rowanduz. During the uprising of the Mîr in 1834, a fatwa was given by state mufti which dictated that “whoever bears arms against the army of the caliph is an unbeliever and his wife has thereby divorced him. The pronouncement of this anathema created a deep impression upon the Mîr’s followers [including Kurdish religious dignitaries such as his own mufti]” (Jwaideh, 1982: 172). 5 Two of four founding members of the CUP were Kurdish; Abdullah Cevdet and İshak Sukuti. They first established the CUP founded on liberalism, secularism, nationalism, and positivism, which are products of Reform, Renaissance, and the French Revolution as a progressive movement and alternative to the sultanic regime. However, later the organization was directed by Turkish nationalism. 6 The first Kurdish journal was published in 1898 under the name of Kurdistan in Cairo, Egypt. Then Osmanlı Kürd İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (the Ottoman Kurdish Committee of Union and Progress) was followed by Kürd Teavün ve Terakki Cemiyeti (the

Counter-hegemonic society  79 Kurdish Society for Cooperation and Progress) in 1908. Hevi (Hope-Kurdish Student Union) and Kürdistan Mahibbur Cemiyeti (Association of Friends of Kurdistan) were both established in 1912. In addition, the Vilayet-i Şarkiyye Müdafa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti (Association for the Defence of Eastern Provinces) and Kürdistan Teali ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Society for the Rise and Progress of Kurdistan) were both founded in 1918 by well-known Kurdish intellectuals, including Sherif Pasha, Seid Abdulkhadir, Emin Ali Bedirkhan Beg, and the Baban Families. 7 Such as Kürt Teavun ve Terakki Gazetesi, Kürdistan, Roja Kurd (Hevi), Hatewa Kurd, and Jin in 1908–1912. Said-i Nursi had written a letter addressing the Kurdish porters in Istanbul, urging them to be aware of three important challenges facing the Kurdish nation: poverty, ignorance (illiteracy), and disorder (especially among the tribes). Simultaneously, he suggested three countermeasures: national unity, labour forces, and national communications within science, art, and alliances (Bediuzzaman Said-i Nursi cited in Tan, 2011). For instance one of these clubs, Kürt Nashri Ma’arif Jemmiyeti (Society for Propagation of Kurdish Education), established a school in Chemberlitash, Istanbul, in 1908 (Jwaideh, 1982; Olson, 1989; McDowall, 2000; Bajalan, 2010). 8 For instance, establishing a Turkish History Institution and Turkish Language Institution. The Kemalist establishment composed an anthem for the tenth anniversary of the Republic, which contained the word, “we created 10.000 million people of every age in 10 years”. 9 “Independence cannot be won with purely military forces; it requires both military and politico-military ones. If the oppressed nation, in fact, before embarking on its struggle for independence, had to wait until the hegemonic state allowed it to organize its own army in the strict and technical sense of the word [. . .] The oppressed nation will therefore initially oppose the dominant military force with a force which is only ‘politico-military’, that is to say a form of political action which has the virtue of provoking repercussions of a military character” (Forgacs, 1988: 207, from the SPN). 10 The best-known founders of the Azadi Society were Jibranlı Halit Beg (Erzurum, excommander of Hamidiye regiments), Blind Hussein Pasha (Haydaran tribe leader), Yusuf Ziya Beg (governor), Ekrem Bey, (from a well-respected Jemil Pasha family among Amed/Diyarbakır Kurds), Said Abdul Effendi (Istanbul), Sheikh Said (a renowned religious leader, Naqshbandi), and İhsan Nuri Pasha (a military captain) (Jwaideh, 1982; McDowall, 2000). There were also other organizations founded in these years, including the Kürdistan Muhibban Jemmiyeti (Society of the Friends of Kurdistan) and Kürd Milliyet Fırkası (Kurdish National Party) (McDowall, 2000; Olson, 1989). 11 The action of the state can be explained in Gramscian terms as follows: “when the pressure of coercion is exercised over the whole complex of society puritan ideologies develop which give an external form of persuasion and consent to the intrinsic use of force. But once the result has been achieved, if only to a degree, the pressure is fragmented” (Forgacs, 1988: 287). 12 The Ağrı Revolt was started by local eshir Jellalis from the Ba(ya)zid (Doğubayazıt) region and the leader of the Broyi Heski Telli (then directed by Khoybun) under the command of İhsan Nuri Pasha, a former Ottoman Staff Major (Çamlıbel, 2007a; İhsan Nuri Pasha, 1992).

5 Passive revolution Constructing institutional politics

The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. Antonio Gramsci

Changing the strategy: the passive revolution Following the failure of the various Kurdish uprisings ending in the Dersim rebellion of 1938, Kurdish political agents largely adopted flaccid strategies as a way of recovery via an education, adaptation, and institutionalisation of politics both within non-state organisations and political parties. This new political struggle has since been regarded as the re-enlightenment process of Kurdish society and an attempt to achieve hegemony through the use of democratic institutions after the neutralisation of the armed struggle. Deconstruction of Kurdish identity away from Turkishness began to take place (Heper, 2007). This in turn can be seen as a continuation of an earlier struggle in identity politics and development of a Kurdi(sh)ness during the last period of the Empire when the children of the aristocrats, who were educated in Imperial and European schools, discovered a nationalism (Bajalan, 2010) that was actively practised by the children of the new elites of the Republic and immigrants in the western Turkish cities in the 1950s (Saracoglu, 2010). The period 1938–1984 is shaped by a war of position.1 This trajectory is subdivided into time frames via a neo-Gramscian analysis: It is consciously and reflexively theorised and interwoven throughout a historical account. The first subdivision from 1938 to 1946 marks the beginning of the multiparty system and represents the first changes to the tradition of the one-party state. It signifies a defensive phase which Hamit Bozarslan (2004) calls the ‘silent years’. The second sub-period from 1946 to 1960 signals an era of aggression, violence, and military coup d’états in the political culture of the country. The third sub-period in the advanced modern political history of the hegemonic struggle of the Kurds runs from 1960 to 1984. This sub-period is dramatically different from previous ones as a result of the construction of Kurdish counterhegemonic culture in civil society incorporating new ideas such as socialism and secularism and adopting a novel political discourse which mobilises society

Passive revolution  81 arising out of the 1968 youth/student leftist movements. Such counter-hegemony was led by new organic intellectuals. These leftist organisations created a modern Kurdish culture that could unite an imagined community within common sense understandings and constructed a modern Kurdish political identity. Most of the members of these movements had been educated in the most prestigious Turkish universities (e.g. Istanbul, Ankara), particularly in science and civil engineering, and sought to construct a society in a practical and scientific way. As the new social engineers and social entrepreneurs, their aim was to develop Kurdish society through a programme of building factories, roads, and bridges to overcome the ‘fate’ of the nation. They strove for a self-sufficient society that bore, ironically, a striking resemblance to the Kemalist social project during its nation formation. This was to become a key attribute of the post-1960s Kurdish groups and provided an opportunity for the nationalist awakening. This defensive and submissive struggle continued until 1984; as a turning point, the year marked the beginning of the PKK’s armed struggle against the security forces2 which has continued to the present day (Yeğen, 2016). In this chapter, Kurdish politics are observed in light of the dominance of the one-party regime of the Republicans whose values did not recognise an opportunity for the expression of Kurdishness and were proudly aimed at the Turkification of the rest of society after the uprising was oppressed by the new government. However, Gramsci observes that hegemony is a dichotomy of force (coercion) and cultural approval (consent). The neutralisation of the hegemonic struggle can be reached by means other than coercion, violence, or frontal attack (Bozarslan, 2004). There is also the possibility of a war of position, which is a process of passive revolution that aims to gain the consent of both civil and political society in an antagonistic articulation. When the conditions of real politics changed, the Kurds adopted this new tactic as a result of these changes. Indeed, attempts to subvert the strongly Republican state became a possibility when external interference eventually resulted in multiparty politics which opened a new page in Kurdish modern history.

‘Silent years’: recovery, absorption, and preparation (1938–1946) During the unsuccessful rebellions of the Kurdish political agents in the early years of the Republic, the country was single-handedly ruled by the authoritarian one-party system under the CHP administration (1923–45), which continued until liberalisation began with the introduction of a multiparty system in 1946. Up until this time, the civil/military political elites had turned the state into a coercive instrument of Kemalism via focusing on the process of socially engineering citizenship regardless of the ethnic differences and religious beliefs of the people governed (Aslan, 2018). Civil society had no means of resisting coercion and engineering because the state dominated every sphere of public life. An absence of a functioning civil society and a lack of effective intermediate institutions became a crucial stumbling block in the transformation towards

82  Passive revolution democracy as each and every institution was considered an official organ of CHP ascendency. In this period, the state was engineered by bureaucratic, technocratic, and authoritarian behaviour, which can be defined as a Jacobin modernist project (Ünlü, 2018). This form of politics excluded the Kurds, Islamists, and leftists because the state considered such opposition as lacking the right to exist. With regards to the Kurds who subsisted on the periphery of the new Republic, the authoritarian policies of the Kemalist regime resulted in the deportation of many Kurds from the region and fuelled the belief that any Kurdish counter-attack to Ankara was futile since the rebellious Kurdish leadership had all been exiled, killed, or deported to western Turkey (Ungor, 2012; Romano, 2006; Chailand, 1994; McDowall, 2000).

The Kurds as Turkish citizens in the one-party regime To understand the nature of the Turkification process, reference can be made to the commonly used phrases and anthems which were developed (and remain in use today) during the CHP’s period. Phrases such as ‘Turk be Proud, Work, and Trust’ or ‘How Happy One Is Who Calls Oneself a Turk’ emerged in this period and are still inscribed on mountains in the Kurdish region (Kirisci and Winrow, 1997). An unofficial economic embargo was imposed on Kurdish-dominated territory, while strict plans, programmes, and militarised regulations were implemented across the region, such as the Eastern Reform Plan of 1926 that aimed to ‘discipline’ the territory via policies of assimilation, colonisation, and pacification of the area. The state authorities officially defined the boundaries of the region and prohibited the use of the Kurdish language in public places; even in the private sphere they instructed primary school children to speak Turkish at home after school (Coskun et al., 2011; Hassanpour, 1992). The Kurds, like the rest of the country, had to abandon their traditional and local customs and clothes, which according to the republican values of the Kemalist elites appeared as symbols of ‘backwardness’. During this period, the policy enforcing the monopoly enjoyed by the Turkish language and the linguistic homogenisation became an effective tool in the Turkification process.3 The establishment of national unity through ‘one language, one state and one flag’ affected all minorities and their institutions (schools, magazines, organisations, etc.), and so, in opposition to the existing social formation and culture, a new culture and social formation were imposed through coercion without seeking the consent of the people affected. They were not considered because, from the point of view of CHP militancy, their folkloric could be ignored in the application of policies that were ‘for people despite the people’. Bernard Lewis (1961) states that these tribunals gave the government dictatorial powers which were oppressive in nature and could be used to justify, for example, summary executions after show trials. The removal of the Kurdish leadership by the Kemalists allowed the regime to introduce an ‘inter-state colonialism’ (Beşikçi, 1991), which left the region as an ‘under-underdeveloped’ area (Majeed, 1976; Aydin Z., 1986). The same indeed was true for Turkish society, but the Turks submitted to the

Passive revolution  83 transformation of their society largely without an uprising. Hence, the conception of the state as developed by the dominant Kemalist elites also resulted in an inevitable historical transformation of society through the means of command rather than compromise. Authority and discipline were the only forces in the Kemalist apparatus of colonial control.

National awakening and Kurdish organic intellectuals Through authoritarian means, central hegemony was shaped by oppressive and assimilative principles, but the Kurdish periphery had begun to prepare a defensive position. This period proved a turning point for the Kurdish movement in which a fresh strategy was formed by a new group of intellectuals. The traditional intellectuals had partially lost their function and were having difficulty in representing the cultural self-consciousness and self-criticism of society. They failed to produce alternative channels for such expression to be articulated within society and therefore ceased to be the key agents that they once had been. The organic intellectuals of Kurdish society were searching for opportunity spaces in both public and political spheres. Their goal was to develop appropriate civil institutions to disseminate their social vision and to win the consent of members of Kurdish society by an appeal to traditional values. They wished to make a bridge between the various identities of Kurdish society, grounded in a consensual hegemony, and make people aware of the possibility of a new political structure as an alternative strategy. They sought a transformation of power relations by shifting from a military strategy of a war of manoeuvre, comprising frontal attacks, to a war of positions using passive methods within the social bloc since the Kurds had become ‘immobilised’ and stagnant because of the oppressive policies of the Turkish state and the traumatisation of Kurdish society. This passive scheme, which entailed such things as organising student unions and penetrating the media sector, was practised in a defensive mode. The project of Kurdish national unity was believed to be achieved through the mutuality and bringing together of the peasants, labourers, students, religiously oriented individuals and groups, Alevis, secularists, and socialists. The function and role of the intellectual was important in relation to this aim, for in other ways these intellectuals might be seen as being inactive in responding to political developments, either individually or as a party acting as a socio-political movement. The aim of the organic intellectuals, who had newly emerged from the ashes of the rebellions, was to construct a distinct Kurdish identity as a counter-hegemonic culture capable of transforming the existing state order and the identity imposed by it through a social and moral leadership that enjoyed cultural ascendancy over Kurdish society. In this way, the Kurds were creating the conditions under which they could challenge the existing regime by developing a counter-hegemony without having to depend on the traditional intellectuals – who remained an elite class, were influenced by the central power, and served to advance the process of Turkification. In response, and with the object of representing the interests of society as opposed to the policies of the centre, the intellectuals of the 1940s consequently

84  Passive revolution aimed to create an organic relationship with every member of society: rich or poor, devout Muslim or secular, Alevi or Sunni, agha or peasant, socialist or liberal, modern or traditional (Anter, 2000; Beşikçi, 1969). The organic intellectuals of this new politique produced a national consciousness located within a fragmented society. According to Gramsci (2003), ‘all men are intellectuals’ but continued by arguing that not all can fulfil the exact function of the intellectual, such as leading, organising, and educating. The reference to education in Gramsci’s position should not be taken to simply mean formal school or university education; for him, school is a crucial instrument for training individuals but is not the only place to learn and teach in terms of cultural and moral theory.4 Conveniently, the Kurdish intellectuals opened a new strategic period in their political history by moving from a frontal attack to passive revolution (a revolution of restoration). The so-called ‘silent years’ (1938–46), as a time of preparation, were also a time of expectation and the hope of recreating Kurdishness in Turkey through cultural and political leadership. This new leadership did not compete with the Republic through violent resistance; rather, they endeavoured to utilise state apparatus which could provide a competitive advantage within Turkish civil society and create a ‘planned politics’ in order to protect and restructure Kurdish political identity. This would reinforce their legitimacy and deconstruct the state’s discursive hegemonic influence on Kurdish society and so served as a war of position strategy in the political struggle. They created a modern politics that could be extended through other counter-agents. The right-wing conservative party, the Democrat Party (DP), struggled against the Kemalist culture, and in 1946 they gained a rare opportunity to come to power, thus ending the rule of a single party, the CHP. The party embraced the Kurds who since 1938 had for the first time the chance to obtain an opportunity space in the public sphere (Bucak, 1991). The political parties that the Kurds organised became a crucial device for the Kurdish organic intellectuals to make use of their cultural identity in the political and social fields (Gunes, 2012). The advances made by the DP in parliament was helped by the progressive developments in the country’s economic, political, juridical, and social life and the creation of an alternative culture based on liberalisation and democratisation that had gained the support of society, including the Kurds. To put it in Gramscian terms, hereafter, the Kurds believed that a philosopher (i.e. intellectual leadership) could be the solution to create common sense (i.e. democracy) for the country, particularly through party politics, with the party as a modern Prince that also could offer a new collective identity as a mode of social production and democracy, which the whole country needed and could provide the tools for achieving this goal. The concept of the Gramscian democratic philosopher was located at the centre of Kurdish politics in this period.5 During this sub-period, the organic intellectuals held different ideological positions in relation to the solution of the Kurdish question, and they were also more moderate compared to the previous period. The nature of the Turkish state and available opportunity space, albeit very limited, also shaped the nature

Passive revolution  85 of Kurdish activism. However, a new style of civil society, a complex structure based on a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, was trying to emerge despite the continuing existence of the Kemalist regime which had by now been undergoing an organic crisis. This crisis arose from two sections of society: ethnically the Kurds and religiously the Islamists did not voluntarily accept the new hegemonic Kemalist culture but suffered at the hands of its repressive policies. In relation to the Kurds, an important development in the process was the emergence of the ‘Turkified Kurds’ or at least some Kurds who accepted the hegemony of the Kemalist state, while the new order rejected any reference to Kurdishness. Even the justice system acted as part of the state apparatus and prioritised the expectations of the state over the delivery of justice.6 The Kemalist regime attempted to define Kurdish identity and construct an ‘official’ expressed in Turkish values (Romano, 2006). In this political, social, and cultural engineering process, the cultural struggle became important for both the state and the society since for the latter under such harsh circumstances conditions were unstable and gave little opportunity for the development of political action, as any voice in favour of something beyond the state’s official line risked persecution.

The appearance of opportunity spaces within multiparty system (1946–1960) Turkey moved to a multiparty-political system in 1946 under pressure from external hegemonic power as after World War II (1945), struggle between two superpowers the United States (the USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR) created a new world order, the Cold War. Turkey became a part of the Western Alliance in this bipolar international system. As a partner of the liberal and capitalist bloc, Turkey benefited from the Marshall Plan in 1947 and, thereby, needed to adopt liberal democracy. The opposition had attempted to conduct politics through a multiparty system since the early 1920s. After the organic crisis within the CHP in 1946, political development indicated that change was possible and that the strong state and its Kemalist regime could be undermined (Oktem, 2011). Trust was still an issue between the state and Kurdish leaders; for instance, prominent Kurdish families remained exiled in Turkish-dominated western cities in 1947 based on the 1934 law on forced displacement. Moving to a plural political system provided vital and significant elbow room for Kurds to take part in the social, cultural, economic, educational, and political life of Turkey. The competition among political parties for votes also meant that there were opportunities for Kurds to gain recognition. This represented another stage (1946–60) of the hegemonic moment to be used by internal Kurdish actors; with the multiparty system hegemony was shaped now in terms of the liberalisation and democratisation of the country. This influenced the counter-hegemonic movement and led to awakening and resurgence among Kurdish organic intellectuals who chose however not to abandon their passive strategy but to adopt an active defensive tactic rather than a static defensive one.

86  Passive revolution The first party to enter Turkey’s political arena as part of the multiparty politics was formed by a businessman, Nuri Demirağ, under the name of the National Development Party (MKP) and was founded in 1945. More significantly, it was followed by the Democrat Party (DP) under the leadership of Adnan Menderes, who was an MP for the CHP but resigned with four colleagues from the party in 1946. The DP became an important player in the transformation of the authoritarianbased system into one based on liberal principles in both the political and economic fields (Ahmad, 2003). The DP was brought to power in a landslide victory in 1950 in which the Kurds also provided significant support, despite the fact that the first multiparty election in 1946 was rigged by the CHP to maintain its power (Bucak, 1991). It was clear that a new hegemonic-state culture had come to power based on different social, political, and economic cultural values yet still within the strong state tradition of Kemalism. Regardless of this, the masses gave huge support to the party, as seen in the 1950 election victory, which was twice repeated in the 1950s. As a counter-hegemonic institution of the centre, the DP challenged the Kemalist élite’s culture by appealing to Islamic and capitalist/liberal principles, and they began to dismantle the Kemalist system in a process of liberalisation. The DP, as a new actor, was eager to gain the consent of society through utilising religion as common sense and particularly sought the support of the periphery, including the Kurdish sheikhs and aghas.7 Initially, after the CHP had rigged the elections, in order to maintain its own power and to pre-empt the DP’s accession to power, it introduced some policies that aimed to please the public (McDowall, 2000). Even though in the long run this did not ensure the maintenance of the CHP’s power, however, even when it was still in power, some socio-political and economic developments, including some that had an impact on the Kurdish region, were made possible through the multiparty system. This period at last provided opportunities for Kurdish society and facilitated the emergence of a new type of elite, including Kurdish members of parliament; albeit with Turkish political and social identities as the traditional Kurdish identity, rooted in Islamic values, still was not independently recognised by the state apparatus (Dag, 2017). Preceding the 1946 elections during the emergence of the DP as an opposition party, bringing the hegemony question to the heart of the Kemalist state, the CHP also attempted to use the economy to gain the consent of the masses by pursuing landreform legislation. The CHP endeavoured to construct a ‘soft’ Kemalism to reach the consciousness of society, with the result that some Kurdish agents, particularly leftists, secularists, and Alevis, looked towards it.8 With regard to the Kurds, the DP pursued a long-term dual policy to gain dissenting Kurdish support and to get them to join their Turkish conservative and capitalist bloc against the CHP’s Jacobin political culture. On the one hand, the DP policies prioritised religion to undermine the legitimacy of the CHP and thereby appeal to Kurdish society; on the other hand, by committing itself to economic development, the DP gained the support of the Kurdish region which had up to this point been left in the wilderness. For instance, the DP opened the region not only to domestic markets but also to international

Passive revolution  87 market economy by developing a network of transportation and the introduction of legislation that allowed the creation of industrial and agricultural programmes which brought together the Kurdish traditional aghas and sheikhs (Beşikçi, 1967) and capitalist entrepreneurs in the industrialised region of the country. Internally, during the period from the 1950 general election until the 1971 military memorandum, the opportunity space in the public sphere which was created by the liberalisation project of the DP made the Kurdish war of position effective. However, such opportunities did not come about as a result of Kurdish pressure, rather the change became possible through two layers of external force: the United States of America and Europe. Both these players acted as an international external hegemon, who by seeking to further their political and economic interests led to change in the political structure of Turkey. While these changes in Turkey were occurring, the Kurds sought the opportunity to occupy spaces in the public sphere. The Kurdish intellectuals successfully employed new skills and knowledge in relation to these external changes and in tune with the mood of the public to create a culture and ethical leadership with the aim of producing consent rather than coercion in Kurdish society. Some traditional and religious Kurdish notables found the intellectual space to challenge the state’s definition of Kurdishness through extending the hegemonic space for internal agents by shunning engagement with the DP cadres. Subsequently, these Kurds were in the DP’s alternative bloc during the period when the DP was struggling against the CHP-Kemalist culture (Anter, 2000; Bucak, 1991). Apart from this, the DP government did not principally differ from the CHP on Kurdish matters. Yet, it is important also to identify the impact that the change in the international situation had on Kurdish politics and so provided an environment that allowed some integration into the country’s politics. For instance, the global contest between the United States and the USSR provided Turkey with a crucial role in the Cold War era. These international actors wished to incorporate Turkey as a regional actor into their blocs. The United States presented financial aid to Turkey under the Marshall Plan (1948–51) following the Truman Doctrine (in 1947), and this had a significant impact on domestic politics. The pro-capitalist, right-wing political parties gained an advantage in this environment and led to the country joining the liberal bloc against the communists by promoting a market economy, religion, and nationalism and becoming a member of alliance international institutions, such as the Council of Europe in 1947 and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952 (McDowall, 2000). The external conditions presented a challenge to the one-party oppressive system and thus went some way to helping opposition groups, including the Kurds, to benefit from, and practise universal rights. As previously alluded to, the political interests of the state-related aghas/ sheikhs under this modernisation process coincided with multiparty politics. Some became big landlords in the region and the friendly actors of both state and the capitalist economy by shifting their conventional ties with the peasants/tribesmen from one of embeddedness based on a reciprocal social formation, to relations of employer and employee within the wage system of capitalism (Beşikçi,

88  Passive revolution 1991; Kıvılcımlı, 1993). The DP period up to the late 1950s can be summarised in terms of the central political system attempting to engage with the Kurdish region in order to gain their votes and to create agents in support of the government, to which end the centre’s political parties extended their patronage in exchange for these votes and political support. The DP’s economic and political policies resulted in some local leaders and large farmers migrating to the metropolis for new opportunities and means by which to integrate into the system. These regional leaders entered the state system first through political parties, particularly those on the conservative right (Yüksel, 1993; McDowall, 2000). The state under the DP not only displayed its closeness to religion in order to gain further legitimacy, something which the CHP could not draw upon, but it also appealed to the Kurds by offering the space to redefine Kurdi(sh)ness. For example, Adnan Menderes invited Abdülmelik Fırat, a Kurdish politician and grandson of Sheikh Said, to become a deputy (Bucak, 1991). Consequently, the notion of Kurdishness in a sense became associated with right-wing political parties based in Ankara, which were largely based on capitalism and religio-conservative – yet Turkish nationalist – principles.

Reactivating of Turkification The state institutions effectively criminalised other minority groups through the implementation of various policies which included, for example, the Wealth Tax of 1942 and the 6–7 September incident in 1955.9 These aggressive nationalist policies of the state towards minorities was a part of a third stage in the process of Turkification (the first stage having been undertaken by the CUP, the second by the earlier Republican cadre, and the third by the new Kemalists). Now business life was affected along with the small non-Muslim communities, Jewish, Armenians, and Greeks who were excluded from socio-political life (Bugra, 1994). The political actions of the Turkish state during this time, therefore, forced the Kurds to find different tactics to empower their counterhegemonic movement. Despite this political climate, the Kurds who were devout Muslims, particularly those associated with the Naqshbandi tariqa stood against modernist policy of the 1950s and 1960s by embodying a Kurdish Islamic identity (Yüksel, 1993). Still, religious Kurds essentialised their traditional way of life and studied in the madrasas instead of the new modern institutions of schools and universities (van Bruinessen, 2000b). They refused to recognise the authority of the state, and most of them did not hold official identity cards as citizens. However, due to the heavy pressure exerted by new political economy (Keyder, 1981), their resistance was gradually neutralised as they started to be involved in state institutions and moved to cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir, where they took advantage of opportunities in the economic, social, and cultural spheres. It is important to state that during this period, the Kurdish society was still not deeply divided in terms of political ideologies despite the emergence of new political positioning. The traditional leaders still managed to remain at

Passive revolution  89 the centre of Kurdish activism, but their power was being eroded in the face of the diffusion of Kurds into daily life through their engagement with the state and emigration to the large Turkish cities with the hope of earning a livelihood. Such socio-political and demographic changes, which entirely altered the Kurdish political landscape, were accelerated in particular with the democratic opening up of Turkey in the 1950s, although, as will be discussed later, these were limited. With the state involvement in Kurdish politics, the political mobilisation of Kurdish internal agents was accelerated so they could engage in the liberal political development of the country. Meanwhile, Molla Mustafa Barzani’s autonomous activities in Iran and Iraq (particularly the Revolt in 1961) influenced the Kurdish political actors in Turkey from the late 1940s to 1968. Bozarslan (2004) argues that the emergence of the Barzani rebellion in Iraqi Kurdistan created hope and confidence for the Kurdish movement to mobilise outside of the Turkish left, as Barzani was a genuine anticolonial reference while a diaspora activism in Europe raised and became effective (Baser, 2015). Despite such developments, a decade later by 1959, the so-called, the case of the 49s happened (Kutlay, 1988; Çamlıbel, 2007b), where a Turkish nationalist politician10 suggested a revenge attack on the Kurdists (Kurdish nationalists) due to the conflict between Iraqi Kurds and Turkmen in Kirkuk (Gunes, 2012). The incident shows that the antagonistic relationship between the state and the Kurdish counter-movement had been revived (Çamlıbel, 2007b).11 The state aimed to prevent the impact of trans-border Kurdish nationalism. During this time, an alternative response also emerged from those Kurdish civil agents, who had not integrated into the state political system to reanimate the Kurdish counter-hegemonic movement that had been in abeyance from the start of the silent years and sought to move towards a more offensive strategy. It was part of the reaction and counter-process among the Kurds which emerged after the state returned to its previous policy towards Kurdish politicisation. This was demonstrated in the case of the 49s in 1959 and the case of the 23s in 1963 when on both occasions Kurdish intellectuals were arrested (Kutlay, 1988; Çamlıbel, 2007b), along with the incident of the 55 aghas in 1960 when 458 Kurdish community leaders, including aghas, were detained and confined in the Sivas Camp (Çiçek N., 2010). This concluded with 55 aghas, sheikhs, and melles being sent into exile under the deportation laws to over 30 Turkish-dominated cities in the west of the country after the coup d’état of 27 May 1960 (Çiçek N., 2010). As a response to such attacks, the Kurdish counter-movement started to re-activate and prepare the conditions for the next stage in Kurdish activism, a return to a war of manoeuvre, which also provided a foundation for the 1960s organisational movements. This was inevitable, as the centre’s definition of appropriate political behaviour was no longer acceptable to the Kurds who were now going through a new development in their identity under the limited liberalisation taking place in Turkey. Arrest and deportation of Kurds indicated the uncompromising attitude of the state towards what it saw as ‘bad Kurds’ that is those who wanted to work outside the parameters defined by the state.

90  Passive revolution

Evolving a Kurdish nationhood Kurdish intellectuals started to form their own political culture independently of the state and its bureaucracy by engaging in an assimilative project of creating an identity for Kurdish society out of a fragmented structure and were thus defining and designing an identity for the Kurds. This was a result of the fact that Kurdish social institutions had invested in counter-hegemonic education and institutionbuilding in the 1950s, under the limited liberalism offered, by redefining their own identity beyond the definition imposed by the centre. Kurdish national awakening, in its various forms, emerged spontaneously mainly through the publication of various magazines. The establishment of this new means of identity formation indicates that throughout the 1950s, the Kurds were regrouping and developing social capital in terms of developing new activism. Although the majority of Kurds were illiterate, the organic intellectuals of the period still tried to educate the masses and develop their own hegemonic culture in Kurdish society via magazines, newspapers, conferences, seminars, or street demonstrations.12 The organic intellectuals also used the state socio-political institutions such as the community centres (halkevleri) that were cultural secular institutions founded under the Kemalist regime as a means of easily reaching the masses. There was a double irony as not only were the Kurds attempting to subvert the strong state by using the means that the state itself had provided to promote and strengthen its own existence, but also those means were aimed at erasing the very identity of the Kurds (Gunes, 2012). Such intellectual and cultural reforms permitted by the Turkish state also allowed Kurdish society to help reconstruct its identity by abandoning its long-term passivity and acquire a voice. New cultural forms were initiated to systematically define an identity through the institutional agencies of civil society. The emerging Kurdish elite, educated in the big cities under the liberal policies of the 1950s, attempted to develop strategies to undermine the assimilative Turkish policy by focusing on education, particularly the education of children – for example, Musa Anter’s works: Dark Wound and the Young Generation – and identifying the roles and duties of the young generation in retaining their Kurdish identity. Thus, the intellectuals in this period also established student halls for university students to promote unity with their fellow countrymen (hemşericilik), such as the Dicle and Fırat Dormitories under the management of Musa Anter (Anter, 2000), who would later control and lead the Kurdish institutions in the 1960s. This new strategy thus brought an end to passive revolution and resulted in new ideological developments. This new political identity of the Kurds did not arbitrarily centre on Kurdishness but resulted from the external intervention of the state and the reaction to the officially defined and constructed ‘Turkified Kurdish citizen’. In this manner, the new intellectual leadership, as opposed to the old traditional one, needed to shape their own cultural leadership in terms of a counter-hegemonic culture (good sense) that could oppose the existing and officialised common sense supported by the traditional intellectuals. The new socially constructed Kurdish reality challenged the existing reality that was shaped by

Passive revolution  91 assimilation policies (Kirisci and Winrow, 1997). Both the state and the Kurdish political agents used ideology – ideas, beliefs, and norms – to gain hegemonic power over Kurdish society. During the period of liberalisation from 1946 onwards, the intellectuals experienced relatively little challenge to their attempts to recapture and redefine a Kurdishness that differed from that of the state because it was viewed as one political ideology among several on the right, left, and centre that were articulated within the multiparty system and thus they were enabled to integrate into the system and democratic framework. However, there were limits, and the state apparatus became disturbed by the expansion of the cultural and political space that the society was developing, and in 1960 came the military coup d’etat and the replacement of the DP. Ahmad (2003) states that the Turkish intellectuals saw the 27 May 1960 coup by the military junta as a revolution which is described in the 1961 Constitution as a revolution of the intellectuals, the Second Republic (Miley and Venturini, 2018). After the military guardianship and the disappearance of the DP from Turkish political life, following the execution of its leadership on the charge that they had deviated from the principles of Kemalism, the Justice Party (AP) was established in a deep polarisation. Under the government of the DP, and later the AP, the Sunni Kurds were provided with the opportunity to integrate into the political system provided for them by the presence of conservative political parties, while the Alevi Kurds could locate themselves and their political interest within the leftist political institutions such as the Labour Party of Turkey (TİP) in addition to other underground and radical leftist organisations (Kıvılcımlı, 2011). These two main developing Kurdish camps deeply influenced the alliance of Kurdish pressure groups after the 1960 coup, particularly after the 1961 Constitution liberal wave, and later with the international left-wing protest of 1968 and the impact of the 68-generation. Various political parties, the DP, CHP, AP, New Turkey Party (YTP), and TİP, were important in terms of what they offered to the Kurds in providing the opportunity to participate in the political system and to (de)construct the official identity of Kurdishness. They also allowed the awakening of Kurdish nationalism through a struggle for hegemonic power by means of a war of position after the destructive phase of the war of manoeuvre. While this may not have been the main intention of these political parties, the political battle to win votes meant that the Kurdish politics could also gain something in return. This return was the redefinition of Kurdish identity within the new circumstances and political parameters by using the available opportunity spaces. Importantly, despite the heavy influence of the Kemalist regime during this period, the political agents managed to bring the peripheral demands of the Kurds into the main public sphere. The period from 1946 to 1960 witnessed another formation in the identity politics of the Kurds and as before it occurred through the impact of external hegemonic power, namely the opportunity space created by the Turkish establishment for its own sake and consequently (although unintentionally) helping the Kurds at the same time. As a result, while different political elites with different ideas on how to organise the future for the Kurdish society always existed

92  Passive revolution in the public spheres, for the first time these differences began to be expressed through different political ideologies, as a new political culture among the Kurds.

Institutional politics and redefining of Kurdishness in the post-1960 After the political openings and expansion of opportunity spaces were provided during the DP administration for a short period, the Kurdish political agents were able to establish a new model of political institutions in the 1960s formulated in terms of leftist ideology although almost all of them were illegalised. The new Kurdish organisations and the intellectuals who led those organisations located themselves within the cultural heritage of the 1940s and 1950s organic intellectuals but were shaped by a different worldview. This new political actor used various passive as well as active strategies and constructed a new knowledge articulated in terms of socialist, secular and organisational politics. After the 1960 coup, the new Constitution of 1961 restructured the social, economic, and political rights of the country within liberal values (Ahmad, 2003). However, while the practice of democratic rights became possible, the new Constitution did not address the political and cultural identity of the Kurds despite its agenda of liberalisation. In this period, the Kurdish political mobilisation was embedded in anti-fascist, leftist organisations (rather than specifically as pro-Kurdish parties) where they had been made more welcome and could use both the armed struggle (war of manoeuvre) and intellectual activites (war of position) strategies. Within such an environment, the Gramscian formulation of ‘Civil Hegemony = War of Position = United Front’ could be realised (Gramsci, 2003). The Kurdish intelligentsia started to educate the Kurdish urban population, young people, students, labour and peasants, to develop a collective social consciousness by creating cultural hegemony over Kurdish society while in opposition to the state regime. This was comparable to the factory council experiment that creates a space to constitute the Party, as a modern Prince. These modern Kurdish activists realised that civil society was the terrain in which they competed for cultural and political leadership and the way of achieving hegemonic power. They aimed to become a strategic actor in society and a rival to a state ideology that had presented itself as a revolutionary and modernist identity in the region and an agent that brought a renaissance to underdeveloped Kurdish culture unlike collective demands which were defined from the perspective of state institutions as backward in terms of their socio-economic effect. Yeğen (2014) argues that the Turkish state denied the existence of Kurdish identity (as distinct from the state’s formulation of the Turkish-Kurd) and characterised Kurdish reactionist politics by means of a discourse that referred to tribal resistance, anarchists, thugs, bandits, and backwardness and treated those engaged in this politics as ‘pseudo-citizens’. However, new Kurdish involvement in organisational politics started to challenge this colonial reading which was not seen as legitimate within Kurdish society since the state’s definition of Kurdishness was a political project rather than a social reality.

Passive revolution  93 The new development needs to be contextualised within the aspirations of the new Kurdish intellectuals in terms of what can be called an advanced modernisation era to distinguish it from the 1923–1960 period that identified as the period of modernisation. The advanced-modernisation agenda of the Kurdish resistance employed new jargon that rejected not only the state but also the language of Kurdish feudalism and religion. Ironically, the new Kurdish political actors, in their criticism of the past and its regional Kurdish struggle, shared the same intellectual platform as the Kemalists. They differed, of course, in their insistence on the continuation of the Kurdish struggle and activism with the desire to replace Turkish hegemony with their own. As a counter-discourse, the Kurdish leading actors began employing the discourse of East (Doğu),13 Easterner (Doğulu),14 and Easternism (Doğuculuk)15 in the late 1960s in an attempt to mitigate the reaction of the state to the use of any terms directly referring to ‘Kurds’ or ‘Kurdistan’, as any reference to ‘Kurdish’ issues was illegal and forbidden on political and legal grounds. This terminology, such as ‘internal colonisation’, was used for the large public meetings in 1967 known as the meetings of the East and Eastern nights (Beşikçi, 1967) and supported by the TİP which highlighted and criticised state policy in Eastern Anatolia, being the Kurdish region (Gundogan, 2005). The organic intellectuals of the time used the language of socialism and class-based politics to discuss colonialism, underdevelopment, dependency, land reform, equal opportunities, and justice in order to a develop a new critical understanding of society, a new social reality. There were strong and deep ideological differences which divided the leftwing and right-wing Kurdish agents, particularly between the radical leftist organisations and traditionalist, pro-state aghas and sheikhs. A national grammar emerged that went beyond the modern political identity. While those involved in leftist movements were establishing and consolidating their position as the new leaders of Kurdish society, the traditional and Islamist Kurdish actors stood aloof from these leftist institutions because of their political and economic interests and religious concerns. Kurdish politics split between right and left wing and legal and illegal context through involvement in mainstream political parties and acceptance of the state legitimacy. The leftist Kurds like those who aligned themselves with right-wing political parties that subscribed to the idea of the ummah (the unity of all Muslims) did not employ a separatist and distinctive Kurdish discourse at this time. This new Kurdish political activism, as expressed through leftism, sought political opportunities within the existing system with involvement in political parties that looked to transform the system and gain hegemony throughout the whole of Turkey, which at the same time would have also given the Kurds hegemonic power in their own region. This would be obtained through a proletarian revolution against the ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ and religious collaborators. The leftist organisations comprised the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Organisation (DDKO), Dev-Genç (Federation of Revolutionary Youth), labour movements, such as the Confederation of Revolutionary Labour Union (DİSK), and the TİP (Kıvılcımlı, 2011; Romano, 2006; White, 2000). They organised mass

94  Passive revolution demonstrations and activities in support of labour rights and democratic rights for the Kurdish demands, as they treat the Kurdish question within their class struggle ideology, hence the Kurdish identity issue is a part of the economic underdevelopment problem of the Eastern region (Kıvılcımlı, 2011; Gundogan, 2005). In this new form of Kurdish political activism, the Kurdish political movement expressed itself as a radical leftist one with an emphasis on class war, the proletarian revolution, and the socialist democratic struggle within Turkish leftist movements. However, the internationalist Turkish left, whose aim was to unite transnational labour movements, was not ready for an independent and separate Kurdish identity, a position that was shared with the Turkish right who as Islamists advocated a transnational religious identity under the institution and concept of the ummah. The Turkish left had never shown any sympathy towards Kurdish national demands and thus the Turkish left and right were both against the idea of a distinctive Kurdish identity, an identity they did not recognise as distinct from Turkishness. This ‘timid’, ‘protectionist’, and ‘introverted’ perspective based on Borders of National Pact, which defines the national borders of modern Turkey and her trauma after the Ottomans collapse, became labelled as the Sèvres syndrome (Gingeras, 2016; Ungor, 2012). This denial of a distinctive Kurdish identity and the demands they made resulted in many Kurdish leftists abandoning the Turkish Marxist–Leninist organisations to establish their own Kurdish leftist groups in the 1970s that soon mushroomed in the Kurdish political sphere in an attempt to develop a larger political platform that was essentially Kurdish (White, 2000; Romano, 2006; Saeed, 2016). An extension of the Iraqi–Kurdish nationalist movement, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Turkey (TKDP), was established in 1965 as the first Kurdish organisation in Turkey since Azadi and Khoybun (1925–1927). It was followed by the student organisation the DDKO in 1969, which was the first legally recognised Kurdish organisation in Turkey since 1938, and later by the Revolutionary Democratic Culture Associations (DDKD) in 1975. These organisational developments continued with the establishment of the Kurdistan Socialist Party (PSK) in 1975 and Kawa in 1976 which later fragmented into two groups, Denge Kawa in 1977 and Red Kawa in 1978. In a similar way, Rızgari also divided into two different organisations, Kawa Rızgari (1977) and Ala Rızgari (1979). The Kurdistan National Liberationists (1978), Tekosin (1978), Yekbun (1979), the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, established in 1978), and the Kurdistan Socialist Movement (in 1980) also bloomed in this period (Romano, 2006; McDowall, 2000; White, 2000). During the 1960s, the magazines like the Freedom Path, The Day of Homeland, Kawa, Rızgari, Denge Kawa, the Tigris and Euphrates (1962), Voice (1963), New Day (1963), The Right Way (1963), New Current (1966), and East (1969) had an intellectual programme (Gundogan, 2005; Gunes, 2012). Their common thesis was that Kurdistan as a colony was divided into four parts. The struggle against this colonialist and imperialist order included their local collaborators such as feudal aghas and sheikhs. Following this approach, the DDKO published their first monthly bulletin in 1970, as organic intellectuals (Gundogan, 2005), who aimed to establish a hegemonic culture

Passive revolution  95 based on socialist and secular principles using education as a considered means to gain consent over society. This change “signalled the critical shift in social mobilisation away from the aghas and semi-tribal peasantry, towards urban-based, modestly educated students and young professionals” (McDowall, 2000: 408). The new leadership strove to formulate an alternative identity and engage critically with a new ­counter-philosophy. The struggle against state hegemony shifted its focus. Their mode of operation extended to cover all spheres of society in a war of position that could be likened to trench warfare. These new Kurdish movements, which aimed to restore Kurdish identity clashed with each other violently, as demonstrated by the actions of the PKK and KUK (Orhan, 2016; Aras, 2014), while political violence was the reality of the country between the nationalists/Turkist, leftists, and state. It was not just a simple reaction but a resistance that constructed a new balance of political power by shifting it away from the old traditional and religious internal Kurdish hegemonic agents. When explaining the transformation, Yavuz (2007: 63–64) notes that these “new intellectuals rather than tribal and religious leaders started to shape Kurdish identity. Under the 1961 constitution, Kurdish intellectuals expressed Kurdish concern and grievances in socialist idioms to promote the self-determination of the Kurds”. Consequently, the political stakeholders of this period initiated a process of transformation of Kurdish identity by means of new cultural and moral reforms to prepare for further political change. Their ultimate goal was to reach a new authority and redefine Kurdishness away from the existing Kurdish identity embedded within religion and customs that until now had dominated society. The new organic intellectuals of the time also attempted to create fresh leadership by re-making Kurdish social structure and delegitimising existing internal hegemonic relations with the object of redefining the institutions of society in order to achieve social cohesion and to create a new culture among the Kurds based on a leftist (although later it formed in Kurdish nationalism), feminist (anti-patriarchy), and secular culture.16 In this reconstruction process of Kurdish identity, the important strategy was to first deconstruct the concept of ‘Turkified Kurdishness’ that had been forced on Kurds by the Republic’s assimilative policy. The political actors started to construct an advanced modern Kurdish identity through the process of reforming society by vernacularising universal rights. For instance, Williams (1977; as cited by Aydin D., 2014: 70) argues that the concept of Newroz (the Kurdish New Year festival) became ‘an ideological apparatus utilised for constructing counter-hegemony against the hegemonic culture. It is an element of the common-sense neglected or excluded by the [state’s] hegemonic culture’. Interestingly, while Kurds insisted on the celebration or myth of Newroz as an essential aspect of Kurdish identity as distinct from Turkish identity (Gunes, 2012), later in the 1980s the Republic attempted to take over the celebrations of Newroz claiming it to be of Turkish origin (as Nevruz), thereby seeking to deny its Kurdish authenticity. Demirer (2012) shows how this concept became grounds for the discursive struggle between the Turkish state’s Nevruz and the Kurdish counter-discourse of Newroz.

96  Passive revolution The new Kurdish counter-hegemonic agents adopted dual warfare: on the one hand, internally challenge the conventional Kurdish social identity, and, on the other hand, externally encounter the state’s fixed official identity. In their ideology, both the strategies of a war of manoeuvre and a war of position were used to gain hegemonic power. This can be expressed as follows: Total Hegemonic Power = Internal Hegemony + External Hegemony Yet, the hegemonic struggle was performed in a different sphere in this period, which was embedded in identity. The first hegemonic struggle of this historical phase (1960–1984) was constituted internally within the base of Kurdish society by extension of the political consensus in favour of regional nationalism. The stakeholders of the Kurdish struggle attempted to construct a new historical bloc through the deconstruction of the old social structure.17 With this internal hegemonic power, they would establish a system of stable consent and legitimacy for the new political identity and would produce a socio-political transformation under the new order by mobilising society. This project was related to the production of new knowledge and relationship between theory and practices, and so could be characterised in terms of the notion of total hegemony as part of a new Kurdishness. The socialists’ discourse, their ideas, culture, and methods of action, which echoed what was happening elsewhere in the world, became central to that agenda. To this day, even after two decades of cultural evolution, the politics of the pro-Kurdish party is still imbued with leftist values that manifest themselves in theoretical and philosophical pronouncements. Eventually, the new actors gained internal hegemonic power by changing the social and political consciousness of society, including subaltern groups and in this way creating a historical bloc, and so during the 1960s and early 1970s this bloc promoted the transformation of society and the restructuring of Kemalist ideological formations and pledged to change the function of the subaltern groups from a passive mass into an active revolutionary power. Throughout this period, particularly in the 1970s, some Turkish socialists also joined the Kurdish historical bloc, but this time the Kurdish organisations were the ones who founded the bloc.18 The bloc meant a political and ideological alliance with different groups for Kurds and thus initiated a new concept of ‘free Kurdistan’ to be made possible through an ideological and armed struggle. The bloc was not constituted by a single scholarly leadership, but rather it raised the intellectual level of society which could then provide erudite and moral direction and so constitute the foundation of the Kurdish political party in the future. The raising of the intellectual level of society enabled Kurdish society to accept the emerging Kurdish nationalism as a new social alternative without the need for any aggressive intervention. It was an ideological process and moreover a process of passive revolution. Hence, the new philosophy challenged existing internal common sense, with its roots in Islamic and tribal culture, based on a conservative, patriarchal, and unequal social structure. The aim was to educate the masses as potential intellectuals in places such as the university,

Passive revolution  97 neighbourhood, streets, and prisons, with magazines, newspapers, and posters. This constituted the social functions and political dimension of the organisations involved in an attempt at radical transformation through these limited and targeted means.

Reconsidering the Kurdish national movement This meek approach outlined earlier changed after the 1980 coup and the following decade saw the arrival of the PKK (Marcus, 2007). The party began to control a significant number of Kurdish leftist organisations and became a hub of Kurdish national struggle for their former members as a result of starting a new insurgency (Gunes, 2012), which allowed them to continue their struggle for Kurdish emancipation. Orhan states (2016: 6) the “political violence is instrumental in the Kurdish case”, from the tribal to the modern armed conflict or within contests of the hegemony, such as genocide, mass killing, murder, rape, torture, or forced displacement. The PKK used political violence to mobilise the people in a Fanonian context as “the violence perpetrated by the colonisers seeks to dehumanize the colonised” (Jongerden and Akkaya, 2011: 132). State violence has also occurred through underground organisations, paramilitary groups, and counter-guerrillas, such as JITEM (Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counterterrorism) under the counterinsurgency policy. The torture of PKK members in the notorious No. 5 Cell of Diyarbakır Military Prison bestowed more power on the Kurdish groups and members of Kurdish society to rally to the PKK, as the brutal policies of the Turkish state provided legitimacy to Kurdish demands (Gunes and Zeydanlioglu, 2014). A  number of the PKK members in Diyarbakır Prison protested through hunger strikes and self-immolation, which also gained the PKK more support in the region and created a narrative and legend to further provide legitimation of its political culture (Tan, 2011).

Conclusion The Gramscian account provides a critical lens to understand the structure of Kurdish responses to the new modern Turkish state. This chapter is divided into three important time periods between 1938 and 1984. In this phase, the political Kurds discovered their modern identity and attempted to deconstruct the officially given identity that was politically designed and imposed by the Republican state, in order to reconstruct a distinctive one of their own. Primarily, the chapter analyses the notion of hegemony in two interrelated aspects: first, it focuses on the struggle among Kurdish internal actors to build an alliance and, hence, to achieve power over society. Second, it argues that the Kurdish leadership shifted their tactics and adopted a passive struggle against the state, which underwent a crisis of legitimacy in the Kurdish region while assuming total power, which can be formulated as: Hegemony  =  Consent (War of Position) + Coercion (War of Manoeuvre).

98  Passive revolution This formulation illustrated the response of Kurdish political agents against authority by using different tactics according to prevailing political circumstances. The first sub-period 1938–1946 was identified as the silent years. It signified a period when Kurds recovered losses and survived despite a heavy assimilation process. The years of passive revolution remained quiet. During the 1946–1960 timescale, the Turkish state itself had become more democratised; and the hegemonic struggle in this period is best understood in terms of civil society. Kurdish agents were beginning to integrate with the various democratic institutions to articulate a new identity. The traditional and religious members of the leadership, such as aghas or sheikhs, reappeared and entered right-wing political parties, like the DP and its successor the AP, while the modern and secular leftist Kurds assumed a presence in the TİP and YTP political parties. On the other hand, some Kurdish socio-political organisations and individuals came together to establish an alternative culture in the non-violent sense in order to continue the hegemonic struggle in the public sphere, seeing the inception of a multiparty political system. The liberalisation of the country’s political life provided Kurdish agents with more opportunity spaces and became one of the defining elements in the revitalisation of Kurdish nationalism. Organic intellectuals appeared in Kurdish society offering a new alternative culture and philosophy, while the leadership received a substantial welcome from members of society. The Kurdish nationalists embraced diverse people: traditional/modern, agha/peasant, socialist/liberal, secular/Islamist, or Sunni/Alevi. Hegemony in these terms means a form of parliamentarism and bureaucratism within a liberal political culture during this period. The new public sphere within the multiparty system was used to develop alternative identities around moral values, consciousness, and culture by means of mass education, community activities, public relations, and engagement with political parties that would secure the moral support of the whole of Kurdish society. In this way, an alternative identity was constructed within the semi-democratic system, taking social power from their relationship to the traditional tribal and religious social structure. Nevertheless, mainstream right and left-wing parties were influenced by the idea of one nation. Kurdish nationalists sought to challenge the central power of Kemalism by using a passive revolution that would systematically but gradually transform the system through non-violent methods after the trauma of the previous period of violence. Occasionally, however, the project of the Kurdish leadership was disrupted by state policies that produced such incidents as the Sivas Camp, which was similar to the deportation of the 55 Aghas in 1960 and the case of the 49s in 1959. These incidents led to the questioning of the Kurdish tendency towards passiveness as the people began to demand social transformation and to achieve power through an alternative system outside the dominant culture. The time period 1960–1984 occurred as an advanced modern epoch. Here, hegemony can be understood in terms of a broadened role for the masses which provided society with the power to control and orient political and social activities along the lines of Gramsci’s experiment with the factory council. Hegemonic

Passive revolution  99 politics were increasingly imbued with leftist ideology in this phrase. After 1960, Kurdish political actors attempted to move beyond defensive politics to a transformative formulation with the creation of their own conception of Kurdishness. It was the external political and social conditions that forced the Kurdish leadership to employ both a war of position and a war of manoeuvre as a means of changing the hegemonic order as a passive strategy would no longer suffice. In the war of position, it had been hoped that moral/intellectual reforms would lead to self-governance, but by the end, this was not possible due to the nature of the authoritarian system. The leadership began to prepare for a war of manoeuvre by using underground warfare searching for modern guerrilla tactics like other socialist organisations the world over. These new youth/student organisations as leading actors aimed to operate a trench system of modern warfare, while simultaneously developing new knowledge and culture after challenging and negating state discourse defining Kurdish identity and using modern techniques deploying a frontal attack. Their organic culture was embodied in the heritage of the 1950s’ intellectual movement which had already changed society’s perception of Kurdishness and had constructed common consciousness and morality for the society. Such new political knowledge, as opposed to the religious-originated nature of traditional politics, created a power struggle among Kurdish internal actors. The new Kurdish leftist groups also deviated from the Turkish leftist movements and created their own socialist ideology imbued with Kurdishness by mixing socialist discourse within national identity politics. This did not hinder the emergence of the new Kurdish bloc, despite the existence of many different and independent groups. The main challenge of this period was to change the traditional framework of conservative, patriarchal, religious, and regional Kurdishness to create a leftist, secular, feminist, and nationalist identity. It was then necessary to redefine relations with the external hegemonic power to gain total hegemony once the internal hegemonic culture had become accepted by Kurdish civil society. Achieving hegemonic power creates a socialist project of democracy to sustain that supremacy. In the next chapter, the notion of hegemony eventually gained a new meaning in the post-1984 era through EU-isation in the context of Mouffe’s (2013) agonistic version of democracy (what I refer to as ‘non-otherising democracy’). These later developments are part of a continuing process in the Kurdish hegemonic struggle that is dynamically embedded in the social construction of Kurdish identity. The postmodern (the) political is emerging as an agonistic process (Mouffe, 2018), alongside a radical democracy, that aims at unity-in-diversity or, in other words, representing a conflictual consensus. The PKK, particularly after the 1990s, has started to adopt this radical political project as a new hegemonic articulation due to complex society and intermingled identity politics.

Notes 1 The book has identified the pre-republic period as a premodern time and after establishing of the republic (until 1960) as a modern time for the Kurdish political history.

100  Passive revolution 2 The armed struggle against the security forces started from 1984 onwards, which is one turning point, although the PKK’s first attack was against the Bucak tribe in 1979 with an attempt to assassinate its leader, Mehmet Celal Bucak, who was labelled a comprador (state collaborator), exploiter (of the labour of peasants), and betrayer of the Kurdish national cause. 3 “Five million Kurds in Turkey are classed as Mountain Turks” (Emir Kamuran Ali Bedir Khan Forward in Kurdistan, in Gavan, 1958). According to Sir Harry Luke (1936: 21), the British Lieutenant-Governor of Malta, who stated in 1936 that “The Kurds are now left for Turkey, as a minority at all compact, of that mosaic of races that once composed the Ottoman Empire”. After the Treaty of Lausanne, “Kurdish cultural institutions were closed, and Kurdish leaders arrested. Tragic and disastrous events followed. The Kurds revolted and fought back ceaselessly against Turkish onslaughts, culminating in 1925” (Gavan, 1958: 24). 4 Gramsci perfectly advises, “the intellectual should not be specifically characterised by intellectual labour, but by the position of this intellectual labour in determinate social relations (including political ones). Second, with the emphasis upon social and political organisation rather than specific intellectual activity, Gramsci explicitly rejected a theory according to which intellectuals form a homogeneous social group distinct from social classes, or even an independent class. ‘There does not exist an independent class of intellectuals, but every class has its intellectuals’ ” (Thomas, 2009: 415). In more practical terms, according to Gramsci, whether a person can sew their ripped clothes or cook a meal does not make that person a tailor or a chef, as the structural relations to the object are important. Thus, the same applies to an intellectual. 5 “The democratic philosopher is the conceptual form that (can be regarded as an intensified version of the organic intellectual) comprehends the political status of the specific intellectual activities undertaken by the organic intellectuals of the working-class movement. More politically focused figure. For Gramsci, the philosopher is a politician and the politician are the philosopher in the sense that both are actively engaged in constructing the ‘terrains’ (the superstructure of civil and political society)” (Thomas, 2009: 429). 6 For instance, in 1943, 33 Kurds were killed in Van’s Özalp town without trial on the orders of the Turkish general, Mustafa Muğlalı, who suspected them of smuggling; this incident has since become a lamentation in the poet Ahmet Arif’s (2008) work The Thirty-Three Bullets, which is written in 1968. 7 “Menderes tried to bolster his authority by forming a nationwide front called the’Fatherland Front’, whose aim was to isolate his critics and disarm the opposition [. . .] When this political maneuver failed to ‘subversive activities’, whose aim, they claimed, was to engineer a military revolt” (Ahmad, 2003: 115). 8 “As yet unrecognised, the paths of Kurdish nationalism [strategy] and of Kurdish folk Islam were destined to part company. When both resurfaced, after the first faltering gestures of democratic pluralism in the 1950s, the sheikhs generally encouraged their disciples to support conservative clerical or right-wing parties in national politics; Kurdish nationalists, on the other hand, sought strength from the political left. Each, in the fullness of time, was destined to become a bête noir for the other” (McDowall, 2000: 211). 9 The state took extra tax from rich citizens, but in practice this tax was for non-Muslim minorities (particularly, Jewish, Greeks, and Armenians), who controlled large portions of the economy. Whether rich or poor, business professionals or not, if they could not pay the amount demanded within 1 month, they were exiled to the labour camp in Aşkale (Erzurum province of the eastern country), where 21 died. Turkish mobs attacked non-Muslims, particularly Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, who lived around the Beyoğlu region of Istanbul and looted their businesses (including churches and synagogues) on 6 and 7 September 1955.

Passive revolution  101 10 Asım Eren. 11 The Kurdish intellectual awakening (for instance Musa Anter’s Qimil book) drew a response from the state and 50 Kurdish intellectuals from different ideologies were arrested; the young law student Mehmet Emin Batu (who died from gastrostaxis) made mention of this incident as the ‘case of the 49s’. These nationalist activists were accused of aiming to split the country with the assistance of the foreign powers. The 50 included: Şevket Turan, Naci Kutlay, Ali Karahan, Koço Elbistan, Yavuz Çamlıbel, Mehmet Ali Dinler, Yavuz Kaçar, Nurettin Yılmaz, Ziya Şerefhanoğlu, Hasan Akkuş, Örfi Akkoyunlu, Selim Kılıçoğlu, Fevzi Avşar, Şahabettin Septioğlu, Sait Elçi, Sait Kırmızıtoprak, Yaşar Kaya, Faik Savaş, Haydar Aksu, Ziya Açar, Fadıl Budak, Halil Demirel, Esat Cemiloğlu, Ferit Bilen, Mustafa Nuri Direkçigil, Necati Siyahkan, Hasan Ulus, Nazmi Balkas, Hüseyin Oğuz Üçok, Mehmet Nazım Çiğdem, Fevzi Kartal, Mehmet Aydemir, Abdurrahman Efem Dolak, Musa Anter, Canip Yıldırım, Emin Kotan, Ökkeş Karadağ, Muhsin Şavata, Turgut Akın, Sıtkı Elbistan, Şerafettin Elçi, Mustafa Ramanlı, Mehmet Özer, Feyzullah Demirtaş, Cezmi Balkaş, Halis Yokuş, İsmet Balkas, Sait Bingöl, Mehmet Bilgin, and Fetullah Kakıoğlu. For more information, see Naci Kutlay (1988), Yavuz Çamlıbel (2007b), and Musa Anter (2000). 12 Such as Şark Postası (Eastern Post) in 1954, İleri Yurt (Progressive Homeland) in 1958, Dicle Kaynağı (Source of Tigris) in 1958, Barış Dünyası (World of Peace – Turkish liberal), and Yön (with a socialist approach). 13 It refers to the Kurdish dominant region or Kurdistan in a historical context. 14 Kurds (Kurdish people). 15 Kurdish nationalism (Kurdists). 16 Gundogan (2005: 2) argues that “a new form of Kurdish political dynamism began to rise especially among the Kurdish university students in metropolises like Ankara and Istanbul. This was a time during which Turkey underwent a significant social transformation, which then resulted in the emergence of a leftist movement with a voice higher than ever. A new group of Kurdish intellectuals who were educated in the universities of Ankara and Istanbul were also among the activists of the leftist movements of the time”. 17 Whose “dialectical understanding of the relationship between structure and agency allows one to trace the contours and grids of different relational power interests across the regional and global landscape” (Bieler and Morton, 2006: xxi). 18 Such as Türkiye Komünist Partisi/Marksist-Leninist; TKP/LM (included Türkiye İşçi, Köylü Kurtuluş Ordusu-TİKKO); Türkiye Halk Kurtuluş Partisi-Cephesi; THKP-C, Dev-Genç, Dev-Yol/Devrimci-Sol (Devrimci Halk Kurtuluş Partisi-Cephesi; DHKPC) (Gunes, 2012).

6 National identity Many Kurds in agonistic pluralism

Identity is ultimately legitimated by placing it within context of a symbolic universe. P. L. Berger & T. Luckmann

Identity, liberal democracy, and pluralism The last two chapters explored the construction of hegemonic Kurdish political identity in terms of a struggle between internal and external actors, particularly during the democratisation period. However, as previously detailed, the promotion of democracy in Turkey has largely constituted a reaction to foreign external influence, such as the Marshall Plan, NATO, and EU membership, as an affiliation of these institutions has required liberalism in the country. Engaging with such processes and transnational institutions meant that the regime had to lessen its control and to enlarge the opportunity space for the larger public, which indirectly enabled the expansion of Kurdish rights and activism. The domestic impact of these global institutions can be implicitly seen in the analysis provided in the previous chapter covering the 1946–1960 period, while the strong and effective impact of the EU can be seen in the post-1999 era, as Turkey at this stage (particularly after 2002 with the AKP’s liberal policies) began to become heavily involved in the EU accession process (Muftuler-Bac, 2014). The EU served as an external political dynamic, affecting Turkish and Kurdish identity reformations and continuously raising criticisms regarding the continuing violations of the political and cultural rights of Kurds in Turkey. The armed conflict between the Turkish army and the Kurdish armed forces (PKK) continued to intensify after hostilities began on 15 August 1984 (Marcus, 2007), which Jongerden and Akkaya (2011) identified as the start of the ‘People’s war’ a turning point, a day of awakening. With the onset of intense large-scale armed conflict, the Kurdish region descended into a decade of violence (Bozarslan, 2004; Orhan, 2016). It is estimated that the fighting has led to the deaths of about 40,000 people. The 1990s witnessed heavy battles with the destruction of over 3000 villages and the displacement of over 3 million people in the region (Kurban et al., 2008; Jongerden, 2014).

National identity  103 This chapter (along with the following one) will offer the third and final empirical case of the book, which focuses on identity politics, providing hegemonic articulation of the internal socio-political agents when transforming an antagonist enemy into an agonist adversary relationship via constructing Kurdish political identity in the EU-ising of Kurdishness discursive practice. It also analyses the effect of indirect external dynamics, particularly the EU, in the political transformation of the Kurdish political movement and redefinition of a political identity. Turkey’s EU accession process provided an opportunity to promote peace and stability in terms of liberalisation of the country and inner democratisation of mainstream Kurdish political actors (Cicek, 2017; Tocci, 2011; Tezcur, 2010). Yet, the cultural and political impact of the armed conflict on the Kurdish politics was notably important, as the conflict was an ongoing reality affecting many Kurdish cities in the region. This cycle of violence led to the completion and dissemination by mainstream Kurdish actors of the contemporary Kurdish political identity. Both Chapters 6 and 7 examine the pluralism and role of the various sub-groups in expanding and transforming concepts of hegemonic Kurdishness, while also examining the domestic impact of external actors (such as the EU) on both macro and micro politics of the country. These two chapters require a social constructivist theoretical approach alongside a Gramscian account, as the notion of hegemony cannot explain alone the complexity of postmodern Kurdishness.

Trajectories of the Kurdish identity politics The competing definitions of social reality can be conceptually and socially understood in different ways. From a social constructivist perspective, newcomers can be seen to attempt to redefine social reality and facts according to their own perceptions. However, the difficulty occurs when one group uses its own definition as the only premise. The prevalent modern Kurdish identity founded during the 1950s and developed during the 1960s was promulgated by the PKK as an advanced modernism in the 1990s. Yet, a constricted definition of Kurdish reality inhibited social change and weakened the social space for dialogue and communication. This Kurdish hegemonic political identity was challenged, as a part of the internal democratisation of the Kurdish political movement and the soft impact of external dynamics (including the post-Cold War era, the country’s EU accession process, and the diaspora), thus the meaning of Kurdishness has been subject to various interpretations among relevant sub-groups, at least at the intellectual level and within discursive practice in the so-called postmodern Kurdish society.1 The questioning of identity creates the context in which to investigate the process of the EU-ising of Kurdish identity. EU-isation discourse is a framework of democratic and liberal values such as equality and liberty to all and influenced Kurdish civil and political initiatives in Turkey. For the Kurdish political agents, universal human rights became the main agenda for the expression of Kurdishness during the 1990s, as a part of their national demands. It was assumed that the EU accession process would stop armed conflict, open channels for dialogue,

104  National identity establish a peaceful resolution ensuring democratic freedoms, such as the freedom of thought and freedom of expression, and establish minority and cultural rights and social justice and equity (Yilmaz, 2017; Muftuler-Bac, 2014; Kaliber and Aydin-Duzgit, 2017; Yildiz, 2005). As a response to the EU accession process and its impact on liberalisation, the term ‘EU-ising’ can be usefully employed to describe the radical liberalisation of Kurdish leftist politics. However, the EU-isation rhetoric was led by Kurdish political actors rather than being a direct result of EU support for democratisation of the candidate country as part of its enlargement policy. The EU’s promise of individual rights within a neo-liberal democratic context did not coincide with a Kurdish collective desire for national rights and democratic autonomy as a practice of radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) within existing state boundaries. Consequently, Kurdish political representatives aimed to transform liberal democracy in line with leftist libertarian and egalitarian values. In this respect, direct concern is not with the EU as a causal factor, rather with the EU–Turkey relations and on the opportunity spaces presented by the EU institutions in terms of the expansion and consolidation of democracy in Turkey. Since the 1990s, the advanced-modern concept of Kurdishness and its political discourses has developed within a hegemonic power struggle. As a result of the Kurdish political struggle, it is now represented in the national governance system which must be considered an important achievement, given the heavy-handed policies of the junta regime stretching back to 1980 (Turan, 2015; Heper, 2007; Muftuler-Bac, 2014). The emergence of new ways of defining Kurdish identity and activism lifted Kurdishness onto the international stage (McDonald and O’Leary, 2007; Celiker-Grabolle, 2015). The question and redefining of Kurdish identity became an important issue with the liberalisation and democratisation of the Kurdish political movement (Tezcur, 2010). The dominant Kurdish identity, predominantly represented by the PKK2 through a strong social and political process, was often at odds with the values of the larger Kurdish society and different sub-identities (Islamists, opportunists, LGBTs, feminists, etc.). It is important to appreciate the internal debate that took place around enlarging the borders of Kurdishness in understanding the new political identity. The Kurdishness was promulgated by the PKK, later challenged by subaltern identities, especially after 1999 (as a period of intense liberalisation of Kurdish politics due to different internal and external reasons) within Kurdish society shifting the antagonistic enemy relations into agonistic adversary ones (Mouffe, 2013). This period can be identified as the emergence of ‘many Kurdishnesses’ (a term which conveys the agonistic pluralism of this new political Kurdish strategy) by ‘various Kurds’. Furthermore, several sub-identities and strategies applied by members of Kurdish society in terms of the nationalist and democratic movements are examined and mapped. With the emergence of such particular knowledge, different Kurdish stakeholders participate in the struggle in various ways and levels, while having created such power relations grants

National identity  105 opportunity for those holding a distinctive identity in Kurdish society to aim to expand the hegemonic Kurdish identity, securing space in the identity sphere. Three main and distinctive characteristics of the more popular and widespread Kurdish political identities and discourses are considered, which Cicek (2017) identifies as the Kurdish national bloc, the Kurdish religious bloc, and the Kurdish economic elite bloc. Aydinli and Ozcan’s (2011) description offers a slightly different emphasis by categorising: integrated Kurds, Islamist Kurds, and active ethnic (or separatist Kurds). In this book, one identity was in the secular, nationalist, and leftist groups, such as the PKK, who became the most ‘politicised’ members of Kurdish society after the launch of the first serious armed struggle against Turkish security forces (Marcus, 2007; Yeğen, 2016). Another can be found in the pragmatist/ opportunist-Kurds already involved, integrated, or assimilated within the political economy and socio-cultural life of the country. Finally, a group shaped by an Islamic orientation identified themselves within a Kurdish Islamic context which distinguished them from those groups involved with the state and the secular and leftist Kurdish actors, and this provided a character of their own (Yavuz, 2007). These different agents (see Chapter  7) can still be identified within the Kurdish social structure and are represented with respect to language/dialect, religion/ sect, territory/region, and class/gender diversities (Table 6.1). Focus now turns to examine the trajectory of these Kurdish political identities and the emergence of this new Kurdishness as a political project. Table 6.1  Strategies and Identities of the Internal Groups Actors Strategies

Kurdi(sh)-Secular Identity

Pro-active Militant • PKK (organised)

Kurdi(sh)-Islamic Identity

Kurdish Opportunist/ Pragmatist Identity

• Hizbullah (organised)

• Village guards; tribes, e.g. Bucak, Jirki (organised) ActiveBased on same human • Modern Kurdiyati • NGOs, for instance, Accommodative capital and ideology institutions Nurcu KAMER, DTAM, with the PKK. (Zehra etc.) or or GÜNSİAD • The pro-Kurdish Mustazaflar(organised) or political partyDer, Hür-Par • The Kurdish linear: HEP, DEP, (Pro-Hizbullah) politicians, ÖZDEP, HADEP, (organised) or bureaucrats, or DEHAP, DTP, BDP • Traditionalist artists in Turkish (organised) or Naqshbandi, public sphere • Societal Institutions Qadiri tariqas, (individual). And such as DTK, KCK, madrasas etc. some of the Islamic IHD, TAYDER, (group) organisations Saturday Mothers (group) (organised) Continued

106

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Table 6.1 Continued Actors Strategies

Kurdi(sh)-Secular Identity

Kurdi(sh)-Islamic Identity

Kurdish Opportunist/ Pragmatist Identity

• Non-PKK • Istanbul-based • Urban and Defensivebuttressed or PKKIslamic groups in assimilated Accommodative sceptic Kurdish the region, such so-called ‘White parties; PSK, HAKas Nurcus Kurds’ (individual) PAR, KADEP (Gülenci, or (organised) or Süleymancı etc.) • Turkified local • Intellectuals, such • Movements Kurdish tribes as Ümit Fırat, (organised) (group) Muhsin Kızılkaya, Orhan Miroğlu etc. (individual)

Mapping identities: inner groups within postmodern Kurdish society Kurdish identity appears in multiple guises in terms of its complex postmodern social base. Creating an identity map allows investigation of the different approaches and discourse operationalised by Kurdish political agents and details the politicisation of a fragmented structure that acknowledges plurality and diversity within society (Cicek, 2017; Aydinli and Ozcan, 2011). After exploring these internal dynamics, clear differences are elicited in the definition of Kurdishness, hegemonic articulation on identity, and how the EU as an external soft-power was involved and impacted the new Kurdish political discourse during Turkey’s protracted accession process. When identifying these groups, their strategies and discourses are considered in terms of articulating their historical Kurdish identity. For example, the different strategies can be identified as pro-active militancy, active-accommodative, and defensive-accommodative against which the various sub-identities and their representatives can be mapped (Table 6.1). It will not be necessary here to look at each sub-group in detail; instead, focus is placed on how these identities understand and practise concepts of Kurdishness (Cicek, 2017; Aydinli and Ozcan, 2011) by analysing their ideology, discourse, political behaviour, and role in the public sphere.

Leading identity: Kurdishness in a secular, leftist, and nationalist setting The secularisation and nationalist transformation of Kurdish identity dominates postmodern Kurdish society through the strong cultural, intellectual, and moral leadership of political agents who command mass support (see Chapter 5). Such a secular, advanced-modern Kurdish identity is formed in a sense of double movement. Representatives of this leftist identity were opposed to the coercive culture of the state which was shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. From an alternate perspective, it emerged as a response to the domination of

National identity  107 conventional Kurdish values shaped by prevailing Islamic, tribal, and patriarchal values. The leftist actors sought to deconstruct the officially defined Kurdishness (that of the ‘mountain Turks’) through a different set of moral values and cultural structure whose emphasis included equity, justice, liberty, and human rights (McDonald and O’Leary, 2007). Particularly, after the 1980 coup d’état, Kurdish socio-political mobilisation created an alternative and modern Kurdish identity not only as a discourse but also as a process, such as ‘newrozification’,3 that started to lead society within a socialist, feminist, and nationalist context. This identity-building process was mainly led by pro-Kurdish leftist groups who traced Kurdish identity back to their ancient people who had lived for thousands of years in the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and the Middle East (McDowall, 2000). In an attempt at providing further legitimacy, the new identity was also formulated in relation to a legacy and heritage of Kurdish rebellion from the beginning of the twentieth century. The agents of this leading identity addressed the fragmented structure of Kurdish society that had been divided by religion, language, and territorial differences. The plurality of religions in the form of Zoroastrianism, Yezidism, Judaism, Eastern Christianity, Alevism, and Islam, supported by different dialects such as Zazaki, Sorani, and Kurmanji, along with geographical differences spanning Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey, and including former Soviet states, were all embodied and welcomed in this politicised Kurdishness. With the adaptation of anti-colonial and feminist discourse, the identity was also claimed to reflect a social reality that differed from the existing traditional feudal (tribal) and pious (Sunni/Shafi) Kurdish society and was exclusively ­Kurmanji-speaking. The new ideology developed within anti-colonial, feudal, patriarchal, and secular principles under the aim of creating a ‘free Kurdistan’ (Mojab, 2018; Beşikçi, 1991).4 As Gunter (1990: 60) observes, the old Kurdish identity was viewed as “feudal and comprador exploitation, tribalism, religious sectarianism and the slave-like dependence of women. Socialism would be ‘the first stage of this [new] society’ ”. Therefore, for the Kurdish leadership a new identity would disassemble Kurdishness from the traditional, conservative, tribal, and male-dominated nature of society which was still under the influence of ­Turkish state culture. Appropriately, the ideal Kurd was defined and formulated as: Kurd = Secular + Socialist + Kurdish Speaker (but not necessarily) + From ‘Great Kurdistan’ (Its Four Parts) In this identity formulation, the ‘ideal’ Kurd was expected to embrace the other Kurdish dialects (as well as non-Kurdish speakers whether they were Kurds or not and who were assimilated), different religions, and those from a broad geographical area (Hassanpour, 1992; Sheyholislami, 2011). One can see this articulation by analysing the strategies used by the PKK to recruit members (Eccarius-Kelly, 2010). The PKK started to operate and recruit from the states in the Middle East (e.g. Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq) where the Kurds inhabited, they rejected the artificial borders of these Westphalian nation-states on Kurdistan geography, the diaspora Kurds (heavily in Europe) also turned to be rich source for the PKK (Strohmeier, 2003; Jabar and Dawod, 2006; Keles, 2017; Baser, 2015).

108  National identity Consequently, this separate Kurdishness has become a dominant and mainstream identity among the Kurds of Turkey and beyond. Even the Turkish state accepted this new identity of its ‘enemy’ during the ‘low level’ war with the PKK since 1984. According to Yavuz and Ozcan (2006: 106), this Kurdish identity is mainly a “secular, anti-traditional and usually supported by newly urbanised and university educated Kurds, who do not have deep tribal ties”, one which has been developed as an alternative to the official, so-called ‘good’ Kurd, conceptualised by the modern Kemalist state as the ‘mountain Turks’. Secular Kurdish nationalists, who now promote their own counter-cultural concept of Kurdishness, legitimise this new identity in terms of an ancient Kurdish heritage and historical legacy that refers to historical images, myths, and heroes by deconstructing the oppressive Kemalist definition of Kurdishness. Gunes (2012: 80) indicates ‘the Kurdish national liberation discourse that hegemonised Kurdish resistance in Turkey during the 1980s and early 1990s’. These symbolic elements are utilised as historic heritages and memories of society to politicise and create an alternative culture and identity against the status quo (Celiker-Grabolle, 2015). The deconstruction and later reconstruction were effectively undertaken by the newly Kurdish organic intellectuals referred to in Chapter 5. After 1990, this political identity becomes distinctive for the majority in contemporary postmodern Kurdish society and its stakeholders from the outlawed PKK to the legal political parties such as the DTP and BDP (Cicek, 2017). Following the pattern of analysing mainstream Kurdishness, the groups that belong to this leading identity can be examined, in order to understand the internal hegemonic articulation, which will be discussed in both this and the subsequent chapter.

The PKK: armed struggle and popular sovereignty The PKK is considered to be the central and leading representative of a ‘progressive’ Kurdish national identity and the main agent conducting an armed struggle and pro-active militant agenda as part of the Kurdish struggle for freedom and democratic rights since the mid-1970s (Imset, 1992; Ozcan, 2006; Marcus, 2007; Saeed, 2016; Gunes, 2012, Casier and Jongerden, 2011). It is considered by many Kurds as their internal saviour through their abolition of the traditional Kurdish society based on tribal structure, religious orientation and institutions, and patriarchy. The PKK emerged alongside other leftist Kurdish youth and student organisations in the 1970s under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan (also known as ‘Apo’) (Gunter, 1990; McDowall, 2000; Romano, 2006; White, 2000). Jongerden and Akkaya (2011, 2016) stress that the PKK is a ‘militant political organisation’ using violence to reach its objectives, which include the destruction of colonialism and building an independent and united Kurdistan, influenced by the revolutionary Turkish left during the formation of the party.5 Öcalan’s charismatic leadership is a principle pillar of the PKK’s formation who mobilised the people (Yücel, 2005) until the late 1980s, using groups known as ‘Apocus’. Orhan (2016) argues, for the PKK supporters, Öcalan’s personality consubstantiates with the ‘Kurdish Freedom Movement’; his persona became a cult within the party. For instance, after his capture, which was an ‘international

National identity  109 conspiracy’ according to his followers from all over the world, various violent forms of self-sacrifice (including self-immolation, suicide attacks, and hungerstrikes) were used by them to show their support, respect, and love for him. The PKK was founded within orthodox Marxism by using methodological nationalism (Jongerden and Akkaya, 2017). Initially, it began to operate through three different institutions: the PKK as a political party supported by a civic organisation, the National Liberation Front of Kurdistan (ERNK), and an armed group, the People’s’ Liberation Army of Kurdistan (ARGK). In 1988, the party cadres issued a declaration that the aspiration of the PKK was to create an independent and democratic society, first in ‘north Kurdistan’ (Turkey) and then in all other parts of Kurdistan, by the establishment of a Marxist–Leninist independent nation-state (Imset, 1992; Ozcan, 2006; Marcus, 2007). The idea of an ‘independent Kurdistan’ is important in its discourse, where reference was made to ‘northern Kurdistan’ implying that the PKK was denying the historical borders of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the order of Westphelian nation-states, and refusing the state discourse of Eastern or South-eastern regions6 in a regional-nationalist mobilisation. Like other leftist counterpart armed national and liberation movements in the world, for example, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA), and Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), the PKK’s main identity was defined in terms of a Marxist ideology, which previously had little to say about traditional Kurdish political economy. The organisation’s structure is based on a congress and it has actively engaged in guerrilla war tactics, namely ‘hit-and-run’ operations, while at the same time making effective use of diplomacy by building a relationship with European supporters through lobbying activities (Eccarius-Kelly, 2010) and exploiting situational politics arising from the political and economic interests of regional states such as Syria, Iraq, and Iran with Turkey. The PKK has maintained a dual struggle strategy: On the one hand, it has attempted to unify the Kurdish national movement through attacking the traditional structures of society and its feudal and religious representations, such as aghas, sheikhs, or tribes, who cooperate with the state. On the other hand, it has opposed the internal colonisation of the state(s), which oppose the ‘Kurdish revolution’, as well as the civil agents, such as the ultra-nationalist groups (ülkücüler); some Turkish left-wing organisations that are categorised as ‘social chauvinists’ (Gunes, 2012; Jongerden and Akkaya, 2017) and right-wing, conservative, and religious elements who as supporters of Turkish nationalism are hostile to the idea of a separate Kurdish identity. The PKK, like most of the 1960–70s leftist underground organisations, has also believed in armed struggle as a strategy to further their demands for collective rights. The first significant armed attack against state security forces occurred in the towns of Eruh and Şemdinli in the Southeast of Turkey on 15 August 19847 (Gurses, 2018). In understanding why a militarist option was chosen, Romano (2006) explains that civil society was demolished under the 1980 coup, and the only method of dissent that the PKK could employ was seen to be violent subversion and ‘guerrilla war’ which initiated another cycle of aggressive and antagonistic relations between the state and Kurds and led to a direct struggle against the

110  National identity Turkish state’s hegemonic culture for almost 40 years. According to van Bruinessen (2000a), the PKK adopted a radical and violent approach as a response to those Kurds who saw Kurdistan as a colony of Turkey. To their way of thinking, the colonial relationship with the Turkish state should be ended in any way possible, including military action (Beşikçi, 1991). Until 1984, various Kurdish social and political organisations had employed passive strategies, such as publishing magazines, newspaper, bulletins, demonstrations, and strikes to give voice to Kurdish demands, but after this the new PKK leadership added three stages to achieve the ‘independence of Kurdistan’, which were ‘strategic defence’, ‘strategic balance’, and ‘strategic offence’ (Seead, 2016). Whereas Öcalan argued, “defence is in one way to wait at guard and try to build one’s own force (Imset, 1992: 98). The PKK first focused on decentralising state power and establishing the right to selfdetermination by placing its major focus on attaining a sovereign state rather than universalistic and liberal individual rights, and to this end, the PKK refused to rely on passive revolutionary tactics and triggered an armed struggle.8 However, the subsequent ‘undeclared war’ and ensuing violence between the PKK and the state security forces radicalised politics in the Kurdish territory while at the same time ‘terrorised’ the region (Ozcan, 2006; Marcus, 2007). In 1987, Turkey declared a state of emergency in the region (OHAL – Governorship of Region in the State of Emergency), which normalised violence in daily life. People were forced to leave their homeland as more than 3,200 villages were destroyed and nearly 3 million people moved to the metropolises of the Kurdish region and the western cities of Turkey, particularly after the 1990s (Jongerden, 2014; Kurban et al., 2008). This created a new migrant generation that grew up in the metropolitan cities of İstanbul, İzmir, Adana, and Mersin in a situation of poverty, inequality, and missed opportunities (Saracoglu, 2010). Having lost everything and not having the necessary education and skills, these Kurds were forced into economic, political, and social deprivation. It was a form of psychological warfare on the part of the Turkish state with the objective of undermining Kurdish dignity in order to subdue them. This created the perfect environment for the PKK to initiate a serhıldan (a Kurdish ‘intifada’) in these large Turkish cities, which meant the mass mobilisation of local ordinary Kurds, including children, to engage with the state’s security forces on the streets in a Palestinian-style intifada (Marcus, 2007). The military engagement between the PKK and the state accelerated the conflict between the state and Kurdish citizens in the mid-1990s resulting in thousands of people being killed or wounded (Gurbey et al., 2017). The conflict became an everyday reality for the Kurdish population and included summary executions, burning villages and evacuation, disappearing individuals, arbitrary arrests, and imprisonment, of children as well. This politicised Kurdishness resulting from the idea that ‘rights can be earned’ through armed struggle rather than merely being something to ‘be given’. While the discourse of national emancipation contained in this activism allowed the PKK to move from the margins to the centre of socio-political mobilisation. White (2000) in his interview with Abdullah Öcalan, learns that the leader of the PKK sees the party as a sort of ‘social laboratory’ for a future state’s structure and

National identity  111 claims that the PKK employed the Stalinist idea of the ‘socialist new man’ which was radically adapted to suit its own purposes. “The PKK has successfully manipulated the traditional system of authority to forge a new Kurdish identity in Turkish Kurdistan, primarily in pursuit of nation-building tasks” (White, 2000: 142). The PKK aims to change Kurdish society. “They talk [of] a new human being, of women who are free, of religious tolerance, modern scientific thinking” (Menon, 1995: 669). Even though such goals ignited internal violence against the inner groups as a brakujti (fratricide) (Orhan, 2016; Aras, 2014) in terms of intra hegemonic struggle, this involved the PKK’s execution of informers, eliminating other leftist organisations (Tekoşin, PSK, etc.), and fighting with the Peshmerga of Iraqi Kurdistan (Gurbey et al., 2017) or the Kurdish-led Hizbullah and village guards. Collective violence (including a suicide attack, self-immolation, and a hunger strike) was deployed by local militias (Gunes, 2012) against the security forces, public goods, and civilians or Turkish Marxist groups. Orhan (2016: 62) argues “violence in Kurdish organisations was more than a revolutionary principle or ideology; it became a practice of ethnic struggle and survival”. It strove to construct a new Kurdish personality by liberating Kurdish people from a ‘backward’, ‘primitive’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘puritan’, and ‘comprador feudal’ character. The traditional, religious, and historical features of Kurdish society became a target for the party. While the PKK was creating ‘heroism politics’, especially after the Diyarbakır prison resistance during the military junta in the early 1980s, whose legacy was used in the Newroz celebration, as a ‘myth of origin’ to ‘imagine’ the unity of the Kurdish nation implicit within PKK discourse (Gunes, 2012) and used by the party to mobilise the masses.9 Since the 1990s, the PKK has periodically announced a unilateral ceasefire which provided an opportunity to pursue dialogue with state institutions and to contribute to the democratisation of the country (McDowall, 2000). The 1990s saw the bloodiest years of the conflict when political violence became the reality of everyday life. Aras (2014) claimed that state violence characterised the political violence of the Kurdish movement. On the one hand, a rise in local insurgency through ‘guerrilla war’ and civil obedience became apparent. On the other hand, the state’s brutal ‘anti-terror’ policies employed mass killing, assassination, unidentified murder, torture, rape, imprisonment, and detention. Principally, after the Fourth Congress in 1990, a ‘civilisation process’ was suggested in which the most prominent change was the idea that a separate country could be transformed into the alternative idea of federalism or autonomy within a unitary state. This strategy was disseminated in various ways, including through the media, particularly via films, TV, radio, music, the internet, and social media, which were used very effectively to build common social values and morals (White, 2000; Keles, 2017). The PKK also used the media as tactical tools in the struggle to express its demands. TV broadcasting initiated by the PKK mainly in Kurdish was used to enhance its popularity and expand its influence beyond its core base. Kurdish broadcasts started in European cities, first with MED TV, then MEDYA TV, and later ROJ TV (Sheyholislami, 2011). In 2012, the new Kurdish satellite channels Stêrk and Nuçe (news channels) were launched when

112  National identity the previous TV licences were cancelled by their host countries (such as the UK, France, and Denmark) under ‘terrorism legislation’. Pro-PKK broadcasts became a feature of the new Kurdish politics as part of the process of shaping a contemporary Kurdish identity (Hassanpour, 1992; Seyholislami, 2011). It was viewed as an attempt to achieve a balance of power between the Kurdish political movement (as an agent), Turkey (the structure), and the EU (providing the superstructure) which has also organised the politics of serhıldan transnationally. Funerals (including the burial, mourning, and condolence) of ‘martyred guerrillas’ and celebrations such as Newroz became an instrument for mass protest and street demonstration (Aydin D., 2014; Demirer, 2012), moreover a space for insurgent violence (Orhan, 2016). In these ways, the PKK has expanded resistance within the various layers of Kurdish society beyond the military cadres and has expanded and consolidated its cultural leadership, legitimating its hegemonic power, by gaining the consent of increasing numbers of Kurds alongside of the coercion strategy (Gunter, 2016). Externally, the PKK sought diplomatic ties with various institutions and individuals in Turkey, the EU, and beyond. During the establishment of the PKK, it had come into conflict with many on the Turkish left, but in the late 1990s the PKK made links with Turkish radical and illegal left-wing parties, such as the Revolutionary People’s Liberation PartyFront (DHKP-C), to form an extended ideological bloc; while lobbying activities by diaspora Kurds mainly in Europe, the United States, as well as Canada, Australia, and South Africa meant that this counter-hegemonic bloc also extended to Western societies and internationally (Baser, 2015; Eccarius-Kelly, 2010; Keles, 2017). Further, post-1999, Islamic and other faith elements (e.g. Alevi), including all other religious minorities, were integrated politically into the party through an internal democratisation process by expanding members of the bloc (Jenkins et al., 2018; Tekdemir, 2018). Even a general amnesty was offered to village guards in 1991 (Imset, 1992; Ozcan, 2006; Marcus, 2007). The PKK insurgency transformed itself into a national liberation struggle in the 1990s. Since the Fourth Congress, the struggle has been formulated as a democratic solution project (Nimni and Aktoprak, 2018). Nonetheless, the capture of Öcalan in 1999 was a crucial turning point for the transformation of the Kurdish political movement (Yücel, 2005; White, 2000). Öcalan articulated an alternative discourse through his engagement with the state during his time in prison, where he found an opportunity to redefine the identity of radical liberation discourse that emerged in a post-Marxist radical democracy beyond nation and state (Öcalan, 2017; Yücel, 2005). This is a significant transformation in the PKK, under the new organisational name KADEK, Kongra-Gel, and later the KCK, as a superstructure of the movement to substitute a nation-state (Gunes, 2012; Saeed, 2016; Plakoudas, 2018). Öcalan (2011) has developed the idea of democratic autonomy/ nation instead of ethno-nationalist territorial claims based on plural society (e.g. jineoloji, a science of women in Kurdish), ecology and communal economy – citing Gramsci, Wallerstein, Fanon, and most influentially Murray Bookchin’s – social ecologist and libertarian socialist municipalism. Öcalan sees bourgeoisie

National identity  113 nationalism, the civic nation, and Westphalian nation-state as a form of ‘false consciousness’ within the doctrine of self-determination. This model outlined earlier for democratic self-government became the PKK’s new political programme (Plakoudas, 2018) that deconstructs the ‘separate state’ discourse of the Kurdish question (Jongerden and Akkaya, 2017; Öcalan, 2011). Öcalan (2012) challenges the nation-state in an autonomous plural nation formation (Nimni and Aktoprak, 2018). Akkaya and Jongerden (2012: 1) outline that “after a long period of a ‘national liberation struggle’ aimed at establishing its own state, the PKK changed its cause towards a project of radical democracy”. This social–ecological society is beyond the nation-state, capitalism, and patriarchy. The emergence of this opportunity space also coincided with the Turkish state’s increased desire to engage with the EU accession process to which end several reforms were undertaken during the early 2000s. As a result, the “Kurdish problem has shifted from the military to the social and political spheres” (Yavuz and Ozcan, 2006: 103). The transformation of the hegemonic Kurdish political identity in radical democracy created opportunities for the sub-groups of society (Tekdemir, 2016) to search for opportunities to meet national demands.

Pro-Kurdish political parties in a parliamentarian politics: from HEP to the BDP The PKK, as the dominant Kurdish political party, shifted its policies away from the ‘utopian’ goal of an ‘independent greater Kurdistan’ to make more moderate demands such as a democratic autonomy, democratic federation, or a radical democracy with an equal and constitutional citizenship based on women’s liberation and social ecology (Akkaya and Jongerden, 2012). The capture of Öcalan in 1999 also made a crucial impact in leading the PKK to search for solutions in the ‘legal’ political sphere (Yücel, 2005). During this period, changes were also occurring in Turkey’s political life. For example, from the beginning of the 1990s, President Turgut Özal started to challenge the authoritarian system and instituted more liberal principles in the political and economic spheres. In a further attempt to facilitate the process and undermine the existing political status quo, Özal also expressed his Kurdish ethnic origins. As part of his liberalisation policies, he initiated changes that allowed the Kurdish language to be used under certain conditions, such as in songs, and for the first time he started using the Kurdish question (Ibrahim and Gurbey, 2000; Cicek; 2017; Öcalan, 2011) despite the fact that the military campaign of the PKK had commenced during his premiership. After the long period of political silence, Özal’s presence as an open-minded president of the country created new opportunities for Kurds including the first Kurdish language newspaper, Rojname (newspaper), and the pro-Kurdish new land available in 1991 (McDowall, 2000), although many legal and psychological obstacles still remained. Under Özal’s presidency, Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel also accepted the ‘Kurdish reality’ during his visit to Diyarbakır in 1991 that also reflected the relaxation in state official ideology. After this, it became a tradition for Turkish prime ministers to go to the region, usually Diyarbakır,10 to

114  National identity declare their acceptance of Kurdish issues. For instance, Mesut Yılmaz in 1999 during his visit to Diyarbakır stated openly that ‘the road to the EU passes through Diyarbakır’. In addition, many years later, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also accepted the state’s errors with regard to the Kurdish issue in his 2005 Diyarbakır speech and stated that ‘the Kurdish problem is my problem’. While Turkey’s EU relations were also enhanced and, in particular, in the post-1999 period, the process of EU accession resulted in a series of political, legal, and policy reforms. All this had a positive impact on developing a democratic nation and self-governance. Gradually from the early 1990s, the Kurdish question was dramatically transformed from a security and military issue into civil, liberal, and institutional politics (Ibrahim and Gurbey, 2000). The new official approach towards the Kurdish question opened up more opportunities for the Kurdish movement in the Turkish public sphere. The PKK itself had transformed its radical Marxist understanding of politics into those more in line with socialist democratic values and had aligned its struggle to promote and facilitate a new radical democratisation process (previously termed EU-isation) (Öcalan, 2012, 2017). The PKK also used a ceasefire to create the opportunity for dialogue (making politics through campaigning rather than in the mountains) that demonstrated an important change since the PKK now aimed to be seen as a political rather than a ‘terrorist’ organisation by the centre. This flexibility provided the pro-Kurdish political parties with an opportunity to operate in the political realm; therefore, the pro-Kurdish party leadership like that of the HEP and DTP started to argue that the state needed to provide the space to search for peaceful and democratic solutions that would allow the outlawed PKK to reduce the violence of the Kurdish conflict. Turkish civil society organisations and NGOs also attempted to understand the Kurdish problem within a democratic and liberal approach and to demonstrate some empathy for the situation of the Kurds. Consequently, alongside these changes in the social and political spheres, a shift in Kurdish politics was achieved. The discourse of self-determination in accordance with the UN Charter, Articles 1 and 2, became articulated in Kurdish politics within the context of the goal of democratic autonomy, decentralisation, regional self-government, and cultural and linguistic universal rights (Gunes, 2012). Later, it further transformed into an agonistic debate on democracy that offered radical pluralism (Tekdemir, 2016). Under this liberalisation process, more Kurdish civil actors entered the ‘legitimate’ political sphere with these new agents employing civil politics by using, for example, a legal political party to pursue Kurdish national demands. The Kurdish political struggle effectively became associated with intellectual, organisational, and social elites who articulated and systematised the demands of Kurdish society. They began to seek solutions within the country’s political, intellectual, and legal field under parliamentary legitimacy, although the democratic street protests and marches were at times attacked by state security forces (Gunter, 2016; McDowall, 2000), particularly during the Newroz celebration and the funeral of an ‘unresolved crime’ or ‘unknown who was killed’ (Gunes, 2012). Violent relations between Kurdish political agents and the state security forces continued in terms of a power struggle to gain legitimacy in the region. On the one hand,

National identity  115 political life developed for the pro-Kurdish political parties by the expansion of opportunities in the public sphere, while, on the other, antagonistic relations continued with the state. These pro-Kurdish political parties, as a legal political mobilisation, which shared the same human capital with the PKK, became part of the transformation brought about by a radical democratic project centred around signifiers of ‘peace’ or ‘freedom’ that respect human rights (Gunes, 2012). Kurdish ‘reality’ was reinterpreted in terms of social, political and economic equality, and justice, along with radical liberal and democratic values. However, these changes do not imply that these politicised Kurdish movements had submitted to the state’s hegemonic power. The tactic of a ‘light’ war and civil obedience was still being used by the Kurdish population with hunger strikes, protests, demonstrations, and clashes with state forces during strikes and economic action (such as shutting down shops and halting business) with the strategy of struggle relocated from the mountains to the cities. Both passive and active tactics were used simultaneously in this hegemonic power struggle. The PKK and pro-Kurdish political parties played an important role in organising these social movements (Watts, 2010). Kurdish demands within parliamentarian politics were conceptualised and advanced in the legally recognised political arena by Kurdish political actors who operated first in the Social Democratic People’s Party (SHP). MPs of Kurdish origin on the SHP ticket had an opportunity to bring forward Kurdish affairs and to challenge the regime’s policies towards the Kurds in parliament. However, even by the mid-1990s, Turkey’s democracy was still not ready to handle a distinct Kurdish identity that disembedded Turkishness from it, and this created a reaction on the part of these Kurdish MPs in the SHP that challenged and pushed the regime on its Kurdish policy.11 However, the SHP could no longer accept the Kurdish MPs prioritising Kurdish issues, and they were expelled from the party. After this experience, the People’s Labour Party (HEP) was formed by former SHP members as the first pro-Kurdish political party on 7 June  1990 in which Kurdish demands and rights became the priority. In 1991, the HEP participated in elections and gained 18 MPs through forming local coalitions with the SHP. A year later in 1992, the Freedom and Equality Party (ÖZEP) was also established on principles similar to the SHP by former MPs of Kurdish origin but in the same year was dissolved, and the MPs joined the HEP. However, Turkey’s democracy was not ready to recognise a separate Kurdish identity or an ethnicity-based politics. While the HEP’s political and cultural programme was seen as a threat by right-wing, conservative, and Kemalist political parties along with the media and the judicial system. Eleven members of the Constitutional Court on 14 July 1993 unanimously banned the HEP on the grounds that it was prioritising Kurdish demands. This had been anticipated and another party – the Freedom and Democracy Party (ÖZDEP) – had already been founded as an alternative should the HEP be banned. However, the Constitutional Court also started a case against ÖZDEP by applying a similar justification for its actions previously used against the HEP by accusing the party of ‘separatism and terror’ and being linked to the PKK; but before the court’s decision, the leadership

116  National identity of ÖZDEP decided to close down the party themselves. These legal and political clashes framed the relationship between pro-Kurdish parties and state institutions, and thus when the Democracy Party (DEP) was set up under the leadership of Yaşar Kaya on 7 May 1993 in order to remain within the political process, it too was banned by the Constitutional Court on 16 June 1994. On 14 May 1994, the People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) replaced a gap created in Kurdish politics after the banning of the DEP, even though the same political, social, and psychological pressures and killings continued (Dag, 2017; Watts, 2010). Despite this, in the 1999 regional election, HADEP gained 37 mayoralties. However, in a repetition of history, HADEP too was closed on 13 March 2003 by the Constitutional Court on the grounds of ‘separatism and terror’,12 while waiting in the background was the Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP) ready to replace HADEP. Later, on 9 November 2005, the Democratic Society Party (DTP) was founded and with its policy of requiring two chairpersons, it stands out as the first example of a co-chair system in Turkey’s democratic history. Ahmet Türk and Aysel Tuğluk became co-chairs, one man and one woman, sending a strong message that there should be more female participation in Kurdish politics by promoting the democratic autonomy project as a ‘party of Turkey’ (Gunes, 2012). For the 2007 election, the DTP assembled social democrats and socialists under the umbrella of ‘candidates of a thousand hopes’ and succeeded in securing 21 MPs elected to the parliament, including the former president of the Human Rights Association (İHD), Akın Birdal, and the chair of the Turkish leftist party, the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP), Ufuk Uras. The bloc constructed a fresh context for politics through the Turkeyfication project with a new discourse of solidarity with ‘other and isolated identities’ such as socialists, Alevis, Assyrians, and the LGBT community (Tekdemir, 2019). The inevitable end came on 27 November 2007 with the party brought before the courts charged with threatening ‘the territorial and national integrity of the state’ which signalled its closure on 11 December 2009. This history of banning parties can be considered as a rejection of the democratic positioning of Kurdish politics and dramatically supports the claim that the Turkish parliamentary system had turned into a ‘cemetery of political parties’. Despite this, however, in 2008 the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) was established as the new successor to pro-Kurdish parties to represent the Kurdish parliamentary opposition (Watts, 2010). It went on to win 36 seats at the June 2011 election with 5.8 per cent of the total votes, while securing nearly 80 per cent of the votes in the Kurdish-dominated regions of the East and Southeast.13 The blocked articulation made another fresh start in an attempt to further Kurdish politics in Turkey. Its success was not yet complete. A number of elected MPs were imprisoned for political activism, while their anticipated release following their election to parliament was thwarted by the Turkish regime. In April 2013, the pro-Kurdish political parties’ tradition was shifted by the establishment of the Kurdish-led, left-leaning populist party, the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) that put forward a radical democracy project using the political grammar of Turkeyfication, new life, ‘We’re’, and great humanity rhetorics

National identity  117 framed in terms of agonistic pluralism (Tekdemir, 2019). The HDP did not essentialise Kurdish identity but embraced all the marginalised minority identities in the country, such as the far left, feminists, ecologists, LGBTs, Christians, Alevis, Pomaks, and Turkmens rather than acting as an orthodox pro-Kurdish party (Goksel and Tekdemir, 2018). Most BDP members also joined this new party, while the party itself changed its name to the Democratic Regions Party (DBP) and remains a pro-Kurdish party in the region. Through this linear succession of political parties – the HEP, ÖZEP, ÖZDEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, and DTP (now all closed); the BDP and, more recently, the DBP (alongside with the HDP) – the Kurdish political elites advanced the cause of a democratic republic and democratic autonomy, later to become a radical democracy project as a solution to the Kurdish question within the available opportunities offered by Turkey’s public sphere. However, throughout this political struggle for a democratic society that ensured the rights of the Kurds, violence has been the main constant feature. Nonetheless, it is important to understand these political parties started to challenge the relationship between the centre and the periphery to combat the lack of economic development in the Kurdish regions and to promote equality of opportunity in social, political, and cultural life (Watts, 2010). As evidence of this, the BDP has won municipal elections, despite the ongoing persecution, and has started to use the Kurdish language in their provision of municipal services in an attempt to make these services available to the Kurdish population who have been excluded from them for many years (Coskun et al., 2011). The BDP has also reverted to using Kurdish names for important places in the region. One of the crucial features, which runs through this succession of parties, is the consistent use of the discourse of democracy, freedom, equity, citizenship, identity, and peace located and interpreted within Kurdish nationalist demands. This is underlined by the similar names, policies, colours, symbols, and emblems of these parties as representatives of ethnic politics (with the exception of the latest in this lineage, the HDP, which has gone beyond a single ethnic identity to embrace a variety of marginalised groups). In addition, an important characteristic of the Kurdish parties has been their direct involvement with EU institutions, at the official level, with a desire to decentralise and redistribute the power of the state so that further opportunity spaces for democratisation are possible in the belief that with further democratisation it is possible to extend Kurdish rights in Turkey. More recently, social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs inspired by the Arab Spring have been used by pro-Kurdish actors to challenge state policy in relation to Kurdish demands and to gain the attention of a wider European and international audience (Eccarius-Kelly, 2010). In this way, through various news media and other electronic and virtual outlets, along with other political and cultural means including political parties and political participation and NGOs, a Kurdish counter-hegemony is sustained against the state authority. But just as the political parties were accused of involvement with ‘terrorist’ activities by the state because of their supposed links to the PKK, this new political arena also faces bans and closure; and in the same way as with the succession of

118  National identity political parties, the print media and broadcasts also sustain a lineage in the way they view their predecessors through their name and in championing the same agenda.14

PKK-sceptic but Kurdophile agents: the PSK and HAK-PAR It is not only the PKK, and the pro-Kurdish political parties that ideologically resemble the PKK, that the Turkish state has not tolerated. The securitisation policy also targets other pro-Kurdish political parties whose origins lay in Kurdishness but offered different responses to the Kurdish question. For example, the former minister Şerafettin Elçi’s liberal party, the Democratic Mass Party (DKP) established in 1997, was banned on 26 February 1999 by the Constitutional Court on the grounds of its ‘separatist’ propaganda. Elçi was again elected as chair of a new political party established in 2006 to supersede the DKP called the Participatory Democracy Party (KADEP). There have also been other political parties operating in Turkish and Kurdish politics which were founded mostly by the PKK’s historical rivals. This competition and even animosity between the PKK and other political entities can be traced back to the 1960s and 70s. Kemal Burkay’s Kurdistan Socialist Party (PSK), for example, always located itself as in opposition to the PKK, although it did not operate within a legal political context too (Cicek, 2017). The PSK leadership and its European affiliation, the Association for Kurdish Workers for Kurdistan (KOMKAR), supported the Rights and Liberties Party (HAK-PAR) in Turkey’s political system with even Burkay becoming a leader of the HAK-PAR. Supporters among Kurdish intellectuals who were either sceptical of the PKK or who opposed it established the HAK-PAR in 2002 under the leadership of Abdülmelik Fırat who was Sheikh Said’s grandson. The party focuses on Kurdish rights by mostly demanding a federal solution for the Kurdish people, operating a political approach different from the pro-PKK. Its former chairman, Bayram Bozyel, arose from the 1960s movement, being a charter member of the Democracy and Transformation Party (DDP) in 1994, which was also closed down by Constitutional Court in 1995. The HAK-PAR and the leftist Freedom and Socialism Party (ÖSP) are other Kurdish political parties existing without organic links to pro-PKK institutions. The political orientation of the ÖSP is shaped by a socialist and modernist agenda, aiming like many to provide a socialist solution for the Kurdish problem, while an Islamic and traditional agenda dominates the party policy of the HAK-PAR. Apart from political parties and their leadership or members, there are also individual Kurdish intellectuals, mainly left-wing oriented, who have appeared independently of the PKK’s politics. This was exemplified by İbrahim Güçlü, a former leader of another famous organisation of the 1960s Ala Rızgari, which later became TEVGER (in Kurdish – Movement), and appeared as a crucial competitor to the PKK’s position. He was also active in political parties, first in the DKP and afterwards in the HAK-PAR, but was unable to continue his involvement with political parties and instead engaged in the establishment of the Kurdish National

National identity  119 Unity Movement (TEVKURD) and principally remained within intellectual activities (Cicek, 2017). Other renowned Kurdish intellectuals include Ümit Fırat, Muhsin Kızılkaya, Orhan Miroğlu, Orhan Kotan, Yılmaz Çamlıbel, Sıtkı Zilan, and Abdurrahman Önen, as well as Tarık Ziya Ekinci, Naci Kutlay, Ahmet Zeki Okçuoğlu, Mehmet Metiner, Enver Sezgin, Sıraç Bilgin, Lokman Polat, Lütfi Baksi, Hatice Yaşar, and the staff of the state Kurdish broadcasting, TRT 6’s (now TRT Kurdi) such as Fırat Ceweri and İhsan Aksoy ve Abdulcelil Candan. All have contemplated possible and differing solutions to the Kurdish problem which created antagonist hegemonic relations between them and the PKK, as well as with other pro-PKK intellectuals and political parties.15 The most distinctive characteristic of these actors cited earlier is the adoption of different strategies and tactics to demand Kurdish national rights. They advocate non-violence by focusing on fighting for the expansion of democracy and human rights as opposed to armed struggle and, can therefore be viewed, as leaning more to a defensive and passive politics (McDonald and O’Leary, 2007). Their counterPKK position and anti-armed struggle give them more opportunity to operate within the Turkish public sphere that is available to the other nationalist groups or what is seen from the state perspective as ‘bad Kurds’. However, with minimal support from the Kurdish populace, this makes it difficult to achieve an effective presence and influence in both Kurdish and wider Turkish society. Here, it is important to understand that a plurality of approaches has helped to liberalise and democratise Kurdish political culture. This is an ongoing process, and therefore new internal actors will continue to emerge with their own style of politics along with civil movements more willing to operate legally.

Defensive civic institutions: the İHD, DTK, or DİSA In the mapping of Kurdish strategies and identities, in addition to political movements and intellectual positions, several civic institutions taking part in the organisation of Kurdish activism can be identified. From the Kurdish NGOs’ point of view, the discourse of human rights has become central to the Kurdish agenda, and these NGOs are representing Kurdish demands, especially in the 1990s (Yildiz and Breau, 2010). For example, the Human Rights Association (İHD) was founded in Ankara in 1986 and is one of the leading and most notable of these non-governmental, non-state organisations with many branches and thousands of members all around the country. It mostly focuses on Kurdish human rights issues, torture, abuse, and harassment. As a result, especially in the 1990s, the İHD has been subjected to constant persecution, arrests, detention, and its members have been targeted for extrajudicial killings (Olson, 1996). The Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP), a European-based pro-Kurdish human rights institution established in London in 1992 under the directorship of Kerim Yıldız and patronage of Professor Kevin Boyle (a renowned barrister and human rights lawyer from the UK), remained until recently an important civil organisation aimed at helping Kurds with human rights issues and getting Kurds to use legal channels within the existing system, especially in Europe.16 As a result, criticism of Turkey’s human

120  National identity rights has become an arena for the Kurdish struggle in the European political, judicial, and public sphere that has also influenced the EU’s policies towards the Kurds. Equally, after the shift in international politics around human rights and national freedom movements, particularly after 9/11, along with the Turkish state’s altered policy towards the Kurdish issue, changes were observed in pro-Kurdish positions. Engagement with the EU played an important role in this process. In response to the impact of engagement with the EU, the Democratic Progress Institute (DPI) was founded by some former members of the KHRP after it closed in London during 2012 with the objective of helping stakeholders in Turkey understand the process of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and democratic advancement. In addition, the Centre for Turkey Studies and Development (CEFTUS) was established in April 2011, and during July 2014, the Centre for Kurdish Progress was launched by diaspora Kurds and lobbyists in London (Keles, 2017). Activities were arranged mostly in London, including at the parliament and within the wider UK, alongside Turkish universities, with the participation of well-known Turkish, Kurdish, and English MPs, journalists, academics, scholars, and institutions to examine appropriate conflict resolution and peacebuilding conditions. Working along similar lines, the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC) was established in 2004 and lobbies in the EU Parliament (Miley and Venturini, 2018), arranges conferences, and invites state-linked institutions and individuals, Europeans, and Kurds to open dialogue and seek common ground for negotiation.17 The pro-Kurdish civil institutions, such as think tanks and human rights’ organisations, publish regular reports aimed at Turkish, European, and international audiences. They read the Kurdish agenda through the lens of international institutions and universal human rights as highlighted by organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch reports, and the UN and EU human rights’ regulations, within the context of democratic and liberal principles. Within Turkey, they are threatened by the state’s laws concerning anti-terrorism, insulting Turkishness, and by institutions like the State Security Courts (DGM), National Security Council (MGK), and Higher Educational Council (YÖK) and have been accused of being the voice of the PKK with many cases filed against them on the grounds of their involvement in separatist activities. Other accommodative actors are also active in the public sphere, such as cultural, linguistic, and solidarity institutions. As advocates of Kurdish cultural, social, and economic rights, they seek opportunities in the public sphere. Examples are the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre (MKM); the Kurdish Institute of Istanbul, also operational in the EU and the United States, which was founded in 1992; the TZP Kurdish language movement founded in 2006 to organise informal language activity; and the Ivy Association of Struggle for Poverty and Sustainable Development (SYMSKD). Like many other NGOs, most of them are seen by the Turkish State as questionably legal affiliates of the PKK. According to its Chair Selçuk Mızraklı, the SYMSKD has 7,400 people who regularly donate to the organisation in order to provide help to 3,150 families to cover their basic needs and give scholarships to 120 students and are subject to political and legal

National identity  121 pressure from the state, being accused of having connections to the PKK and acting as its urban organisation. Besides, many other defensive and accommodative pro-Kurdish civil society organisations or think tanks operate in the social, political, judicial, and economic spheres: The Democratic Society Congress (DTK); the People’s Democratic Congress (DTK) which recently became one of the main components of the HDP; and the Diyarbakir Institute for Political and Social Research (DİSA) are some of the prominent civil institutions. All of these groups seek to establish a reciprocal relation between the state and Kurdish citizens by redefining the nature of the Kurdish issue in the political, social, and economic aspects of everyday life and by aiming to carve a space for Kurdishness that exists beyond the private sphere to bring it into the public domain and to move the Kurdish issue beyond matters of security and ‘terrorism’. These groups in their promotion of pluralism endeavour to create an environment considering the issues and to engage in peaceful dialogue. Thus, they actively look at possible ways to integrate Kurdishness and the demands of Kurds into the social and political sphere by an appeal to internationally legitimated universal human rights linguistic and cultural freedom and freedom of expression and thought, alongside a liberal and democratic discourse. Overall, various civil organisations and individuals can be seen as attempting to organise a historical bloc to challenge the state’s narrow approach to citizenship. On 11 January 2012, many of these accommodative agents joined a declaration organised by the BDP, HAK-PAR, KADEP, ÖSP, DTK, TEV-KURD, and the Revolutionist Democratic Kurdish Movement (TDSK). The leadership published a declaration in Diyarbakır to work and move together towards the realisation of Kurdish demands and rights including political status and the self-determination of rights in Kurdish-dominated regions, particularly in the process of building a new constitution. This illustrates the explicit and implicit aim of creating unity despite the differences and even competition between different groups, as the central issue remains that of the existence of Kurdishness.

Conclusion The construction of identity is a social process, which has political, economic, cultural, and historical dimensions. That process was influenced by various Kurdish political agents during different timeframes resulting in a transformative trajectory regarding Kurdish political identity. A prime objective of this chapter is to explain the scope of hegemonic Kurdishness, therefore, elucidating the discourse, strategy, and character of its sub-groups that constitute the complexity of Kurdish society. Kurdish discursive plural practices provide agents with a multitude of identities in various subject positions. Eurocentric, Western-style nationalism served as the ultimate figure in the contemporary political ground that was generated by hegemonic Kurdish actors and which subsequently affected subalterns, such as Islamic background groups or passive and defensive ‘urban Kurds’. As Gunes (2012: 110) states: “the existence of such representative organisations enabled the PKK to articulate their specific demands within its discourse in a chain

122  National identity of equivalence as part of Kurdish political demands”. Hence, most members of society already or partly accepted the secular and nationalist form of a leading Kurdish identity, which is represented by the PKK, in terms of cultural and linguistic demands. In contrast, the other (non-PKK), alternative internal agents within Kurdish politics attempted to extend the content of this socially constructed Kurdishness, during internal democratisation (EU-isation), within a post-hegemonic identity politics that at the same time provides a new historical bloc for political mobilisation. They did not want to redefine existing Kurdishness, which is accepted in a hidden social contract, as the politicised Kurdish actor (by example, the PKK, BDP, and DTK) plays a key role in the political institutionalism of Kurdish groups by mobilising them to take part in the political system and thus alleviate limitations, and which serves to challenge political participation in the existing regime. The EU involvement in Kurdish politics increased after Turkey upgraded to a candidate for membership and development of the Kurdish diaspora movement in Europe. The liberal values popularised within Kurdish demands during the post-Soviet era have also affected the PKKs ideological transition, from orthodox Marxism to post-Marxism, as an external dynamic. However, the internal dynamic played a more important role in such democratisation and emancipatory discourse. The transformation of Öcalan’s ideological stance and the PKK’s national liberation, discourse, and organisational restructuring led these alternative inner groups to be recognised in the public sphere. Gunes claims that the PKK realised a ‘united socialist Kurdistan’ is no longer achievable, hence began appropriating democratic discourse as a strategic transformation “from a resistance movement that used political violence into a democratic movement that advocates peaceful political transformation” (Gunes, 2012: 126). Transition opened up a political and social space for emergent sub-identities, while ‘other Kurds’ challenged hegemonic Kurdishness at grassroots level and forced the national movement to expand political frontiers. The articulation of Kurdishness became a terrain for the intra-hegemonic struggle; therefore, the Kurdish liberation movement discursive practices provide an opportunity for the EU-ising politics, which is a dynamic and open project for antagonistic articulatory practice. These internal subordinate identities – according to Wittgenstein (2001) – have a ‘family resemblance’ (particularly within their language) to one another, although they offer different approaches and developments. Accordingly, for a member of Kurdish society, joining off the same roots, heritage, history, regional area, tradition, and customs converge them at one point, Kurdiyati (ethnic and cultural Kurdishness); however, they wanted to construct the political Kurdishness based on their discourses and ideologies through a hegemonic stuggle, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Notes 1 The notion of postmodernism addresses the complexities of society in ideological and religious terms, alongside the ability to access opportunity in the public sphere, class,

National identity  123 or gender dimensions. It refers to contemporary Kurdish plural society and its different sub-identities and stakeholders within the dynamics of Kurdishness. 2 The PKK began an armed conflict and made a first armed attack against the Turkish security forces in Eruh district (Siirt), killed one soldier and injured half a dozen of the other. 3 This term refers to the construction of Kurdish political identity by the PKK. The PKK used pre-Islamic Kurdish symbols, historical heritage, and leftist discourse to establish and mobilise the people. “From the 1970s onwards, the construction of the relations of differences of the newly formed Kurdish political parties and groups were done on the basis of the myth of Newroz. The myth allowed the Kurdish national movement to trace the origins of the Kurds to the ancient Medes and reactivated/recreated Newroz and the legend of the Kawa as the myth of origin” (Gunes, 2012: 33; also see Aydin D. 2014; Demirer, 2012). 4 There are various sub-organisations created by the PKK under the banner of unifying Kurdish society such as the Union of Patriotic Women of Kurdistan, Union of Patriotic Worker of Kurdistan, the Union of Revolutionary Youth of Kurdistan, as well as the religious Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, the Union of Alevi of Kurdistan, the Union of Yezidi of Kurdistan, and various NGOs in European countries (Gunes, 2012). 5 Jongerden and Akkaya (2011; 2016) categorised the PKK timescale into several phases: (i) ideological group formation,1973–77; (ii) party construction, 1977–79; (iii) guerrilla warfare, 1977–84; (iv) active fighting, 1984–99; (v) crisis and repositioning, 1999–2004; and (vi) re-establishing (radical democracy) 2004–onwards. 6 The state identified the Kurdish-dominated area, as the Eastern and South-eastern region, which was known as the Kurdistan province in the Ottoman Empire. 7 Before this attack, the most important armed conflict that the PKK had engaged in was with the traditional, tribal, and state-linked agha of Bucaks, Mehmet Celal Bucak in the Urfa district in 1979. 8 The political programme of the second congress declared that the Kurdish revolution would begin with weak forces against a strong enemy in a semi-feudal colony as a national war of liberation or long-term popular war (Gunter, 1997). 9 Such as Mazlum Dogan, who protested against the use of torture and violence in No. 5 Cell of Diyarbakır Prison and set himself on fire on Newroz Day in 1982. He had been seen by party members as a modern Kawa, who is the founder of the Newroz rebellion against the Assyrians for the Medes (ancient Kurds). He was followed by four other members (Mahmut Zengin, Ferhat Kutay, Necmi Öner, and Esref Yanık), among which two are remembered for the ‘night of four’. There was also Kemal Pir who died while on hunger strike with Mehmet Hayri Durmuş, along with others like Akif Yılmaz and Ali Çiçek in Diyarbakır Prison on 14 July 1982 or Mahsun Korkmaz who died in 1986, a well-respected guerrilla commander of the PKK’s armed force (Gunes and Zeydanlioglu, 2014; Tan, 2011). 10 The city was historically regarded as the unofficial capital of the Kurds. 11 For example, some of the Kurdish MPs of the SHP attended the International Kurdish Conference in Paris, which was held by the Paris Kurdish Institute, due to which they were expelled by the Party on 16 December 1989, including Kenan Sönmez, İsmail Hakkı Önal, Ahmet Türk, Mehmet Ali Eren, Adnan Ekmen, Mahmut Alınak, and Salih Sümer. 12 The party was closed down under Articles 68 and 69 of the Constitution and Political Party Law no. 2820, Articles 101 and 103 as with other pro-Kurdish party lines for being a centre of illegal activities and also aiding and supporting the PKK. 13 See www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13740147. The HDP was established in 2012 and replaced the BDP in 2014 as a new political project by the Kurdish political movement. It is constituted by many different groups including Alevis, Armenians, Turkmen, Arabs, Assyrians, Islamists, radical leftists, Kurdistanis, LGBT individuals, and more and offers a radical democracy through a new political grammar such as we’re,

124  National identity great humanity, new life, and Turkeyfication. It has reached remarkably 13 per cent of the votes in the general election (June 2015) and passed the election threshold with 80 MPs to represent a historical success in the country’s political history. 14 Daily newspapers such as Ülkede Özgür Gündem, Gündem, Yaşamda Gündem, Güncel, Günlük, and Gerçek Demokrasi (all in Turkish), Azadiya Welat, Rojev (in Kurdish); weekly Yedinci Gün, Haftaya Bakış, Yaşamda Demokrasi, Toplumsal Demokrasi, Öteki Bakış (in Turkish); and Fırat and Dicle news agencies have closed for a short time or shut down indefinitely. The international broadcasting Kurdish TV stations (MED, ROJ, etc.) also became an important issue of concern to European countries due to Turkey’s pressure on these TV channels to close based on an accusation of being propaganda centres for the PKK. 15 These names were famously published under the title of “good Kurds and bad Kurds” by Odatv which claimed they were on a list by Dr Bahoz Erdal, one of the leaders of the PKK. See https://odatv4.com/iste-isim-isim-iyi-kurtler-ve-kotu-kurtler-2201101200. html. 16 Yildiz states (cited by Graves, 2012) that “the KHRP was set up to remind Turkey of their national and international obligations and to use the Human Rights channels available. Through these mechanisms, we were able, for the first time in history, to open up a gateway for people to take their cases directly to the international and regional courts such as the European Court of Human Rights [. . .] We believe that we have succeeded through those cases. For example, Turkey had to lift the state of emergency, and abolish the death penalty, as well as make payment of compensation to victims and make changes regarding the state of detention”. 17 It was founded by KHRP (UK), Rafto Foundation (Norway), and Medico International (Germany). Their aim “favours Turkish membership in the European Union. Provided the EU insists on full compliance, in law and in practice, with the Copenhagen criteria in all its aspects, Turkey will become a genuine democracy, with ‘respect for and protection of minorities’. This will resolve one of the most difficult political problems that Turkey has so far failed to even recognise and that has been a festering sore in Turkey for decades, namely the Kurdish problem” www.eutcc.org/articles/5/about.ehtml

7 Articulating an alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere

A plurality of the social that the project for a radical democracy. E. Laclau & C. Mouffe

Other Kurds: we are also Kurdish The central goal of this chapter, as a continuation of previous chapter, is to highlight the reappearance of different Kurdish sub-identities in the political realm. Discussion focuses on the democratisation of Kurdish politics in radical liberal values and domestic effects of the EU on a symbolic ground on both the regeneration of Kurdish political strategy and Turkey’s accession to the EU. These alternative Kurdish groups aim to deepen and widen the existing hegemonic Kurdishness by extending its political borders especially with the emerging of the HDP in 2012 and the party’s historical success in the country’s general election (June 2015) that reshaped both Turkish and Kurdish politics.

Everyday identity: conservative, traditional, and Islamic Kurdishness Islamic values and morals have pervaded Kurdish society ever since they converted to Islam in the seventh century. The Islamic value system, along with the tariqa (literally meaning path, refers to a mystical educative process that teaches and practices a spiritually infused embodiment of Islam) institutions, has traditionally played a crucial role in the Kurdish social structure. Equally, Kurds have played an important role in Islamic history and produced many religious scholars in the Islamic world (Yüksel, 1993). The concept of the ummah (the pan-national community of Muslims) is embedded in the culture of the Kurdish population, and the Kurds since becoming Muslims have strongly subscribed to this element of Islamic social cement in the region. They always fought alongside Turkish (and other Muslims) ‘brothers’ from the early history of the Ottomans and later in the War of Independence that saw the formation of the new Turkish state, despite the nationalism that had spread across the Muslim world at this time (Kreyenbroek and Sperl, 1992; Houston, 2001). A majority of the Kurds rejected the concept

126  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere of the nation-state which they saw as modernist and occidentalist coming from the West and was perceived as a threat to the unity of the ummah. Consequently, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, they acknowledged their Islamic fraternity with their Turkish brethren in forming the post-Ottoman state in Anatolia that also included Kurdistan (Houston, 2001; Gingeras, 2016). The religion did not only enter significantly into social life but was also crucial in the social construction of their reality. As Berger (1969: 28) states: “Religion has played a strategic part in the human enterprise of world-building”. Through Karl Mannheim’s (1952) social constructivist point of view, Kurdish society is divided into socio-political groups, which produces their social location and constructs their scope of knowledge. The relation between those Kurdish inner groups of the society transpires in the area of political competition and antagonistic hegemonic relations on definition of identity, which can be read through a power relation. While later, much of Kurdish society was to undergo a process of secularisation, or at least became influenced by secular values, one group still located Kurdishness within the Islamic value system and sought legitimacy through reference to religious principles that gave meaning to everyday life. As Berger (1969: 42) explains “religion thus serves to maintain the reality of that socially constructed world within which men exist in their everyday lives”. Until the 1950s, whenever the state had tried to remove Islam from the public sphere and to create a secular society as part of its project of modernity, it at the same time incurred problems in dealing with Islamic and religiously determined Kurdish identity (Cicek, 2017, Aydinli and Ozcan, 2011). From the Kurdish Islamic point of view, Turkish nationalists had begun a process of secularisation during the late Ottoman and early Republic period as an agent of the West, which was incommensurate with Islam. Secularisation means that “sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols” (Berger, 1969: 106). It “is more than a social-structural process. It affects the totality of cultural life” (Berger, 1969: 107). Moreover, due to the hegemonising power of secularism, religion no longer legitimates the whole society or identity. Consequently, those who are religious seek to maintain their particular sub-identity and compete with internal and external opponents who might deny it. McDowall observes that “the religious impulse had always been a complex issue” (2000: 431), and this applies to both Kurds and Turks. For devout Kurds, religious ties and networks are one of the main reasons to retain relations with Turkish society, based on ‘Muslim fraternity’; however, this has seen a crucial obstacle by Kurdish nationalists for gaining a national unity among all Kurds (van Bruinessen, 2000b). For some, in both an opportunistic and also apologetic sense, Islam is seen as the only common tie between Kurds and Turks, and the current conflict between them can best be solved within an Islamic framework of Islamic ethnic and national rights. Along with opposition to secular Kurds, particularly during the 1968 leftist momentum, Kurdish political Islamists have also stood against Turkish nationalism. More recently, they have argued that the Islamist agenda of the ruling parties failed to address Kurdish demands, and devout Kurdish Muslims blame Turkish

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  127 Muslims for being ‘arrogant’ and ‘ignorant’ of basic Kurdish demands, such as linguistic and cultural rights. Kurdish Islamists stand as much against a statist and Turkic-Islamic approach as they are against the Jacobin, laicism, and oppressive modernist state policy, alongwith secular, Marxist–Leninist ideology, and some Kurdish political parties’ discourse. Shying away from seeing the Kurds from a Turkish Islamic position has led to some accommodation between Islamically oriented Kurds and the mainstream Kurdish political agents in terms of Kurdish rights, although without subscribing to their secular ideologies (Cicek, 2017). Pious Muslim Kurds define their Kurdi(sh)ness within an Islamic discourse to construct a sort of passive nationalism, while at the same time searching for a way to bring their Kurdish Islamist identity into the public sphere with the aim of extending it among society. Yavuz and Ozcan (2006: 107) describe these ‘MuslimKurds’ as “those who stress Islamic values and normally identify with religion rather than ethnicity but also feel Kurdish when confronted with the choice of Turkish identity”. According to Houston (2001: 177): Kurdish Islamist discourse is concerned to show that on the contrary Islam does not cancel ethnic subjectivity, and that such subjectivity is not a Western innovation. [. . .] If the democratisation of the political structure in Turkey proves incapable of granting such rights, Kurdish Islamic discourse finds no objection in Islam, or in Islamic law, to their realisation through a federation, or by autonomy, or in the independent state for Kurds. Consequently, this creates cracks in the ‘fraternity’ discourse of Turkish and Kurdish Muslims (Dag, 2017; Aydinli and Ozcan, 2011). The Islamic Kurdish intellectual, Ramazan Değer, complains of the danger of being labelled as ‘Kurdist’ when anyone refers to Kurdish demands among Islamists: “if you put the Kurdish problem on the agenda, you are a Kurdish nationalist” (Houston, 2001: 175). Kurdish Muslims also became subject to Kemalist state persecution, first for being a Muslim and second for being a Kurd and thus different than their Turkish fellow religious counterparts. This constitutes an ambivalent situation for the Islamically oriented Kurds and creates complex relations with Marxist Kurds that encourages them to construct a Kurdish Islamic discourse which is distinguishable from both Kurdish secular socialists and Turkish Islamists. This new activism and discourse of the Kurdish Islamic groups have shaped a new type of sub-identity, perhaps in the hope of reactivating Islamic values in Kurdish politics. It expresses differences between an intellectually constructed formal Kurdishness that is offered by leftist Kurds and the daily practices of Kurdishness by conservative Kurds. However, as Houston (2001: 184) argues “it would be wrong to assume that Kurdish Islamists are necessarily anti-PKK because of its avowed anti-religiosity” although the PKK’s 1991 pamphlet on religion appears to show a strategic change in the rhetoric of the PKK leadership towards Islam. The Kurdish Islamists created their own isle of identity which appealed to a Kurdish Islamic heritage by reference, for instance, to the legacy of Mîr

128  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere Salahaddin Ayyubi who remains one of the most respected and iconic images of Islam having saved Jerusalem from the medieval crusaders to become a hero for the Kurdish Islamic identity. Likewise, Sheikh Said, alongside other sheikhs who rebelled against the state, is another decisive contributor in shaping this new identity. The heritage of the Sunni Kurdish theologian of Said-i Nursi (despite its contested identity by his Turkish followers) and his advocacy of a moderate Islamic culture have also been influential in defining the new Kurdish Islamic identity (Nursi, 1990). Kurdish Islamic-oriented individuals’ knowledge of identity is embedded in everyday life. A Kurdish ethnic identity emerged as a sub-identity of the society within Islamic identity that shaped and reshaped in relation to political and cultural Islam. It maintains its own ‘symbolic universe’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) and discourse as part of an Islamic Kurdish heritage along with its own vocabulary or ‘language game’ (Wittgenstein, 2001), for example, like ummah, tevhid (Islamic doctrine of the divine unity), jihad (holy war), mustadafeen (the oppressed), shariah (Islamic law), salvation, and brotherhood. In particular, the Kurdish Islamists’ defining notion of mustadafeen is an important one that carries an important message for the rest of Kurdish but mainly to Turkish society. When compared to secular Kurdi(sh) intellectuals, the identity of these religious intellectuals and their role are quite different, and they function more in Mannheim’s sense of an intellectual rather than Gramsci’s organic sense. Religious intellectuals act as a mechanism of transmission to formulate and organise a system of belief that is transmitted to Kurdish society in terms of the responsibilities entailed in being a devout Muslim. They are required to intellectually legitimate their identity in relation to an opposing one. Their interpretation of the world derived from Islamic values is synthesised into a worldview that must be seen to provide solutions to the issues of society and humankind. They construct Kurdishness in terms of Islamic morals and argue therefore that there is no need to be secular in order to have a national identity. While the Kurdish Islamists explore the Kurdish problem from a pro-Kurdish perspective and offer an Islamic blueprint, at the same time, they must compete with other secular Kurdish groups and Turkish Islamic groups, over which Kurdish identity should dominate. This has sometimes resulted in clashes and violence. The Kurdish Muslim groups created an Islamic discourse and in doing so distinguished themselves from the rest of the Islamic world, including Turks, as a result of the indifference and muted reactions of the Islamic world to Kurdish demands. For instance, as Beşikçi (1991) points, after the Halabja Massacre by Saddam Hussein in Iraq on 16 March 1988, the Islamic Conference held in Kuwait on 20 March condemned the atrocities committed by Bulgarians against minority Turks, by Greek Cypriots against Turks, by Israel against the Palestinians, and by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, all seen as examples of oppressive and assimilative policies towards Muslim minorities; however, none of the 42 member countries referred to Kurdish assimilation in the region nor the serious chemical attacks that had caused more than 5,000 Kurdish deaths as an act of genocide by the Iraqi government (Bulloch and Harvey, 1992). As a result, the Kurds see themselves

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  129 as a ‘miss-treated stepbrother’ by Turkish Muslims and have become ‘orphans’ of the Muslim world (Shinnavi, 1992). However, it would be a mistake to see the Kurdish Islamic groups as a homogenous entity as their Islamism and Kurdishness are articulated and combined in different ways. Focusing on the agents and strategies of the Kurdish Muslims allow us to recognise their challenge for the redefining scope of political Kurdishness.

Political violence, religion, and nation: the Kurdish-led Hizbullah The contemporary proactive and armed representatives of Kurdish Islamic identity are Hizbullahi Kurdi or the Kurdish-led Hizbullah (the Party of Allah who has no connection with the Shia Hezbollah of Lebanon) with Turkish objectives. They emerged as anti-ethnic and anti-secular militant defenders of the ummah mainly in the Kurdish cities of Batman, Diyarbakır, and Şırnak (Kurt, 2017; Aras and Balci, 2002). They claim legitimacy by reference to their Kurdish identity and background and in glorying Kurdish Islamic history and the Kurdish contribution to the Islamic world. However, Kurdishness refers to cultural, traditional, and linguistic characteristics rather than a nationalist concept. Hizbullah was established under the leadership of Hüseyin (Durmaz) Velioğlu in Batman in 1979 (after they represented İlimci – scientists), while Menzil (rangers/guardians) bookstore was led by Fidan Güngör. According to Imset (1992), a group of Islamist radicals in the Kurdish region was ideologically influenced by the Iranian Islamic Revolution. It is a distinctive characteristic and systematic structure of radical Islamic groups to assemble and emerge around Islamic bookshops, and in fact many Islamic movements have the same origin (Yavuz, 2003; Kurt, 2017). However, tensions existed within Hizbullah; between the İlimci and the Menzilci which can be considered as one of the first groups to fragment from Hizbullah. The Hizbullah organisation comprised two main approaches and strategies resulting from different views on the means of struggle. The Menzilcis advocated a passive struggle via intellectual and cultural leadership, while on other hand, the İlimci, being the more active of the two, were eager to use violence and armed struggle to achieve an Islamic revolution in Turkey as their contribution from the Kurds as the ‘slaves of Allah’. Different approaches to the struggle resulted in divergence and contestation between these two groups, and some years later between 1991 and 1995 they engaged in armed combat against each other, which resulted in over a hundred people dying (Kurt, 2017). Eventually, the conflict was won by the İlimciler who now controlled Hizbullah. Returning to the origins of Hizbullah, Altsoy (2014), who is the heir of Velioğlu, explains in his book the reasons why the Hizbullah organisation, which was described as a jemaat (congregation), was created. He claims that it was necessary for Muslims to form such a voluntary association as part of their Islamic duty and responsibility and that it should follow Islamic values in terms of devotion (takva), self-sacrifice, piety, and Islamic brotherhood. While furthering the aim of building Islamic character, they also employed the discourse of anti-imperialism.

130  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere However, although leftist groups used the same anti-imperialist discourse, they collided with Kurdish leftists arguing that the ummah is the solution for Kurds since Islamic principles meant that the Kurds would not be discriminated against because of their ethnicity. Hizbullah constructed their discourse around concepts of relations between the oppressor (zalim) and the oppressed (mazlum) by arguing that Muslims are supposed to help the oppressed, irrespective of religion, language, race, or ethnic origin. The struggle developed as a counter-movement against the oppressors (zalim) in any part of the world following the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini’s slogan that ‘everyday is Ashura, everyday is Kerbela’. Within this conceptualisation, the Kurds are the underdogs (mazlum) of the region and the Kurdish problem is a result of Western modernism, especially nationalist ideas that were imported by Westerners to the Islamic world. This destroyed the unity of Muslims and created problems for the whole Muslim world (Houston, 2001; Altsoy, 2014; Taspinar, 2005). They considered that the PKK and other secular organisations perpetuated this modernist attitude among the Kurds, and therefore from their position of support for the ummah, Hizbullah vehemently opposed and clashed with the PKK resulting in many deaths. In the internal conflict of the early 1990s, the İlimci (later to dominate Hizbullah) also accused the Menzilcis of jeopardising the unity of Muslims, the ummah, and betraying Islamic values. The Menzilcis therefore were seen as münafık (hypocrites and not truly Muslim), and references were made to similar examples of the münafik during the Prophet’s era and adding that the Menzilci acted as a nifaq (faction/separatist) group within Muslim society (Altsoy, 2014; Kurt, 2017). Consequently, Hizbullah became an extreme and violent politicised aspect of Islamic identity. Hizbullah’s strategy is twofold. On the one hand, it is based on tebliğ (notification) and dava (invitation) as a moderate or passive form of struggle utilising propaganda to gain the support of society in their aim to construct an Islamic viewpoint. On the other hand, it also pursues violence in the form of a direct attack against both the PKK and the secular state as a type of jihad (war) through the use of arms and violence. Metaphorically, they described this struggle as one between the soldiers of Allah (God) and the soldiers of Devil (Şeytan). They sanctified death by reference to the notion of shadid, which means martyrdom, although they preferred this term to another word for martyr, şehit, because this is also used by the secular, state security forces, such as the army and police, as well as armed leftist groups. Hizbullah began to compete with the secular Kurdish parties and their modernist, secular, leftist, and nationalist ideas which they saw as fundamentally at odds with traditional Kurdish social structure, as political violence “escalated in the 1990s with the support of state actors, who sought to benefit from the conflict” (Orhan, 2016: 15). In justifying Hizbullah’s position, Altsoy (2014: 72–73) argues that the PKK “devastated Kurdish belief and culture through alienating people from Islamic values and leading them to emulate Western society under the desire for liberation or independence, something that Kemalist regime had been trying

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  131 to achieve but failed for a century”.1 This constituted the justification to wage war against the PKK as part of their support for the rule of Allah through their own party, Hizbullah (Kurt, 2017). They not only accused the PKK of continuing the Kemalist agenda, which served as an opportunity to gain the xulamlık (shepherd or server in Kurdish) position in Kemalism, but also considered the PKK to be an ally of Israel and the United States, which was not characteristic of the Muslim Kurdse. As Gunter (1997: 71) states: The anti-PKK Hizbullahs consisted of pro-Islamic Kurds who objected to the atheism of the Marxist PKK and its goal of splitting off an independent Kurdish state from Turkey. They also believed that the PKK was cooperating with the Armenians to divide the Muslim people of Turkey. Hizbullah saw the PKK as a gayr-ı Islami (non-Islamic) actor and as such could not be a representative of the Kurdish people and their rights since they create nifaq (discord) in Kurdish society. Adopting this approach, it is not surprising that the Kurdish Hizbullah sought to connect with other radical Turkish Islamic groups and other extremist Islamic national and international organisations, parties, and movements in Kurdistan and beyond. While notably, Hizbullah often used the term ‘Kurdistan’, which is not common for Islamist movements in Turkey, it must be understood that their reference is to a geographic area rather than a national or ethnic territory for the Kurds. They also blamed the traditional and local Islamic institutions, such as madrasas and tariqas, of being backward and illiberal and accused them of representing a false approach to Islam and to have stood passively and inefficiently against Western and modern, secular and atheist Kemalist ideas and the nationalist, secular (that is atheist), and communist PKK (Yüksel, 1993). Consequently, Hizbullah has easily justified the use of violence against these ‘unbelievers’. McDowall (2000: 422) explains Hizbullah’s opposition to the PKK in Kurdistan “where it saw the secular nationalist movement a prime enemy, because of its close association with atheistic communism and because it challenged the Turkish Right with which the Islamic tendency was so closely associated”. Altsoy (2014) adds that Hizbullah saw the PKK’s success as not due to its ideology, skills, strategy, tactics, politics, and mobilisation, but rather as the result of the Turkish state’s policies towards the Kurds and the illegitimacy it has among local people. Interestingly, both Hizbullah and the PKK use the same acronym, ‘TC’, to refer to the Republic of Turkey and employ a similar discourse in terms of its policies and legitimacy. However, controversy surrounds Hizbullah, and according to Houston (2001: 186), “there have been many rumours that in the Kurdish areas of Turkey Hizbullah was initially supported by the state”, and for many (both secular and religious groups) it became a widely held belief that Hizbullah was a Turkish state’s political project in the Kurdish region (Kurt, 2017). It has also been accused of having secret links and allegiances with state security forces which operated illegally against pro-Kurdish and PKK institutions, of having engaged in counter-guerrilla tactics, and receiving arms training from the security forces. In 1991, Hizbullah

132  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere started assassinating pro-PKK intellectuals, journalists, and sympathisers and bombing their institutions, and as McDowall (2000) points out, by the end of 1993, over 500 pro-PKK activists, trade unionists, and members of the secular nationalist left had been killed. As a result, some Hizbullah militants were arrested and charged with being responsible for a number of these killings. However, as Imset states (1992: 124), “the amount of immunity this flank of the Kurdish Hizbullah enjoyed soon earned its nickname of ‘Hizbul-contra’ in reference to public suspicion of its contra-guerrilla background”. The violent activities of Hizbullah continued for many years, resulting in hundreds of deaths among other Kurdish groups but, remarkably it was argued, despite Hizbullah’s obvious anti-Kemalist pose, they avoided attacking the state apparatus (Kurt, 2017). It is, however, significant to mention that Hizbullah’s attacks were not confined to PKK members. After eliminating Fidan Güngör and the Menzilciler, Hizbullah continued its acts of violence against other Islamic groups and noted members within Kurdish Islamic circles including the assassination of a number of leading Islamic scholar and activists. An important aspect of Hizbullah’s violence was the nature of violence as it developed its own assassination methods, particularly favouring stabbing or shooting people in the back, and specific means of torture. Hizbullah came to be known as ‘Hizbul-Şeytan’ (Satan). The Hizbullah activities and leadership were halted in 2000 by Turkish security forces who then attempted to remove the evidence of any collaboration between the state and Hizbullah. After Hizbullah kidnapped the leaders of the Kurdish Islamic group, Zehra, in October 1999, state security forces stormed a number of buildings in Istanbul and discovered many bodies, all having been tortured in a way typical of Hizbullah. In one such incident, the leadership of Hizbullah including Velioğlu was killed in gunfire exchanges between the security forces and Velioğlu. This was followed by a number of operations against Hizbullah resulting in many arrests and imprisonments (Aras and Balci, 2002). While this brought a temporary end to the creation of a possible internal counter-hegemony, it is important to note that the emergence of Hizbullah and its tactics did not arise out of Kurdish society but was, as many believe, a result of the manipulation by the Turkish state in line with their political aims of creating a challenge to the PKK so that ‘brothers should kill each other, while the Turks watch’. In 2011, Hizbullah produced a new manifesto which showed that the aim and strategy of the organisation had changed, particularly the shift in their Kurdish policy, denoting a more frequent mention of Kurdishness. On 3 January, the main leaders of Hizbullah were released, however the outcry against this led to some being re-arrested and imprisoned. After 11 years, they reappeared in Kurdish politics and on 17 January 2012, the leadership published 17 pages of a new manifesto that formulated a regenerated movement with a new discourse. The declaration summarised and formulated the goals, principles, and strategy of Hizbullah in ‘northern Kurdistan’ for Kurdish people.2 Hizbullah moved into a new stage of existence. Previously, they had been active through an NGO called Mustazaf-Der (the Association of the Oppressed) until it was closed by the state in the summer of 2012. This was mainly centred

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  133 on the mobilisation of civil society through religious activism which had led them to move towards a political platform, and in the latter months of 2012, they began the process of establishing an Islamic Kurdish political party, the Hüda-Par (Free Cause), which was represented in the March 2014 local election. Hizbullah emerged to form an internal counter-hegemonic movement against the PKK while collaborating with the main hegemonic power, the Turkish state (Kurt, 2017). At the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, this resulted in clashes between HüdaPar and pro-PKK groups and HDP supporters that led to the deaths of over 50 civilians (Dag, 2017). However, following PKK’s strategy, it subsequently started the process of becoming a legitimate political grouping through the establishment of a new political party with an Islamist positioning. The PKK was still determining the ‘rules of the game’ in the larger Kurdish periphery.

Accommodative Kurdish Muslims: the Zehra and Azadi movement Islam formed a hegemonic space between Hizbullah, the state, and the PKK in gaining the support of the Kurdish people for whom religion remains an important value system embedded in everyday life. In this respect, the PKK treated religion and its relationship with Islamic politics differently from traditional Marxist groups. Consequently, pro-Kurdish or pro-PKK-related Islamic organisations appeared in the post-1999 period, such as the Islamic Party of Kurdistan (PIK); however, on the other hand, Zehra (Kurdish Nurcus) and Azadi, as independent Kurdish Muslims, demanded Kurdish rights by appropriating the heritage of the Sheikh Said rebellion and its Kurdish Islamic character. The Kurdiyati Nurcu (the light or follower of Nursi in Kurdish objectives) groups, followers of the Kurdish Islamic scholar Said-i Kurdi, known as Said Nursi, mostly acted as a sub-identity within Kurdish activism as accommodative agents in the context of their strategy (Table 6.1). The Kurdish Nurcu groups (e.g. Zehra) were distinct from other mostly Turkish Nurcu groups in terms of their approach to the Kurdish issue (Cicek, 2017; Dag, 2017). The Kurdish Nurcus were disconnected from Turkish groups in the same way as Kurdish leftists were from the mainstream left in Turkey, because Turkish Nurcus worked on Turkifying the identity and the discourse of Said-i Nursi and remained ignorant of Kurdish demands, denying a separate Kurdish identity. Like other Islamic organisations, Kurdish Nurcus established a publishing house, Tenvir Neşriyat, and published the magazine Dava (meaning ’invitation’, but which also meant ‘struggle’) in 1989. The group called itself Med-Zehra, under the leadership of Mehmet Sıddık Dursun (nickname Seyhanzade) whose approach centred on the concept of hizb-ul Kur’an (the party of the Qur’an) (Atacan, 2001). Med-Zehra aimed to become a counter-hegemony force opposing in particular other Nurcu and more generally other Islamic groups in Turkey and could be seen as another sub-Kurdish identity in relation to the PKK. They challenged the Turkified identity of Beddiüzaman Said-i Nursi by deconstructing his statecentred Turkish identity that ignored his ethnic origin and cultural background.

134  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere It had parallels with the PKK’s reclaiming of Newroz from the Turkish state’s Nevruz. Said during his early work and speeches focused on his Kurdish identity and the Kurdistan problem. Nursi wanted to open a university in Kurdistan and to have the Kurdish language recognised as one of the main languages of the country, petitioning the Ottoman sultan for the development of the Kurdish region.3 He left Istanbul’s ‘pseudo’ modernity for Kurdistan’s mountain, which he described as the ‘centre of absolute freedom’, in order to advance his demands for Kurdish development. Moreover, Said acknowledged the relationship between his Kurdishness and Islam, signing his work with the name of Said-i Kurdi until the more repressive times of the Republic. Kurdish Nurcus argued that the Western style of nationalism jeopardises the ‘unity of ümmet-i Muhammad’ (followers of Mohammed) and with reference to Said-i Nursi’s work – Risale-i Nur – defined nationalism in terms of an ummatic framework and considered Western nationalism a return to the jahiliyya devri (the pre-Islamic era of ignorance). According to Said-i Kurdi, like other Western institutions, nationalism is not appropriate for the Muslim world (and thus also for Kurds) and makes a distinction between two types of nationalism (Atacan, 2001: 127): Negative forms of nationalism harm people by benefiting from the destruction of others. They have created many problems for Muslims historically and remain a great danger for the Muslim world today. In contrast, positive nationalism emanates from the needs of a society, and carries the potential to improve the solidarity and strength of the Muslim brotherhood. Kurdish Nurcu accused their Turkish counterparts (particularly the Gülenci group) of adopting a negative nationalism and distorting Üstad’s (Master) work. For instance, the terms ‘Kurdistan’ and ‘Kurds’ in Said’s original books were later translated by the Gülen group and other Turkic-centric nurcu groups as respectively the Eastern country and Eastern people that refers to a Kurdish peasant and tribal people. Zehra corrected these distortions and re-printed Risale-i Nur in its original version, first through Tenvir and later through Nubihar publications. They also claimed and evidenced that “certain paragraphs, most of which were concerned with the political regime of Turkey, have been removed from the original text” (Atacan, 2001: 123). Kurdish Nurcu groups, such as Dava, have accused some other Nurcu groups of denying Said’s Kurdishness by their attempt to prove that he was a sayyid (biological heir to Prophet) and thus an Arab. However, without being able to provide proof these Turkish Nurcus go on to portray Said as Turkish and wrap his identity with Turkish nationalism, even though nationalism strictly speaking is forbidden in the Qur’an (Atacan, 2001). Dursun, the owner of the former Dava magazine (a Med-Zahra group) and the leader of the later established Tenvir group and publications, complains that “our Muslim Turkish friends understand everything from an Islamic point of view except when it comes to the Kurdish issue. Then they think like a Turk” (Atacan, 2001: 135).

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  135 Med-Zehra always articulated the notion of Islamic confederation. This dispute with the Turkish Nurcus over Said’s ethnic origin symbolised the division between Turkish and Kurdish Nurcus, which led to the creation of the Med-Zehra group and Dava magazine that claimed a universal Islamicity favouring Kurdish national rights.4 With regard to Kurdistan (referred to as a geographical area, see Culcasi, 2006), they argued that Kurds had special rights, ever since contract between Sultan Yavuz Selim and Mir Idris-i Bitlisi during the Ottoman Empire materialised (Bitlisi, 2005/1597), which allowed the Kurds to use their own language and to enjoy de facto autonomy, but this was broken after the emergence of the secular, positivist, and nationalist Republic after which Kurds were assimilated into Turkish ethno-nationalism (an echo of Sheikh Said arguments). “Med-Zehra believed that the two men [Said-i Kurdi and Sheikh Said] shared similar ideas and opinions, besides belonging to the same land and nation, while nourished by a shared culture (Kurdish territory, ethnicity, and culture)” (Atacan, 2001: 129). The Kurdish Nurcus contest against Turkish nationalism was particularly inspired by Islamic values with this inspiration traced back to Hussein’s struggle (the grandson of the Prophet), who representing Islamic values fought against Yezid and his Arab nationalism. The Kurdish Nurcu, like Kurdish leftists, went through a number of evolutionary periods and organisational forms as well through division and co-optation. For example, in 1990, Med-Zehra divided over strategies and personality clashes, and İzzeddin Yıldırım formed the Zehra Education and Culture Foundation (Zehra), which captured the majority of the previous Med-Zehra constituency. The Zehra established the Nubihar publication which became one of the main leading Kurdish language publications with an Islamic orientation, while Dursun founded the Tenvir publication (Dag, 2017). The Kurdish language-based magazine Nubihar, which recently celebrated its twentieth year, has been Zehra’s important contribution in developing Kurdish thought and Kurdish language intellectuals. While Tenvir’s influence shrunk entirely to Bingöl city, Zehra made important inroads in Kurdish and large Turkish cities by organising the Kurds. Both groups situated themselves around mainly Said-i Kurdi and Sheikh Said, although Sheikh Said was emphasised more by Tenvir. However, it was not Zehra’s aim to develop a counter-hegemonic cultural movement to thwart the dominance of the PKK and its political platform in the Kurdish public sphere. Zehra mostly engaged in soft politics with a focus on intellectual activity, publication, and the education of young students within an Islamic discourse that justified Kurdish identity. The Zehra group acted as a moral and intellectual leadership that wished to create a counter-hegemonic culture against the state and other Turkic-Islamic religious groups by adopting a hegemonic position parallel to that of the secular Kurdish socio-political agents. This meant that the Kurdish Nurcus were not only competing with the Turkish Nurcus, but also for the same audience (human capital) as Hizbullah, which made them an easy target for Hizbullah’s paramilitary action.5 This was considered as a necessary strategy by Hizbullah to eliminate the presence of Zehra in order to become a main player in the Kurdish issue (Kurt, 2017). The Zehra rank and file

136  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere had not only lost direction but also had faced intimidation by the state while, at the same time, they had also lost every asset they had as a result of the ‘postmodern’ military coup d’etat on 28 February 1997 when they were accused of Islamism, and their assets were confiscated. One of the main reasons for this repression was their insistence on the Islamic nature of Kurdish identity, and how Islam justified Kurdish demands for their rights. In addition, and importantly, Zehra did not wage a war against secular and leftist Kurdish movements (the PKK, BDP for example) nor consider taking the side of groups who opposed them. Instead, Zehra preferred to develop a position in parallel with the PKK, something that was unacceptable to the establishment (Cicek, 2017). Zehra had tacitly supported pro-Kurdish political parties in elections. After the coup of 28 February (in 1997), Zehra began re-organising into local associations and focusing on publications, education, and the provision of accommodation for young university students, along with social and civil society activism. The Nubihar magazines remain an important Kurdish language publication. Zehra has been attempting to make a comeback more recently after the negative impact of the 28 February coup ended. Regarding Hizbullah’s aggressive stance against Zehra, two different agents that used Islamic and Kurdish discourses were applied from different angles and strategies, although their audience was drawn from the same source as Kurdish Islamic knowledge produced for a society that needs the power to execute it. This difference could sometimes be seen with preachers in the Kurdish mosques of the region in their efforts to control the mosque’s activity that sometimes ended in violence and even death. However, the impact of external agents must also be considered regarding how the establishment aimed to use Hizbullah for its own ends not only against the PKK but opposed to what it saw as other uncompromising Islamic individuals and groups, thereby, able to construct its hegemony by gaining the consent of society. In addition to the Kurdish Islamic groups already mentioned, new Kurdish Muslim groups emerged in the region: the Azadi Initiative which appeared as a new Islamic Kurdish social actor in Diyarbakır in June 2012 sought to influence the intellectual space. ‘Azadi’ means freedom in Kurdish, a term which was used by the organisation that started the historical Sheikh Said rebellion and was used by this new group to situate itself within the same discourse and struggle. The Initiative legitimises the establishment of this group by reference to their Islamic responsibility towards the ‘Islamic and Kurdayeti’ (or Kurdi meaning Kurdish related) people and the defence of the rights of ‘Kurdistani’ (territorial nationalism that embraces all diverse people who live in the Kurdish geography) people in Kurdistan through non-violent means. They claim the period of either being defined as a Kurd or a Muslim is over and appeal for an Islamic moral stance in the Kurdish struggle. As part of this approach, they took up the ‘Uludere (Roboski) massacre’ case and created a webpage to seek justice for the slaughter of 34 Kurdish youths by the Turkish regime in December 2012.6 Collaboration ensued with secular Kurds in demanding Kurdish national rights by advocating an agonistic pluralism in the HDP’s chain of equivalence.

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  137

Muslim Kurds and primordial and local institutions In addition to identifying Kurdishness within modern Islamic organisations, one could argue that the Kurdish public sphere has always been dominated by traditional religious institutions, such as the tariqas, mainly representing Qadiriyya and Naqshbandi strains of Sufi culture. These trans-regional actors have always strongly influenced everyday religious life of Kurds both at the societal and tribal levels. After the abolition of the Janissary institutions and the related sect of Alevi-originated Bektashism, the Ottoman sultans adopted Naqshbandi-infused Sunnism, which consolidated their power and also deeply influenced state institutions. However, the modernisation/westernisation disrupted this engagement with Islam until the Democrat Party epoch (Dag, 2017). The era of multiparty politics provided religious freedom and the Naqshbandi-influenced Turkish politics from Erbakan, Özal to Erdoğan among others. However, the Naqshbandis in the Kurdish region, such as Sheikh Said, opposed newly imported ideas of nationalism and secularism that held sway in modern Turkey as they were considered destructive of the social contract based on the idea of an Islamic brotherhood between the two nations. This led to a significant number of rebellions against the new Kemalist regime from within the Naqshbandi tradition (e.g. the Bitlis uprising). In examining the social formation of Kurdish society, the institute of the madrasas, religious seminaries, constituted a very effective tool of the Naqshbandis by promoting melles/seydas (Islamic scholars) in the education of society’s members. However, after the Republic banned religious orders, the madrasas and tariqas went underground but remained active, even during the laicist single-party era, while today this traditional Kurdish Islamic approach encourages a madrasa-style manner and culture in developing the Kurdish language and literature (Yuksel, 2009). They did not oppose the state’s dominant culture of modernism, nationalism, and secularism and its official institutions explicitly, including religious ones, such as the Directorate of Religious Affairs (the Diyanet) or civil servant imams, in a confrontational way but provided a much subtler opposition by offering an Arabic and Kurdish Islamic education to the Kurdish population (Lord, 2018). Such an approach discussed earlier contrasts with more modern Turkish Islamic movements, such as the Gülen movement and its advocacy of a TurkifiedSunni–Hanefi triangle (Baser and Ozturk, 2017). The melles and seydas have not been comfortable with the Islamic world’s ignorance of the ummah nor the sufferings of the Kurds (Cicek, 2017). These madrasas were regional networks within Sunni-Shafi Islam that interwove and embedded Islam and cultural (but not political) Kurdishness into everyday life and survived through voluntary contributions. They strove to base and shape daily life in terms of Islamic values and practices (Aydinli and Ozcan, 2011). Modernist and positivist ideologies were perceived as a threat to Kurdish traditional and Islamic values, with a cultural understanding of Kurdishness shaped within an anti-modernist context, seeking preservation from the influences of modernist institutions. As during the nation-building process of the Kemalists, they resisted the new modern regime but, having failed to stop it, withdrew from involvement with the socio-political and economic life of the

138  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere new order. For instance, these traditional Islamic Kurds are not educated in state schools, marriages are not registered with state institutions, they do not engage with the state’s legal and security functions on any matters, nor possess an official identity unless forced by the state to acquire one, and find it ‘necessary’ to engage with state institutions such as military service. Consequently, even in the so-called postmodern Kurdish society, the Kurdish Nurcus and madrasa/melles have self-positioned as alternative Islamic counteractors that largely promote a Shafi-Kurdish Islamic approach within the region that opposes state-supported and controlled Islamic organisations. However, as accommodative agents, they also strive to offer to renew the social contract between the Kurdish and Turkish Islamic nations in terms of providing a new social contract built upon universal human rights, encompassing linguistic and cultural rights along with freedom of expression and thought, in the context of democratic principles. Tariqas have also acted in part as alternatives to the radical-Salafi extremist or radical groups (Yüksel, 1993), as they believed these groups did not only have links with the state but also that they focused only on Iran, Afghanistan, and Palestine rather than Kurdish problems. Today, the impact of the madrasas and melles-saydas is observedly less strong in social and political life in comparison to premodern eras, as their influence waned in the face of modernisation, nationalisation, secularisation, and technological advances within Kurdish society. This was compounded by the modernist and secular tendencies of other Kurdish groups who delegitimised the efforts of the tariqas and historically considered them as part of the reason why the Kurds failed to create a nation-state (Cicek, 2017; Yüksel, 1993). However, their influence has not entirely waned, and some have attempted to come to terms with modern institutions and integration into the system. Although melles, and thus madrasas, are not as strong as before, they still play an influential role in Kurdish society. Some of these traditional institutions and their members are involved in Kurdish nationalism. This has involved participating in acts of civil disobedience, including organising the civilian jummah prayer outside mosques which oppose official preaching and the Sunni–Hanefi approach, and moreover attending street demonstrations along with secular Kurds while carrying the Qur’an and engaging in a religious discourse. The AKP has initiated the state melles project that is run by the Diyanet to gain an advantage over these melles and to counter their reputation and influence in Kurdish society. The project aims to recruit 1,000 melles by appointing these non-state school-educated people to jobs as civil servants, namely as imams (prayer leaders). Pro-Kurdish and Kurdish nationalists view this as similar to the earlier Hamidiye regiments or village guardian project as the Turkish government seeks opportunities to maintain sovereignty over Kurdish society by forming alliances with local actors.

Civic and political Islamists: the branch of Nurcus and right-wing parties The urbanised Nurcu groups who originated in Istanbul (e.g. Gülenci, Kırkıncı, Süleymancı) are not spiritually effective in the region compared to the

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  139 Shafi-oriented madrasas, tariqas, as well as Kurdish Nurcus and other modern Kurdish Islamic organisations, because these outsiders’ reputation implies collaboration with the state assimilation policy. However, they still operate in the region and attract the following of a significant number of Kurdish youths, as they do in the main Turkish cities by providing help and socio-economic opportunities for Kurdish university students with the aim of co-opting them into the organisation. These urban groups are mostly from a Sunni–Hanefi background, which fit easily with the state’s Turkish Islamic culture and have no problem obeying state authority and integrating into modern city life. By contrast, Kurdish and Sunni-Shafi tradition rejects the affiliation with the Kemalist secular Turkish state (Yuksel, 2009) and does not embrace the regime’s modern secular life. Such distinctions create difficulties for the Istanbul-based groups to penetrate the Kurdish region despite shared Islamic values that constitute a cohesive factor between Muslim societies and some of the important alims (Islamic scholar) whom Turkish Muslims from the region follow, like Said-i Nursi and Seyyid Abdulhakim Arvasi. The position of these ‘statist’ Islamic groups on Kurdish demands and people are not that different from the state’s assimilation programmes in which assimilation with the Turkish Islamic culture instead of Kemalist Turkish secularism is stressed. One such example is the Gülen movement that operates in the region (Baser and Ozturk, 2017). According to Yavuz (2013), Gülen is a ‘Turko-Ottoman nationalist’ who along with his organisation is state centred and uses civil society and the market economy to gain socioeconomic power. These mainstream Islamic groups referred to earlier have gained a foothold in almost every part of the Kurdish regions through various means. They have set up dershanes (education training centres) and dormitories for poor students and run TV channels, newspapers, and magazines, promoting Turkish and Hanefi Islam, which as Houston (2001: 154) states: “heralds an old assimilationism that Kurdish Islamism will not take kindly to”. The use of religion, namely Sunni/Hanefi understandings of Islam, goes back to the coup d’état of 1980, which aimed to co-opt all oppositions, be it far leftists, ultra-nationalists, Kurdish nationalists, or radical Islamists, through a moderate-Islam within the framework of a Turkish–Islamic synthesis (Dag, 2017). This was funded and supported by the United States in a foreign policy aimed to counter threats to the Western capitalist, liberal democratic system posed by the communist ‘red line’ (as a threat) in which Islam was seen in the context as a ‘green safety valve’. Yet, this relaxing of the hitherto firm Kemalist approach towards Islamic movements resulted in more opportunity for Islamic agents to gain influence in the public sphere, one that continued and was extended in Özal’s conservative society and neoliberal economy era after 1980 coup through its Islamic/Naqshbandi identity. Some Kurdish Islamic tariqas also benefited from this expanded opportunity (Yavuz, 2003) and developed their movements within the state’s Islamic project, gaining a crucial foothold. As a consequence, new political Islamic discourses, particularly Erbakan’s adil düzen (just order) and the Islamic brotherhood emerged (Lord, 2018). Islamist scholar like Ali Bulaç sees this as involving a new

140  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere definition of identity based on moral and spiritual values along with a project to integrate the region, which was rooted in Abdulhamid’s utopian idea of Islamic Unity.7 However, this new Islamic politics by no means completely won over the Kurdish region.8 The concept of ummah, which is the main reference for the ‘statist’ Islamic groups in relation to the Kurdish Islamic population, was not so easily established after the nation-state building when the concept of nationalism became embedded in Islamic societies and created discourse such as Turkish Islam, Kurdish Islam, and Arabic Islam in modern Turkey. The presence of the AKP in government since 2002, which identifies as an Islamic government, legitimised the state in the eyes of conservative and religious Turks and Kurds; however, the adverse treatment of the Kurds at the hands of the AKP government was no longer seen as Islamically unacceptable (Tugal, 2016). Thus, the state’s re-integration of religion into the state system by the AKP has been a successful project (Lord, 2018). The debate centres on Turkish and Kurdish Islam reflecting the earlier separation between the Turkish and Kurdish left. The religiously oriented Sunni Kurds no longer find the religious discourse used by AKP in furthering the interests of the state against the Kurds acceptable despite the commonalities of being Muslim in general. This shapes the AKP’s future, which paves the way for new religious identities to emerge in the region and via Kurdish political struggles.

Opportunist integrated and Turkified Kurdishness: ‘white Kurds’ A second important sub-identity challenges hegemonic Kurdishness alongside Kurdish Muslims. Islam can be viewed as a common value system for both Turks and Kurds leading to communality and brotherhood, embedded and consolidated historically through an implicit social contract. However, the new Republican government opted for a new type of identity for the post-Ottoman society, one of ethnic Turkishness. As previously discussed in Chapter 1, the social constructivism suggests an identity created by certain social internal agents in an interactive manner, and it is assumed that these agents play a formative role to develop sociopolitical identities in particular discourse. Within a Kurdish sub-identity case, the Kemalist project politically, rather than socially, constructed a ‘fixed’ identity for the people of Turkey in general, and for the Kurds in particular (Cicek, 2017; Aslan, 2018). It resulted in the removal of all sign of Kurdishness (as well as other different identities) from the public sphere placing Kurds under strict state control as part of the process of ‘civilising’ the region. This Kemalist nation-building process attempted to assimilate the Kurds into socio-political life while deploying deportation, forced migration, and displacement as state policy towards the Kurds (Jongerden, 2014). Pluralism was replaced by a monopolistic Turkishness by homogenising multi-diverse postOttoman society through the institutionalisation of Kemalism and the replacement of most of the traditional institutions of Kurdish society with the official and single political party of the CHP. In this new political culture, identity was

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  141 formulated and recognised through the lens of Turkishness and through the integration of Kemalist cultural products into Kurdish society. Within this Kemalist order, political, cultural, and social realms were narrowly defined, which made it harder for individuals who did not accept these restrictions to participate in the public sphere. A body of Kurds failed to assemble and secure a presence within public life. The distribution of knowledge related to Kurdish heretic identity was interrupted and transmission of an authentic Kurdishness to the new generation curtailed by an external dynamic whereby Kurdishness became an invalid social value. Nevertheless, such identity is a product of society as a social reality, retaining Kemalist construction as a political project. Kurdish ethnic identity and Islamic values were forced underground and became unrepresented in the public sphere (Yavuz, 2003), existing only within private spaces. Maintaining a distinct Kurdish identity carried a heavy burden including invisibility, while, in contradistinction, opportunities were created for Kurdish individuals to exist in forms defined as acceptable by the state. As Beşikçi states (1991: 4) “the Kurds can enjoy basic freedoms and benefit from the principle of equal treatment as long as they deny their ethnic identity”. This meant that they could only appear in the public sphere when content to be Turks, even though their accent would immediately identify them as Kurdish unless they were already assimilated, urbanised, and educated (Laizer, 1991). Yavuz and Ozcan (2006: 106) define them as ‘opportunist Kurds’, the ‘group of Kurds – known as ‘occasional Kurds’ – very much assimilated within Turkishness who prefer to be active among centre-right and centre-left parties’, while Aydinli and Ozcan (2011) describe them as ‘integrated Kurds’.9 Even though these Kurds had access to various advantages offered through the iron grip of the state, this hybrid identity assumed divergent forms dependent upon educational background, location, and the propensity to express consent. It even became possible to be Prime Minister in Turkey by adopting this Kurdish-originated Turkish identity, as exemplified by Turgut Özal (Laizer, 1991; Beşikçi, 1991). Such manipulation was highly criticised by Kurdish nationalists and compared to the Ottoman devşirme (integrated) policy. Consequently, hybrid self-definition could be problematic in terms of the degree of Kurdishness and Turkishness adopted. This amalgamated identity has not usually been organised into groups because of its individual, situational, and opportunist character and therefore cannot be identified with an intellectual stratum, although this is not to deny the existence of individual intellectuals. The traditional role of Foucault’s ‘specific intellectuals’ may be ascribed to this type of Kurdish intellectuals because, as Foucault argues (as cited in Smart, 2004: 67), these specific intellectuals are “working not in the modality of the ‘universal’, the ‘exemplary’, the ‘just-and-true-for-all’, but within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them”. Consequently, the forms of knowledge about Kurdish identity are effectively reinterpreted and redistributed by the state via these intellectuals to an audience who primarily resides among Turks in metropolitan areas. Their language of origin, history, and identity is prohibited and disqualified by these self-same intellectuals.

142  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere Mehmet Ziya (1876–1924), a Kurdish intellectual, provides an example to the hybridity referred to earlier: under the pseudonym of Ziya Gökalp he was one of the main founders and theoreticians of Turkish nationalism (Berkes, 1959). Gökalp, a Kurd, denied his own Kurdishness despite speaking and writing in Kurdish and being involved with Kurdish national organisations in the late Ottoman era. He felt like a Turk even though his ancestors were from non-Turkish roots and went on to develop the idea of Türkçülük (the principle of Turkism) based on Turanism (a greater Turkish land encompassing Anatolia to the Chinese steppes) and was influenced by Durkheimian sociology which was also the foundation for his sociology of knowledge, ülkü (the theory of the ideal) (Gökalp, 1991/1926). Gökalp’s notion of knowledge can be seen as the “self-knowledge of society, which is born when men become aware of the existence and value of the social group to which they belong” (Heyd, 1950: 48). He argues that this derives from social shock, crisis, transformation, or revaluation. In relation to the Kurds, “he does not explicitly suggest giving the Kurds cultural autonomy; he seems to anticipate that they would be assimilated by the Turks” (Heyd, 1950: 132). Gökalp opposed the concept of ummah (and therefore the millet system too) and favoured the idea of identity as one cast in modern nationalist terms (Gökalp, 1991/1926).10 Although he did not deny the impact of Islamic principles over society, he believed that Islam could merge with Turkish culture, values, customs, and nationalism and furthermore advocated the idea of Turanism, aiming to unite the Turkic world from the Balkans to Central Asia and at the same expressing the ideal (ülkü). It is clear from the preceding discussion that the Kemalist concept of the public sphere did not allow for the expression of plural identities, and resistance meant taking up the struggle at the lowest level through individual criticism or at the highest level through armed struggle, in both cases facing the resulting consequences. The alternative was to accept Kemalist hegemony or at least be cowered by it and to navigate the system by not revealing a true identity. Kurdish identity, when suppressed, afforded opportunities to individuals and, in some cases, even accession to the governing party in Turkey (Cicek, 2017); for example, the AKP had the highest number of Kurdish MPs of any pro-Kurdish party during the 2002, 2007, and 2011 general elections. Consideration now focuses on mapping the identities and strategies of such opportunists and integrated Kurds (Aydinli and Ozcan, 2011). Examining the members of this nested identity (alongside their political behaviour) helps to observe how the borders of hegemonic Kurdishness expanded allowing an EU-ised-based political project in agonistic pluralism and radical democracy to arise.

Paramilitary group: the village guards The village guard system was officially founded as a paramilitary and semi-­ official security agent of the state and recruited mostly from Kurds in the region in the mid-1980s under Özal’s (a Kurd himself) administration. More recently, it shows how the state can ally itself with local actors in order to fight the PKK, as it requires self-employed locals to kill, torture, and outrage (Balta, 2004). The

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  143 village guard system traces back to the Ottoman Empire, and its roots lie in the Hamidiye Cavalry. It was used after the establishment of the Republic with the aim of policing and protecting Anatolian villages against bandits (Imset, 1992) but was disbanded by İsmet İnönü (a Kurd himself) as part of the reform of the feudal system and the modernisation of the region. Later, when the PKK began its armed struggle in 1984, Özal’s administration suggested reviving this model, claiming to ‘protect’ the country by drawing on local personnel to combat PKK militarism, and by April 1985 a temporary village guard system again was established in modern Turkey. By early 1996, the number in this paramilitary group described earlier was estimated to be 67,000 (Ibrahim and Gurbey, 2000) and by 2004, probably 80,000 (Balta, 2004). Romano (2006) argues it transformed the strategy of the Turkish army towards the PKK’s guerrilla tactics by using Kurdish tribes and their leadership, the tribal chiefs, in this project.11 The state started to search out local partners and to implement a new relationship between the state and Kurds against an ‘official enemy’. There were three main reasons why some tribes accepted this overture by the Turkish state. First, it was a good opportunity to gain state involvement and its institutions in the poor and isolated socio-economic conditions of the region as they offered financial rewards in return for the services; second, it was a way of dealing with the pressure from both the state and the PKK and a means of protecting themselves; and third, the internal dispute among these tribes forced them to take a side in the ‘war’. The arms and financial aid enabled the tribes to sustain their role in the region and to maintain a balance of power. It also meant that by finding common cause with the state they could resist the PKK’s aim, as a modernising force to remove the feudal structure which ensured the survival of the tribal structure. These guard tribes gained economic benefit in cross-border smuggling with the local government assistance and held legal impunity for their crimes (e.g. seizing the lands of the inhabitants) and violence (i.e. rape) (Balta, 2004). Importantly, the tribes and individuals of the village guard had a relationship with the state based on political and economic interests, rather than being assimilated or integrated, and could continue to follow their own traditional existence with only limited ties to other tribes. It was mostly a ‘business’ relationship of sorts with the characteristics of a ‘client–patron’ relation (Kirisci and Winrow, 1997; Romano, 2006). The state made its first bargain with the Jirki tribe in Adiyaman. However, it worked in different ways for each of the tribes; for instance, some tribes agreed to gain economic and political advantages, while for others, it offered a good opportunity to be recognised by state institutions after many years of being ignored (Imset, 1992). Additionally, having the support of an additional power compared to other tribes became very attractive for some aghas who could now assert their authority within local areas. They were more able to preserve the existing feudal structures against the PKK’s policy of modernisation. However, involvement with the state was not always voluntary, and sometimes the state forced aghas to be part of the system, giving an ultimatum to either ‘join

144  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere or leave’ (Aras, 2014; Orhan, 2016). The state organised meetings with aghas such as in Hakkari and Van in 1989 to encourage (or force) the tribes to become part of the system (Imset, 1992). Just as the state attempted to maintain and gain the support of tribes for the project, the PKK and social pressures exerted by their neighbourhoods were forcing these tribes to curtail their cooperation with the state. After the establishment of the system, the village guards, including their family members, became a priority target for the PKK,12 and some who realised that the war against the PKK could not be won withdrew from a voluntary or implicit mandate, reneging on the duty of being a village guard. Nevertheless, this reality does not undervalue these paramilitary groups as outlaws inflicting brutal violence on the region. By the 1999s many of the tribes had entered a ceasefire with the PKK due to a change of heart regarding the protracted conflict. Some reconciled with nationalist Kurdish politics, supported peace-building initiatives during 2013–15, and joined the HDP’s rainbow collation (Tekdemir, 2019).

Immobile, occasional, and integrated agents: Westernised and urbanised Kurds City-dweller Kurds provide another instance of the opportunist, pragmatist, and integrated sub-identity within Kurdish society. Their characteristics are shaped by two circumstances. Initially, for a ‘security’ reason, some tribes became the subject of the Ottoman Empire’s displacement policy. Later, a similar policy employed by the early Republic saw the Kurds (particularly, the leadership) from the region either internally displaced or deported. For both cases, the state represented the rebellions as an excuse for enhanced security, which changed the demography of the region, and dissolved Kurdish nationalism in its historical context. As a result, since the time of the Ottomans, many Kurdish tribes were displaced to different parts of Anatolia to be assimilated by the dominant Turkish culture. With the rise of the PKK and its military engagement, the Turkish state, as mentioned, undertook the policy of forced evacuations resulting in the displacement of a large number of Kurds moving mainly to the large metropolises of Turkey where they were expected to disappear within the vast expanses of the big cities and where the grind of everyday existence would distract from the Kurdish struggle (Jongerden, 2014; Saracoglu, 2010). A second projection saw Kurds assimilated or integrated within a Turkish cultural prevalence due to family ties (through marriage), by holding civil service positions, and via business relations (e.g. partnership or trade) and economic migration, which became modes of channelling the Turkification process. It is also important to mention that in the post-1950 period, with the expansion of industrialisation in Turkey around certain cities such as İstanbul, Bursa, İzmir, Adana, and Mersin, large numbers of Kurds migrated to these cities hopeful of attaining a better life and securing employment (Saracoglu, 2010) to escape prevailing armed conflict, violence, and internal colonial practices. In addition to forced migration (Kurban et al., 2008), such voluntary migration became an important contributory factor in the process leading to the loss of Kurdish identity.

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  145 Kurds, who underwent a much earlier forced migration, have undergone the loss of their collective memory. Overall, these Kurds, whom I termed as the ‘white Kurds’, generally benefit from state-originated opportunities, who easily access public management or receive business opportunities that make them a more advanced class compared to the nationalist and opponent Kurds (Cicek, 2017). These originally ethnic Kurds have taken up opportunities to become involved with the Turkish state and use regional connections (tribes or relatives) to further their position politically and economically and within the state bureaucracy. As the ‘white Kurds’, they occupy a number of different positions. For instance, some are politicians located in the big cities who retain strong ties with the Kurdish region, where their relationship with the state provides both political and economic rewards. Other Kurds remained in the Kurdish region but benefited from Turkification where they engaged in substantial economic, political, or institutional relations with the state. They are mostly businesspeople, members of business associations and NGOs, artists, academics, or bureaucrats. Such ‘integrated Kurds’ as highlighted earlier are defined more within an individual rather than an institutional context (Yavuz and Ozcan, 2006). Like the urbanised Kurds, they were largely either exiled or migrated to the western part of the country in response to political oppression and economic dependency. Most of them melted into Turkish society and culture, having no physical ties or only weak memories and limited relations with their roots and ancestors. Either by consent or the result of coercive policies, their Kurdishness has been transformed into Turkishness. Some of these Kurds have done what the state wanted them to. They have married Turks, or they have decided not to teach their children to speak Kurmanji, the Kurdish language that is most widespread in Turkey. They have taken their place in the mainstream Turkish economy and learned to enjoy Turkish food, pop music, and soap operas. In short, they have become the Turks that the state always insisted they were (de Bellaigue, 2007: 1).13 Most of these Kurds as individuals have found a place in right-wing, conservative, and Islamic-based political parties where such an engagement has provided an opportunity to participate in the public sphere. However, the Kurds’ response to the subsequent relocation to urban areas has not been uniform either politically or more specifically towards Kurdish nationalism. For some, their adoption into metropolitan life in the post-1984 period has been unsettled, rather than following establishment designs that Kurdish identity would diminish, instead their struggle for a decent life has kindled political activism and strengthened their cultural and political sense of belonging to a Kurdish nation (Saracoglu, 2010). Such experience of the city has been reinterpreted in a radical way seeing Turkish society and culture as the cause of difficulties due to their Kurdishness.

State-related regional NGOs: the GUNSİAD and KAMER Another group comprising opportunist, pragmatist, and integrated Kurds can be found in certain institutions in Kurdish civil society, which functions regionally for local Kurds but collaborates with the state or works with public institutions.

146  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere GÜNSİAD provides an example of this type of economic organisation, with lucrative ties to the state and its institutions (Cicek, 2017). While their position on Kurdish rights differs from the PKK and pro-Kurdish political parties, such as the BDP, they opposed the decision of the High Election Committee (YSK) in denying Hatip Dicle, who was elected as an MP for the BDP in the 2011 elections, to take up his seat. Another set of institutions such as KADER and KAMER centres on women’s rights’ movements and seeks to operate in both the Kurdish and Turkish public spheres. Having declared themselves against violence, they called on the PKK to cease its ongoing armed struggle. Both chairpersons, Çiğdem Aydın and Nebahat Akkoç, accepted the invitation from Prime Minister Erdoğan to attend the National Unity and Fraternity Project in 2010, as part of the ‘Kurdish opening’ project to seek solutions to the Kurdish question, where they were treated as spokespersons on regional issues by the state. Socio-political think tanks form yet another type of institution which maintains relations with the Turkish state. DİTAM, for example, is a research centre focussing on social issues. Here, the right to education in Kurdish is advocated, while simultaneously criticising the PKK’s armed struggle. Notably, all 45 NGOs, including the Islamic-oriented civil organisations, opposed violence in the region following Turkish military war plane bombardment of the borders between Turkey and Iraq causing the death of 34 civilians (the majority being children) in the village of Roboski (Uludere) in the Şırnak district.14 A joint declaration issued through the educational and cultural association AYDER called for a cessation of the armed struggle between the PKK and the Turkish military, with an emotional appeal to immediately stem the tears flowing from Kurdish and Turkish mothers. The NGOs discussed earlier exhibit positive relations with state institutions and are identified as ‘good Kurds’, in distinction to national Kurdish movements, namely the pro-Kurdish political parties and PKK, deemed ‘bad Kurds’. Access to state institutions denied to ‘other’ or ‘bad’ Kurds is afforded to these NGOs. There are also a few small and marginal shadow organisations having emerged as a result of the civil initiatives of the pro-Kurdish national movement during the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) – as Kurdish transnational political assemblies – operations (Seead, 2016). The Anatolian Peace Movement is included. It applies an Islamic discourse and contends that the only route to securing peace in the country is via a ceasefire instituted by the PKK and subsequent surrender of PKK fighters. It calls upon the PKK to renounce Zoroastrianism and take an oath to enter Islam. Furthermore, it suggested that the famous Diyarbakır Prison be converted into a mosque instead, a proposal by many Kurdish civil society organisations, for a museum that would contribute towards social peace in the country between the state and Kurdish society. The discussion of these sub-groups (Table 6.1) and their subordinate identities illustrate the multiplicity structure, diversity, and agonistic pluralism in the chain of equivalence of postmodern Kurdish society. This bloc politics reveals an internal hegemonic struggle surrounding the definition of Kurdish political identity, which prepared an environment to build the EU-ised Kurdishness in

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  147 discursive practice, particularly after the transformation of the leading Kurdish political figures in radical democracy.

Radical plural democracy on the EU-inspired agonistic ground (1999–2015) Turkey’s EU accession process constituted one of the main reasons for the development of Kurdo–Euro relations, along with the significant population of diaspora Kurds in Europe (Eccarius-Kelly, 2010; Baser, 2015; Keles, 2017). The process of the ‘EU-ising of Kurdi(sh)ness’15 was shaped by two different factors formed by both external and internal dynamics in relation to the postmodern Kurdish social structure. On the one hand, Turkish domestic political factors – liberal democratisation – began to impact on the transformation of Kurdish political identity (Tezcur, 2010), as the country’s political atmosphere changed from an authoritarian, militarist regime into a more civilian and liberal system which provided an opportunity for Kurds to enter the political sphere and influence Kurdish politics. On the other hand, the Kurdish political movement (represented by pro-Kurdish political parties and the PKK on illegal grounds) had also shifted its strategy, especially after the 1999s, as the EU-isation process developed; the latter became both promoted and challenged by the new context of Kurdish socio-political structure with its diverse sub-identities. The influence of the EU can be overstated regarding the neglect of the internal drivers for change and adaptation to the EU, as revealed in some of the literature (e.g. Tocci, 2011). According to Yilmaz (2017), Europeanisation is not a linear process that formed in EU conditionality. Afortiori, it is an interactive relation between internal actors and EU institutions. An argument exists that the transformation of Kurdish political identity and the EU-ising of Kurdishness did not solely derive from the EU but rather changes to Kurdish political identity emerged from the pressure exerted by domestic groups (their identity and agents have been discussed earlier in this chapter) (see Table 6.1) by providing space for democratic opportunities which were internally driven. Nonetheless, the impact of external factors cannot be ignored. This started with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War era and later via the development of political radical Islamist groups antagonistic to the West, such as AlQaeda, whose violent actions led to many civilian deaths. These developments encouraged Kurdish political actors to search for non-violent methods and legitimate channels to resolve conflict, as their contemporaries in the IRA in Northern Ireland and ETA in Spain had previously secured. While recognising the central importance of internal developments in the Kurdish political sphere, an important external factor was Turkey’s EU accession process, the main trigger for the EUisation of Kurdishness. European norms and values as embodied in the Copenhagen criteria were perceived as symbols of liberty, welfare, and hope in both Kurdish and Turkish society (Muftuler-Bac, 2014; Yildiz, 2005). In line with these values, the Kurdish understanding of politics evolved from a radical Marxist tradition into one that

148  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere embraced more liberal socialist (post-Marxist) democratic standards based on give and take. The conditions demanded by the EU required the democratisation of Turkey which, particularly since 1999, resulted in the expansion of democratic freedoms in Turkey, and in which the recognition of Kurdish rights was explicitly stated. This led in turn to the development of a democratic Kurdish identity as a challenge to the hegemonic power of the PKK and its political identity that was forced to widen and expand via the concept of ‘many forms of Kurdishness’ in EU-ising rhetoric. As in the past, the institutionalisation of democracy in Turkey has always been due to external influences, and thus, the accommodation of Kurdish demands, however limited, was due to external pressure above and beyond the social, political, and military pressure exerted by the Kurds themselves. In reflecting on this EU leverage, Gunter (1997: 101) in relation to the Kurdish diaspora emphasises that: This new strategy developed by the Kurdish diaspora has sometimes been termed the ‘Europeanisation’ of the Kurdish movement. Europeanisation consists of the development and use of a Kurdish network in Europe whose aim is to promote Kurdish rights in Turkey through the European supranational system. The means available are exclusively democratic: petitions, demonstrations, lobbying, and political representation. In the past, the demands by Kurds for basic rights resulted in denial and brutality in terms of the ‘Sèvres Syndrome’, which is a popular conspiracy which infers that Turkey is surrounded by internal (e.g. Kurds and Armenians) and external enemies, especially the West, who will divide the country. However, the EU accession process and the EU institutions moderated the country’s legal, political, and cultural environment to become more harmonised with European liberal and universal values (Muftuler-Bac, 2014). Turkey–EU relations had always been complicated since Turkey applied to join the European Economic Commission through the 1963 Ankara Agreement, but the December 2004 Brussels summit was a big step for the country in accession procedures as it opened membership negotiations for Turkey (Kaliber and Aydin-Duzgit, 2017). This also created a positive atmosphere and hope for the possibility of opening dialogue between two traditional opponents, the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement, to reach a peaceful resolution on long-standing issues (Tocci, 2011). The European accession and enlargement process found a place in the Kurdish political realm as part of the democratisation of the Kurdish political movement within a radical approach (Tezcur, 2010), whereby, the PKK declared a number of unilateral ceasefires (in 1995, 1998, or 1999) in a search for political reconciliation (Gunes, 2012). This restoration process formed within an EU-ising political project opened opportunities for more sub-identities to be represented in hegemonic Kurdishness by expanding the parameters of political identity, especially after 1999. In this context, Moustakis and Chaudhuri (2005: 84–85) contend

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  149 that “under the auspices of the EU, the path to westernisation and modernisation would include the Southeast, which is bound to benefit from increased and that could integrate the Kurdish population of the Southeast with the rest of Turkey”. Hopes were high that as a result of the EU accession process armed conflict would cease, dialogue would open, and a peaceful resolution that ensured democratic freedoms such as freedom of thought and freedom of expression, minority and cultural rights and social justice would follow (Tekdemir, 2016). Moustakis and Chaudhuri (2005) asked how the EU could provide the ‘Turkish Kurds’ with legal recognition and a safer living environment, to which the answer was the application of the Copenhagen criteria, which states that a condition of EU membership requires that the candidate country achieve justice, political stability, and democracy. In response to the Copenhagen criteria and in an attempt to exhibit the state’s capacity for amending its poor human rights records, Turkey adopted 143 new laws and developed the short-lived ‘Kurdish Opening’ in 2009. The EU-isation process and Europragmatism (using the EU as an opportunity space) offered new political opportunities for Kurdish national politics through supranational institutions such as the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the Council of Europe, and the European Court of Human Rights (Yilmaz, 2017). The EU encouraged the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) to transform the political and legal system to meet the Copenhagen criteria by adopting reform packages that incorporate laws consistent with democratic rights, even though some, mainly the Kemalist faction, were not eager to support such reforms. The EU also set conditions for the Kurds to consider replacing their methods with more democratic ones and to put pressure on the Kurdish armed forces to stop the ongoing war by declaring a unilateral ceasefire in order to further influence the democratisation of Turkey (Turan, 2015). In this respect, the PKK took a number of steps in initiating a peace process (Ozpek, 2018) by calling on the government to allow a greater involvement in the country’s political life. In the transformation of the PKK (Jongerden and Akkaya, 2017; Saaed, 2016), the EU must be considered as an external political force. EU and Kurdish relations were now considered within the framework of the EU’s ongoing criticism of Turkey’s social, political, and cultural stance with regards to the Kurds and the necessity to acknowledge Kurdish ethnicity and human rights (McDonald and O’Leary, 2007). The EU involvement increased significantly after 200216 when compared with the 1990s, which also caused the state institutions to become engaged in a more democratic manner with Kurdish issues.17 Consequently, the EU was a significant influence on the AKP government during this period (see 2008–2009–2010 EU Progress Reports; European Parliament and the Council, from 1998 to 2012) until the 2011 general election. The EU simultaneously urged the pro-Kurdish party, the DTP (later the BDP), and all its elected members to distance themselves clearly from the PKK, while appealing to all parties to contribute to a peaceful solution that would enhance the stability, prosperity, and integrity of the Turkish state (see 2008 EU Progress Report; European Parliament and the Council, from 1998 to 2012).

150  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere These messages directly emanating from the EU forced the leading Kurdish national movement to change their methods and approach to the struggle as some managed to engage directly with EU institutions. In this respect, along with the redefined Kurdish identity, the demands of Kurdish society changed from seeking an ‘independent Kurdish nation’ to seeking a common constitutional (radical) citizenship (see Mouffe, 2013). Along with the macro level reforms required by the EU accession process, symbolic peace groups were sent in 2009. Demands for more democratic rights for Kurds within the Republic of Turkey, together with the release of imprisoned PKK members and Abdullah Öcalan were made. European Kurds also had a direct and effective impact on the Kurdish movement in Turkey (Eccarius-Kelly, 2010), and their efforts included diplomatic lobbying in the EU and raising awareness on the international scene. To summarise, the EU as a multilateral superstructure endeavoured to build a relationship between the Turkish state and the Kurds, influencing Kurdish policy towards the adoption of European values that impacted both Turkish and Kurdish society (see 2011 and 2012 Reports). Thus, before the involvement of the EU until the mid-2000s, it “was rare that people would publicly refer to ‘Kurds’ in reference to an ethnic group in Turkey” (Somer, 2004: 246) in public–political discourse. Kurdish movements obtained formal political representation in the TBMM as pro-Kurdish political parties and, as a result, remained the most active and prominent in their demands for rights within Turkey’s EU accession process. This formed part of a more general move towards adopting the Copenhagen criteria. For instance, the 2010 EU report on Turkey cites that EU financial support was provided for the development of civil society under the ‘Civil Society Facility’ to enhance the effectiveness of civil society organisations (Kaliber and AydinDuzgit, 2017). Initially, the Kurdish leadership also took part in this process and effectively utilised the civil society organisation in their democratic struggle. In addition, technical assistance was provided to the Turkish administration to promote good governance in support of active citizenship. More recently, the EU has shown an uncertain relationship with the Kurds and its role in furthering the transformation of relations between the Kurdish leadership and the state. European bureaucrats have frequently visited Diyarbakır, perhaps more often than they visit Ankara, although nationalist Kurds remain critical of the EU. Predominantly, pro-Kurdish political parties (like the BDP, DTP) and politicians have demanded collective rights that go beyond the EU’s neoliberal concept of individual rights. Turkey’s observed strategy to become a regional leader in the Middle East and also the AKP’s self-confidence after winning several elections, along with recent events in the area (e.g. the Syrian civil war), has resulted in a ‘slowing down’, if not cessation, of the EU process.

Radical democracy in different concepts and experiments Kurdish politics is influenced by the Öcalan’s (2012) new theoretical account that refers to a radical democracy and conceptualised within democratic autonomy (including a democratic republic and democratic confederalism), as a ‘strategic

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  151 dispositif’ (Akkaya and Jongerden, 2012) for self-determination, and a council democracy project (Jongerden and Akkaya, 2016). With respect to the abovementioned factors, the Kurdish national/liberation movement’s complex structure was divided, and the implementation of radical democracy split into two different methods and geopolitics: On the one hand the radical democracy project is practised in Turkey by two main actors in different interpretations. At the end of the 2010s, radical democracy as a democratic autonomy project was implemented by the PKK/KCK (Saeed, 2016) based on a local democracy (Jongerden and Akkaya, 2016) in autonomy or municipality forms by tackling the government’s authority. The PKK/KCK used violence as an instrument for the realisation of the project (Akkaya and Jongerden, 2012), which was harshly suppressed by the government because of the threat to its territorial sovereignty in the end of 2015. However, for the other stakeholder, the HDP’s radical democracy implication operated in a passive way, which was through renovation instead of a revolution, and formed within parliamentarian politics (Tekdemir, 2019). This appears more along the lines of Mouffe’s (2013) concept of an agonistic approach (what can be termed a ‘non-otherising democracy’) that generally means the radical transformation of liberal democracy towards socialist values. The political is formulised and promoted by the HDP, especially after the Gezi demonstration in Taksim square (June 2013) in Istanbul (Goksel and Tekdemir, 2018). The HDP can be defined as a Kurdish-led and left-leaning populist party rather than pro-Kurdish. The HDP established a great collation among Kurds (such as white Kurds, Muslim Kurds) and between Kurds and other progressive democratic movements (ecologists, feminists, leftists, LGBT community, or non-Muslims, Alevis) (Tekdemir, 2018). The HDP’s left-wing populism seeks to engage with the democratic institutions in order to transform them radically (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). It aims to create inclusiveness and representative democracy, which is formed in hope and within a pluralist discourse, such as a capital “WE’re”, Turkeyfication, great humanity, and new life as well as on a democratic bloc without essentialising a particular identity, which was constituted by transformation of antagonistic enemy relations into agonistic adversarial ones (Tekdemir, 2016). On the other hand, since the civil war in 2012, PYD’s revolution implemented radical democracy in Öcalan’s direct ‘stateless democracy’ (Dirik, 2018) by establishing a canton regime within the context of democratic autonomy (Öcalan, 2017) in Rojava/northern Syria. This implementation has been shaped within Hardt and Negri’s (2017) strategy of withdrawal from (exodus) the existing system and capitalist economy through revolution and building a presenting democracy within active multitudes, in gender equality, ecology, and communal economy. PYD’s project goes beyond the representation in popular sovereignty, geopolitics, and assembly (Knapp et al., 2016).

Conclusion Transformation of Öcalan’s intellectual formation, with the PKK’s institutional framework on the Kurdish question, having an EU-originated opportunity space,

152  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere emerging of the HDP and starting of the peace process between 2013 and 2015 all together provided a symbolic democratic ground for the various Kurdish groups to raise their voice in the public sphere. With this internal democratisation, development of a new conceptual bridge appeared, and the Kurdish political discourse, which was a variation of classic orthodox-Marxist form, shifted into a post-­Marxist radical plural democratic project. The transformation of political discourse has affected bilateral angles, and the EU-isation of Kurdishness rhetoric has been shaped by predominantly internal dynamics in the context of new post-modern social structures. Distinctive internal sub-identities and approaches within their tactics emerged into complex identity politics. These were launched to dispute the limitation of Kurdish identity on Kurdish politics and challenge the PKK’s policy and methodology. This chapter, along with the contribution of the previous chapter, argued that internal actors challenged the existing narrow definition of Kurdis demos by widening and deepening its political frontiers (‘we’) through the democratisation of the Kurdish national movement which were identified with the EU-ising rhetoric. The questions about the ultimate status of both social reality and knowledge of Kurdish political initiatives are raised when concerned with and analysing the social construction of identity processes, within the triangular concepts of substructure (agent), structure (state), and superstructure (EU) relations. While the PKK’s discursive transition aims to build a chain of equivalence as an alliance of the various popular forces in signifying democracy and constitutes a plural society to foster democratisation in a radical (socialist) sense. Contemporary Kurdish identity, which has already dominated society, was challenged by various adversary sub-groups that seek to rearticulate hegemony with a new antagonism and redefine the meaning of modern Kurdish identity in a political sphere. Each actor has a distinctive methodology and understanding of the struggle and strategies in expressing Kurdishness. This chapter discussed and demonstrated two main alternative identities with their conceptual groups by drawing a cognitive map through considering their ability to use opportunity space in the public sphere. The nature of these identities is derived and defined from their ideology, discourses, and political behaviours, which have reacted to the policy of the state on Kurdishness in different methods. It is within face-to-face interaction between members of society that created its own groups as strong or weak, majority or minority. All these agencies have employed different tactics and strategies on the context of identity, within various meanings, hermeneutics, understanding, reading, and discourses. These subidentities mostly eliminate the outsider’s hegemonic interpretation and continue to construct new antagonisms. Their existence is transforming the liberal understanding of antagonistic friend/enemy (we/them) dichotomy into agonistic adversary relations that are based on ethical political principles and offer equality and liberty for all despite their religious, linguistic, socio-economic, and geographical differentiation. In analysing the Kurdish socio-political agents, the process of EU-isation was witnessed, as one of the external soft powers and positive determiners, which has

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  153 impacted the transformation of Kurdish political identity, discourse, and culture, via providing opportunity spaces in political (state) and public (civil) spheres. Post-2015, Turkey’s relationship and progression with the EU have slowed, and, thus, the positive impact of the EU is lessening in macro/Turkish and micro/Kurdish political life. The HDP’s inclusive left-wing populism is expanding Kurdish politics and inspired by recent developments in the new Middle East (namely the political gains in Syria and Iraq by the Kurds). The Kurdish progress in the region leads this new political discourse and replaces the soft and symbolic impact of the EU (Kaliber and Aydin-Duzgit, 2017). This chapter’s aim was not to focus on European identity per se, which can perhaps explain the conceptual division between Europeanisation and EU-isation. As Europeanisation is a mostly social constructivist process for European society, it is already constructed through European social reality, values, cultures, and knowledge and is simultaneously legitimated by internal European actors and society. A proposal here is to employ EU-isation as rhetoric and a political construction process, which occurred via transformation of the Kurdish political movement. EU-isation discursive practice that requires convergence in democratic values benefited from the country’s EU accession process and much rather by institutional politics to unite peripheral Europe with central Europe, as it is based on strategic, security, energy, economic, and political interests (such as the migration negotiation between the Erdoğan’s government and the EU). Non-European countries also voluntarily adopt EU legal, democratic, and liberal values without having an EU-push and conditionality in order to engage with the EU. It is a political constructivist project and process of commodification of Europeanism, which at the same time constitutes contrary identities (European or from the EU) for Europe through essentialisation of multiple-modernities and different approaches towards European politics. As a result of the factors cited before, the new Kurdishness became a nodal point for all stakeholders of the hegemonic identity that was denoted by EUisation signifiers within liberal, democratic values, but with the motivation of transformation via radical (democratic socialist) principles as the naturalisation of hegemony (passive revolution). The rearrangement of Kurdish culture and discourse cannot be explained only by the EU impact, despite crucially providing new opportunity spaces. Consequently, when the term EU-isation is applied to Kurdishness, it implies that Kurds are not becoming European themselves, but their political culture and institutions are being influenced by the EU’s liberal democratic values. Eventually, the new social and political spaces are emerging after the country’s desire to join the EU, relaxing of state control on Kurdish identity, and seeking of Kurdish agents to expand the limitations of the public sphere via constructing counter-political and social spheres. On the other hand, Kurdish Muslims and white Kurds achieved certain opportunity spaces through EU institutions (NGOs, Copenhagen criteria etc.), local government (mayors), parliamentarian powers (MPs), diaspora (lobby functions, financial support), intellectuals (dynamic

154  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere power, networks, communication), and media (TV, newspapers, and internet/ social media), which play an important role in the trajectory of Kurdish political identity. Such internal direct engagement helps these actors to construct their own reading of democracy as well, which can be called a non-otherising democracy in an agonistic debate on the radical version of democracy. Relations between Kurdish political agents and the Turkish structure again reached a watershed in the post-2015 period. Seemingly, the Turkish government has returned to its security policy on the Kurdish issue, which may be attributable to a slowing down in the EU-accession process. Pro-Kurdish actors argue that the new hegemonic actor, the AKP, which has assembled religious, nationalist, and capitalist values, has also begun to implement the ‘AKP-isation of the Kurdish issue’ through using Turkish Islamic values in a ‘new Turkey’ rhetoric which lies within a neo-Ottomanism in the international arena, despite the conflict resolution process that started with the Oslo Negotiations in 2009 and resulted in the Dolmabahçe Agreement in 2015. It seems that at the time of writing the cycle of violence has resumed (Ozpek, 2018). Ironically, this archaic method has been practised by Kemalist coterie since the Republic was established, which has denied Kurdish reality and forced Kurdishness to be embodied in a state definition and simultaneously marginalised Kurdish democratic rights. This is not a long-term reconciliation plan for the Kurdish question.

Notes 1 The author’s translation. 2 Hizbullah adopted the PKK’s discourse by also using the same terminology for the geographical areas of Kurdistan, defining the East and Southeast part of Turkey as North Kurdistan. “The Hizbullah, in its new manifesto, rejects denial, assimilation and the oppressive policy towards the Kurdish people and states that it will stand against and resist it; moreover, it will fight with its all ability. Hizbullah considers the Kurdish issue in terms of an Islamic worldview, thus the solution is also offered within an Islamic value system which determines its method of struggle too [. . .] The Hizbullah congregation is prepared to discuss any options for solutions such as a constitutional offer or autonomy, federation and independence which can guarantee the Islamic and human rights of Kurdish people. It will at the same time struggle for the Kurdish language to become an official language in public institutions and in education, moreover to be used in every part of the public sphere to serve the Kurdish people [. . .] Hizbullah believes that the Islamic states, congregations and groups, who hold the same aims and targets should be assembled to create a league together, combining their forces for the same goal [. . .] Hizbullah does not see any necessity to struggle with any other congregation, institution, group, party and political organisation, no matter their ideology and belief, unless they are attacked as is their right to legitimate self-defence [this latter is in reference to the PKK-BDP]” (my translation), available at: www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=R adikalDetayV3&ArticleID=1076008&CategoryID=77. Access date: [18 January 2012]. 3 According to Nursi, “the language was an important determinant of human fate (İnsanda kaderin sikkesi lisandır), thus he wanted to establish a university, Medresetul Zehra, to improve the level of education provided to the Kurdish people. At this university, three languages were to be used: Arabic was obligatory (vacip), Kurdish was permissible (caiz), and Turkish was necessary (lazım)” (Atacan 2001: 126–127).

Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere  155 4 “Med-Zehra believes that every ethnic group should have its own state and these states, in turn, should form an Islamic federation. This approach would ultimately lead to some changes in the existing borders of Turkey by establishing a Kurdish Islamic Republic” (Atacan, 2001: 125). Through citing Said-i Nursi, Seyhanzade points out, “we can neither accept nor reject the current regime. Rejection requires power that we do not yet have. Thus, Islamic scholars agree that if conditions are not ripe, that is, if one does not have power, action cannot be taken. If one acts from a powerless position, a major suppression of Muslims may result, which could block future development of the Islamic movement” (Atacan, 2001: 121). 5 As a result, İzzettin Yıldırım and his comrade Şehid Avcı were kidnapped in Istanbul on 29 December 1999, and their tortured bodies were found on 28 January 2000. Hizbullah was blamed for this harsh slaughter as proved by the video recordings of the torture when Velioğlu was killed in clashes with police in Istanbul. 6 See www.uludereicinadalet.com/index.php?s=2. 7 Prominent Islamic intellectuals use international discourses in an Islamic context, Daily Zaman, 1 March 2012 “28 Şubat, Erbakan ve Cemaatler” (28 February, Erbakan and Jammats) available at: www.zaman.com.tr/yazar.do?yazino=1252892&title= 28-subat-erbakan-ve-cemaatler. Access date: [01 March 2012]. 8 For instance, “one reader of Dava, a teacher from Batman, wrote that there were two groups of Muslims in Turkey. The first was composed of Turkish Muslims who were racist and imperialist; this group made up about 95 per cent of the population. The second group comprised Kurds. The author believed that, unfortunately, 95 per cent of Kurds had no national consciousness and thus were likely to imitate Turks and treat them well. These Kurds had the ‘soul of slaves’ and could easily betray their own people” (Atacan, 2001: 135). 9 Aydinli and Ozcan (2011: 447) identified “Turkey’s Kurds, three general groupings can – albeit with some inevitable overlap: 1) Integrated Kurds; 2) Islamist Kurds; and 3) Active Ethnic=Separatist Kurds”. 10 He defines the nation as “a society consisting of people who speak the same language, have had the same education and reunited in their religious, moral and aesthetic ideals – in short, those who have a common culture and religion” (Heyd, 1950: 63). 11 Such as Alan, Jirki, Gevdan, Giravyn, Goyan, Helilan, Izdinan, Mengelan, Mukusan, Pinyanish, Shidan, Zevkan, etc. (Imset, 1992). 12 The non-professional ordinary Kurdish tribe men could not really successfully protect the state structure against professional modern guerrilla warfare in Kurdish areas. According to McDowall (2000: 423), “as a result the security forces found themselves having to provide protection to the village guards and during 1987 it seemed the PKK would destroy the system as enrolment dropped from 20,000 to 6,000”. 13 Houston (2001) also points out this context in an interview with Mehmet Pamak, one of the ex-leaders of MHP, a very radical, extremist, ultra-nationalist party. Mehmet tells how his family originally came from the provinces of Van, a Kurdish region, and were exiled to the west in Çanakkale during the Zilan massacre explaining how he and his family were badly treated by locals (calling them ‘Kurds with tails’) when they immigrated to the city. He was later to become a Turkish nationalist but is not anymore (probably because he no longer feels threatened). The Zilan massacre happened during the Ararat (Ağrı) Rebellion in the 1930s when many Kurds, including children, women, and the elderly, were killed in an army operation in the Zilan Valley located in the Erciş district of Van. According to the Kemalist daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, 15,000 people were killed, while other reports claim that 47,000 people died. 14 Signed by Anadolu Gençlik, Ay-Der, Bayındır Memur-Sen, Bem-Bir-Sen, Birlik-HaberSen, Buro Memur Sen, Cami-Der, Çarıklı Derneği, Diyarbakır İnsani Yardım Derneği, Dem-Der, Dicle Fırat Diyalog Grubu, Din-Bir-Sen, Diyanet-Sen, Doğu Batı Kardeşlik Platformu, Eğitim-Bir-Sen, Enerji-Bir-Sen, Gönül Köprüsü Derneği,

156  Alternative discourse in the ‘EU-ised’ sphere Hayat-Der, Hizmet-Der, Hür-Der, İslah-Der, İhvan-Der, İkra-Der, İlim-Der, İmam Hatip Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma-Der, İnsan ve Erdem, İşad-Der, Köy-Der, MemurSen, Mustazaf-Der, Ög-Der, Özgür-Der, Özgür-Eğitim-Sen, Sağlık-Sen, Sahabe-Der, Sek-Der, Şafak-Der, Şefkat-Der, Sura-Der, Toc-Bir-Sen, Ulaştırma Memur-Sen, Yeni İhya-Der, Yetim-Der, Ufuk-Der, and Yusufi-Der. 15 As I mentioned before that the term means adopting the EU’s institutional values, such as democracy, human rights, liberalism, and secularism, instead of becoming European or culturally Europeanising. This transformation is also a product of the EU enlargement/accession process. 16 AKP formed the first government that was compatible with liberal values. 17 For example, establishing the state TV channel TRT 6 (Şeş in Kurdish) that broadcasts in Kurdish and allowing universities to use Kurdish in higher education in certain circumstances. The University of Mardin Artuklu opened an undergraduate programme in the Kurdish language and literature, and some, mostly private universities (e.g. the University of Bilgi), provided elective language courses. These initiatives created opportunities for the AKP government to gain some sympathy from Kurds as noteworthy concessions.

8 A Kurdish model Embeddedness, radical democracy, and populism

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

Kahlil Gibran

Conceptualising the theoretical formulation within Kurdish experience The Kurds have been identified as the largest ethnic population (approximately numbering 30–40 million) in the world without a nation-state. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the WWI, the Kurds came to live within the new boundaries of the Sykes–Picot agreement, thereby, separated by four nation-states, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran (General, 1919; Randal, 1998). Today, the largest Kurdish population lives in modern Turkey, numbering an estimated 20 million. In the twentieth century, the politics of identity and the demands for their own nation- state have been part of the social, political, and economic life of Kurdish society and of the nation-states where they have resided. The nationalist, oppressive, and assimilative regimes of the Middle East have attempted to create ‘imaginary communities’ based on monist–ethnic cultures. This book has analysed the foundation of Kurdish political economy and trajectory of political identity and discourse while highlighting the emergence of contemporary political Kurdishness. It offered a model which is based on historical social, political, and economic progress. The Kurdish model has been impacted by various internal and external elements such as Turkey’s process of the EU accession (now stalled), the emergence of the AKP, the country’s changing role as a regional power (the Syrian civil war has changed this perception), and the emerging power of the Kurds in the ‘new’ Middle East (Tugdar and Al, 2018). In the twentieth century, the Kurdish national struggle was shaped by its reaction to the central power of the young Turkey that produced and imposed narrowly defined citizenship by excluding and negating a separate Kurdish identity, which has continued to the present with identity construction being open-ended. Contemporary identity politics emerged through antagonism and hegemonic articulation between various internal actors, as a result of the opportunity spaces available in the public sphere due to the democratisation of the Kurdish national movement.

158  A Kurdish model This work contends that the transformation of Kurdish political economy and identity became a central and ongoing issue of the Kurdish question. It asserts that such a transformation requires a multi-theoretical approach to aid an understanding, and, thus, this research has drawn on three main theories of Polanyi, Gramsci, and Bergerian and Luckmannian social constructivist approach within a poststructualist scope. The book examines the role of internal forces in the form of socio-political agents both in advancing the renovation of Kurdish society and in the process of (re)constructing its political identity and discursive practice within a changing social and economic setting. It explores the developments related to the political economy in recent Kurdish history by locating a hybrid theoretical framework mentioned earlier. To this end, the empirical chapters stand as a case study informed by theoretical perspectives to provide a critical discussion on the trajectories of the Kurdish political economy and political identity. It is the aim of this concluding chapter to assess the notionally informed nature of the research by engaging with the identified theoretical frameworks as a contribution to theoretical approaches in Kurdish studies which hitherto have remained rather scarce. This chapter filters the arguments and accounts given in the empirical chapters through a synthesis of theories, regardless of how these theories might differ in terms of their respective ideological positions, as an effective way of comprehending Kurdish reality. Each of these theories offers an insight into understanding the social and political issues that have shaped the Kurdish model. Indeed, the research integrates and is driven by these three theoretical accounts, each applied to the three particular historical cases, rather than imposing one particular theoretical framework on the material with the forlorn hope of understanding the dynamic nature of Kurdish question in terms of a single overarching grand narrative. In order to understand the developments in the Kurdish model, we have looked at the premodern, modern, advanced-modern, and postmodern era – with two pillars, political and economic – of Kurdish history, each case explained from a particular theoretical perspective. What remains constant within each of the three main historical episodes is the Kurdish struggle against an external power in order to preserve their identity, culture, and power, although different strategies are employed to achieve this which differ in each period, where the emergence of new actors and politics happen. This tripartite formulation is supported theoretically by: (1) reference to Polanyi’s notion of the great transformation in examining the premodern period of the nineteenth century; while (2) Gramsci’s concept of hegemony lends weight to the analysis of the modern period, particularly between 1923 and 1984; and (3) the social constructivist approach, along with an agonistic debate on democracy, pluralism, citizenship, and conflict, evaluates the concept of identity formation in the postmodern time of Kurdish1 society from 1984 onwards. From this analysis, each of the three historical periods differs greatly in terms of their content and actors, although, taken together, they plot the transformation of Kurdish political identity in relation to the changing political economy of the centre from the Empire to the Republic that itself influenced Kurdish cultural

A Kurdish model  159 political economy. The use of only one theory would fail to provide a nuanced assessment of the different stages of the reformation and transformation of political identity. While this does not necessarily mean that the theories can smoothly combine with each other, there are sufficient common links between them so that each can help our understanding of the historical turning points within a changing dynamic of society. The following sections explain how each of the theoretical frameworks aids an understanding of the changing nature of society, its formation, and constituents in a historical context with further critical reflection on the material presented in the research narrative.

Social protectionism versus market economy: preserving the Kurdish legacy To recognise the transformation that took place in Kurdish society and the emergence of a new relation with the state, it is essential to look back at history with special reference to the centralisation politics and marketisation economy during the late Empire era (as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3). This period also identifies why Kurdish society did not follow the linear development found in many nineteenthcentury societies. The transformation of Kurdish political economy and its related contemporary movements are entwined with the Ottoman’s macroeconomy. The Kurdish micro formation was affected by the reform projects whereby the Empire went through a self-regulating market economy with the enforcement of international capital. It was necessary to examine the imperial structure and explore its relationship to the peripheral area, namely Ottoman Kurdistan, to identify the top-down and bottom-up manner of the political economy. The Ottoman’s social, political, and economic structures must be considered as pivotal and decisive factors in revealing the emergent impact of the new self-regulating market economy on Kurdish society, while the resistance of the non-economic institutions was shaped in a moral economy. By the nineteenth century, the Ottoman’s traditionally based regime had turned into a modern, semi-secular millet system. During the westernisation of the imperial structure through Tanzimat and other reform processes, new local actors of regional governance emerged, such as the ayan, pasha, kaimakam, resulting in a new political economy and governance. These new agents, with the assistance of international capital, transformed the sultanic absolute political power and agricultural political economy into one based on liberal market economy principles. This new political economy system replaced the traditional tımar (yurtlukocaklık) order. Indeed, the tımar had been a key unit of fiscal policy and a political tool that enabled the state to penetrate the modes of production and the distribution of surplus within the Empire. In a development of a market (in surplus cash crops) the ordinary peasants and farmers became a semi-labouring class alongside an emerging new type of bourgeois class (i.e. the notable – eşraf – families, begs, big landowners – çiftliks) who became semi-independent by gaining political power. This action

160  A Kurdish model had ramifications throughout the political system and was followed by the rise of the monarchic constitutional regime of the CUP during the period from the declaration of the first constitution in 1876 and the second in 1908 (Ahmad, 1969). Consequently, the combination of this progress with the development of new institutions in the social, political, and economic spheres (to create an entirely new political economy in effect) had a direct impact on the relationship between the state and its subjects and between subjects themselves. With the centre’s aim of convergence in the new international political economy, traditional Kurdish agricultural structures that formed in a cultural mode of production were forced to integrate into the developing international capitalist system. Polanyi proposes an insight as it offers an institutional and moral view of world history which is relevant to both Ottoman and Kurdish history. The rise of the selfregulating market economy and emerging of market-based society demolished the moral values of nineteenth-century traditional society by disembedding the economy from daily life. This commodification and new income-based economic system clashed with the social relations as people used to govern by the principles of embeddedness, reciprocity, redistribution, and the household economy. Here, social rather than economic formations were primarily with the former as determinants. These principles of a moral economy were further embedded in the social and political relations of a particular social formation that was developed through a historical context within a specific society. The Polanyian account provided an analytical tool to understand why internal dynamics could not follow the linear process of industrialisation and institutionalism that was so successfully developed in Western societies, and, to a degree, this indicates the reason for Kurdish uneven development. The loyalty of society to their historical and traditional social formation hindered the linear transformation of their society into a market economy despite the efforts of the Young Turks who had managed to force the centre to evolve towards a self-regulating market economy. The Polanyian framework also permits an inquiry into the role of the leadership in this process and its perceived failures and, furthermore, helps to understand the consequences of the ‘great regression’ of society, rather than its great transformation. In the nineteenth century, Kurdish society did not complete the transformation process, and therefore retaining the economy within social relations did not occur. The Kurdish political economy in this period appeared as non-modern, non-industrialised, and little organised; moreover, it represented a pre-capitalist mode of production in its ancient, tribal, semi-feudal, and religious nature. Attachment to such a moral economy structure in the form of traditional political identity could not provide a base for the transformation of the Kurdish political economy. Through analysis and understanding of cultural modes of production, history, response, and struggle, it can be seen how the process of transformation and linear modernisation could not have taken place within this context. The author has explored the role of non-economic institutions and political leadership of society as local factors – within the much broader context of this

A Kurdish model  161 period of upheaval in the Middle East – which prevented the linear transformation of Kurdish society into a market society of the time. Within this Polanyian framework, it is not argued that the problem was simply due to marketisation, as the market mechanism (as opposed to the market system being a signifier) has always existed, rather my claim that the transformation entails is that the economy itself becomes separated from social life, and thus from its morality, resulting in the commercialisation of nature, labour, and money, as fictitious commodities, even though it is against their intrinsic characteristics. With the rapid emergence of this economic paradigm of the market economy, the economy no longer worked as it had always done in the past in an embedded manner, and instead disembeddedness had become the defining nature of the new political economy without natural process. Kurdish society retained their traditional norms to maintain an economy embedded in social relations while the rest of the Empire was rapidly adopting a new political economy based on the Western experience. The notion of moral economy emerged within society, one which was embedded in tribal and religious values, through its leadership composed of traditional (mîr and agha) or religious (sheikh, sayyid, and melle and dede) agents. This counter-political economy system predominantly was a moral one with economic, social, political, and religious relations all embedded in non-economic institutions. The profit motive was not so important for most of the tribal society because their economic behaviour was grounded in both the cultural realm and religious spirituality. Consequently, self-sufficiency was the dominant economic characteristic based on the household, sustained through endogamous marriage, and economic behaviour was different from that exhibited in a capitalist society since individual motivation did rely on notions of personal gain and on the expectation of a reciprocal quid pro quo in terms of honour, reputation, gift giving (xelat), kinship, and the solidarity of the tribal cultural economy. For this reason, the structure of society remained static and traditional with any aim of progress held within the bounds of the normative world of its moral compass. An examination of Kurdish society of the time shows that it was built on tribal and religious values, making the maintenance of social ties crucial for the survival of such a kinship-oriented society. As seen in Chapter 3, the society’s identity was expressed through the pre-capitalist social forms of this particular era which by their very nature could not correspond to a market-based economy.2 Adopting Polanyi’s definition of a traditional society, we can observe that the political economy of Kurdish society was in the nineteenth century mainly a redistributive, reciprocity-based moral economy with an emphasis on household functions strongly influenced by feudal/tribal and Islamic/Sufi aspects and, as such, did not willingly try to produce a great transformation of its own. It is also essential to note that following Polanyi, such a traditional social formation and political economy were dependent on the centricity of social morality, symmetry, and self-sufficiency. Subsequently, Kurdish emirates’ political–economic behaviour was grounded on these traditional and cultural realities (Eppel, 2016). At the societal level, this political economy was constituted by tribes in terms of

162  A Kurdish model kinship-oriented power and the influence of sheikhs (as part of a religious order), which provided the religious legitimacy for the tribal leader as the relationship between the agha and his subjects, and that between the sheikh and his followers, was based on social–tribal and religious norms. The relationship was not oriented economically or through self-interest as there was no economic expectation for the economy, which was not monetised/ financialised or tilted towards profit. The social order subordinated economic relations and operated in a collective and non-competitive context which was more important than economic interests. Further, there was no organised market, and ownership was not of a capitalistic nature. With the involvement of the state in regional affairs through its centralisation and marketisation policies, this organic unity was dissolved and economic behaviour disembedded from the traditional fabric within, notably, against their nature. This intervention caused what Polanyi refers to as a double movement when the Ottomans pushed the Kurdish authentic economy towards marketisation that simultaneously created resistance in social protectionism. This confrontation led by the traditional and religious leaders had prevented the society transforming into a sustained market economy, as the society wanted to maintain a system of redistribution, reciprocity, and decommoditisation by re-embedding economic activity within social relations. By the twentieth century, the traditional Kurdish society and its institutions and norms could no longer compete with the institutions and mechanisms of the market economy that were promulgated by the central Turkish state despite the resistance of its leaders. The historical development of the Kurdish political economy must be seen in terms of the internal nature of society and its attempts to protect its traditional economic base in response to external forces. As explained in both Chapters 2 and 3, the change within Kurdish political economy was the result of two dynamics. The first narrative occurred in the Ottoman self-regulating market economy externally that was also pushed by Europeans. The second narrative actualised in the Kurdish counter-movement, driven by preventing a traditional form of economic relations, after the demise of their conventional social structure, and sought to reembed economy into daily life. Indeed, a reference to the embedded economy of everydayness came to be an essential aspect of their understanding of their own Kurdishness. To understand this period of political economy, it is necessary therefore not just to look at the treatment of the society by the Ottomans but also from the bottom up and the important role played by cultural institutions and political agents. Although this study is not definitive, it tries to open a debate on the role of internal dynamics in society on the observed incomplete transformation process in the nineteenth century. Anthropological economic analysis of the Kurdish ethnographical political economy was turned into a necessity in understanding the past performance of society. It has been necessary to assess whether this was separate from the Empire or whether it existed as an alternative political economic mechanism based on ancient institutions and collective characteristic features with tribal and religious ethics. In this respect, the emirates/tribes acted as

A Kurdish model  163 the essence and the main pillar of the political economy. The emirates (thereafter, aghas) struggled to keep the economy embedded in social relations that were designed to acknowledge religious and moral solidarity, honour, respect (social statute), shame, hospitality, and generosity norms. Such analysis is missing from existing Kurdish studies that focus on Kurdish dependency and underdevelopment issues rather than advancing a critical approach in understanding the uneven development. The literature on Kurds has mostly favoured a theoretical approach or simple narrative that focuses on nationalism, social movement, and state–society relations and, hence, ignores the impact of the human factor. The role of ancient institutions, the modes of production, the relationship between commodities and the individual, and the impact of these factors on relationships between the authorities and society are vital in our case. Slim attention has been paid to the role of the non-economic institutions in this respect. Such approaches demonstrate various shortcomings in their conceptualisation of Kurdish politics as they are merely concerned with the ethnonationalism of Kurdish actors, their general demands, and liberation movements without focusing on the role of leadership and distinctive society. Despite the Eurocentric basis of Polanyi’s analysis of non-European primitive societies, his concepts of the great transformation and double movement prove useful in the analysis of society although it has not been the aim of this book to verify or test Polanyi’s theories. Kurdish civilisation failed to achieve the great transformation during the collapse of the Empire and, unlike other ethnic groups, did not make any serious effort to create a nation-state, something which is a crucial political outcome of the new order. It is important to highlight two important points from the Polanyian perspective: the spread of self-regulating market principles and their political consequences, and society’s, or their agent’s, response to them in the form of protectionism, which together constitute a double movement. Such features of reaction and protectionism continued to dominate modern Kurdish history into the early twentieth century albeit in a different form.

Kurdish position among different centuries The intention is here to provide a theoretical justification for moving from a Polanyian perspective to a Gramscian one in the analysis of history. The justification emerges from a demonstration of both accounts’ relative usefulness in gaining an understanding of historical events. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the self-regulating market economy was heavily linked with the modern nation-state, and thus the absence of a capitalist mode of production and political authority after armed conflict in the post-sultanate era created a hegemonic gap in Kurdish society that was filled by the modern Turkish state. This resulted in a power struggle. In this respect, Polanyi’s transformational framework has little relevance in explaining the identity, sovereignty, emancipatory, and power relations, moreover, the internal colonialism and violence of the Kurdish armed struggle that arose in the twentieth century. Polanyi did not place any significant emphasis on the strategies of counter-hegemonic agents and their

164  A Kurdish model unequal power relations with the centre as this was not his concern in explaining the alteration of the economic system. Understanding this inequality, however, is essential as it played an important role in determining the Kurdish trajectory in our second stage of historical turning point. With establishing the Republic, the Kurdish reaction against the infiltration of the state has shifted from protection of the traditional order to the struggle for the emancipation of a nation, after internal colonisation and oppressive policies of Turkification. The ensuing transformation of Kurdish society can no longer be best explained by Polanyi’s framework but rather requires an understanding in Gramscian terms of hegemonic articulation, which manifested itself in the rise of new political actors and uprisings that sought to reject the state’s homogenising tendencies. A counter-hegemonic struggle not only implies that those involved are rebels against the existing system but that they also seek to create an alternative order that embraces Kurdish nationalism in a modern sense. As the dialectic of the process necessitates, counter-hegemony constructs a historical bloc from various fragments of society through cultural and intellectual leadership. This argument suggests that Polanyi’s double movement should be read in conjunction with Gramsci’s political strategies. Chapters 2 and 3 employed a Polanyian perspective to discuss the obstacles to linear development, while Chapters 4 and 5 explored the hegemonic struggle. Considering that Kurdish leaders adopted various strategies which in Gramscian terms could be described as a war of manoeuvre (means an open conflict and direct clashes with the state) and a war of position (addresses, where conflict is gradual and hidden and the aim is to gradually gain power, hence the hegemony). While there was an internal antagonism as Kurdish leaders (emirates, aghas, sheikhs, or organisations) sought to gain hegemony within the Kurdish bloc. The reference to Gramsci, as a heterodox Marxist, aids our understanding of the importance of leadership for furthering and articulating the interests and identity politics. This is not a total break from the earlier Polanyian analysis, as Silver and Arrighi (2003: 327) argue “Polanyi puts forward a theory of class leadership with some analogies with Gramsci’s conceptualising of hegemony. For a class/group to lead, it must also protect other classes/groups”. The study, hence, utilises these two important theoretical frameworks in order to highlight the historical specificity of the development of Kurdish society.3 As the Gramscian reading reveals, Kurds were not only both a stabilising and conservative force but also a new social movement in the late twentieth century, which challenged laissez-faire liberalism as a counter-reaction in Polanyi’s sense. From this perspective, “Polanyi’s model (undergirded by a broad and rather ambiguous definition of society, hence his underdeveloped sense of agency) is usefully complemented by Gramsci’s work” (Birchfield, 1999: 39).4 This research initially, using a Polanyian framework, focused on the dialectical relationship between attempts to force a state–market economy on the Kurdish society and their resulting identification with a moral economy which stopped society’s great transformation and then analysed subsequent events through a Gramscian perspective to explore the result of the transformation impact on the

A Kurdish model  165 formation of political identity. Each of these theoretical frameworks thus explains our case by situating it within a particular period in history: in one case as a responsive reaction shaped in a double movement, and in another as a counterhegemonic power struggle (both of which have parallels in the other). The alteration process of Polanyi becomes later a Gramscian passive revolution. However, in applying these two frameworks references are made to the historical specificity of state and society to adjust for the Eurocentric approaches of Polanyi and Gramsci, which relate to a particular period of European history with their culturally relative understandings. Besides, they are employed within organic ideas of Kurdish politics (e.g. radical democracy and democratic autonomy model). The accounts of Polanyi and Gramsci, despite their Eurocentric foundations,5 are critical and complementary in terms of contributing to the central argument of this research. They also implicitly point towards the possibility of radical democracy (Chapters 6 and 7). According to Birchfield (1999: 40), “Gramsci’s radical democracy theory is rooted in the appreciation of his conviction that ‘tutta la vita e politica’, which already establishes a strong affinity with Polanyi”. Both Gramsci and Polanyi at the end of their discussion suggest a democratic system formulated within socialist values as a third way.6 This combination allows us to analyse the Kurdish radical democracy project coherent with our Polanyian and Gramscian combination. Indeed, such collaboration draws attention to the importance of civil society and instead of emphasising the classic essentialism on class, as they argue that the leadership of the proletariat needs to gain power through civil society and democratic institutions in order to transform the system in terms of socialist principles. This approach has been further developed by post-Marxist scholars using the term radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), one that more recently fits the Kurdish-led HDP’s left-wing populism (Chapter 7), which will be discussed later.

Revisiting the Kurdish power struggle The previous discussion demonstrates and justifies the link between Polanyi and Gramsci’s intellectual positionings in understanding different periods, actors, and relations within the trajectory of the political economy and the reason why a single theoretical approach could not be pursued for our narrative. Gramsci theorised the notion of hegemony in terms of class struggle; however, the concept provides a suggestive insight into the Kurdish case: How do the ideas of Gramsci explain antagonism in the twentieth century of Kurdish political community? In addressing the neo-Gramscian historical analysis, we initially identified the hegemonic struggle situated between Kurdish political agents and the Kemalist regime. The Kemalist regime gained hegemonic ascendency and sought to create a rigid nation-state within a unique Turkish ethnic identity and internal colonial practice. This resulted in a response by the Kurdish political movement although an inner hegemonic struggle continued within the Kurdish political community.7 To understand this historical context, it is necessary to comprehend two different senses of hegemony which can be referred to as inner and outer. Not only was

166  A Kurdish model there a hegemonic struggle between the external hegemonic state and the internal counter-hegemonic agents in the Kurdistan region from the early Republican period but there was also an endogenous hegemonic power struggle among various intra-groups in Kurdish society to achieve intellectual and moral leadership, particularly in the contemporary era. Both coercion (domino) and consent (egomania) applied to gain hegemonic power in this period. Within this context, the hegemonic nation project has been shaped by different goals, while hegemonic articulation identified different circumstances for each sub-period in this chronological narrative. Consequently, the modern Kurdish political history is subject to the vicissitudes of the hegemonic struggle in which the nature of the struggle is analysed within different periods that can be seen as turning points, and for each period there is a particular type of hegemonic struggle as depicted in Table 8.1. The line of hegemonic struggle from 1923 to the present is divided into three main connected stages of hegemonic contestation (Chapters 4 and 5). (i) The first episode of armed struggle can be characterised as a frontal attack of the Kurdish counter-hegemonic movements, which is starting from the founding of the Republic in 1923 (including the pre-1923 sub-period) to the end of the last uprising in 1938. As discussed in Chapter 3, this era of rebellion has ended with a lack of leadership. The power struggle of this period was violent and engaged in a war of manoeuvre to resist the oppressive tendencies of the modern state. The state’s level of coercion and a lack of consent and authority raised the question of its legitimacy and right to govern in the region which in turn encouraged a geopolitical resistance. It is important to note that during this period, the Kurdish struggles against the Turkish nation-state were mainly initiated by traditional and religious actors who contested the legitimacy of the regime by leading numerous uprisings based on territorial and sovereignty demands. (ii) The second stage of Kurdish hegemonic struggle has occurred from the suppressed 1938 rebellion to the 1960 coup (1961 constitution) and can be divided into two sub-periods. The first phase (1938–1946 during the oneparty regime) was the ‘silent years’ with little outward conflict, while the second phase (1946 and 1960) saw a renaissance in society in terms of the emergence of a modern Kurdish political identity, which was formed, articulated, and disseminated by organic intellectuals (i.e. intellectuals tied to their social circumstance). During this time, there was a move in strategy from the war of manoeuvre to the war of position reflecting the emerging multiparty system in a passive defensive way by engaging in educating and organising society in an attempt to build a separate Kurdish identity as common sense that also became a ground for the historical bloc. (iii) The period lasted from the 1960s to the beginning of armed conflict between the PKK and security forces in 1984. It was a time of identity politics in terms of institutionalism and ideology, which was led by a new cultural and moral Kurdish leadership. The efforts of individual intellectuals, such as Musa Anter and Mustafa Remzi Bucak, were not enough on their own to create a

A Kurdish model  167 Table 8.1  Chronology of the Kurdish Hegemonic Struggle Chronological Period

Agent/Actor

Tactic/Strategy

Stage 1) 1923–38: a) Pre-1923

Mîrs (emirate)

b) Post-1923

Premodern organisations (Azadi and Khoybun) and traditional leaders, aghas and sheikhs Traditional intellectuals (immobile)

War of manoeuvre Tanzimat: centralisation drives by social and modernisation protectionism – (against external armed struggle power: regionalism (desultory armed vs centralism) struggle) War of manoeuvre – Nationalism/ armed struggle Turkification (institutional (against external power: politics – modern homogeneous vs devices) heterogeneous)

Stage 2) 1938–1960: a) 1938–1946 b) 1946–1960

Stage 3) 1960–1984:

Organic intellectuals

War of position (defensive struggle) War of position (passive struggle)

Hegemony

Identity – Kemalism (against external power: modernity vs ‘backwardness’) Liberalism and democracy (against external power: mass vs elite) Socialism and secularism (against internal power and external power: redefinition of identity)

New youth/student War of position organisations (very active way) (‘modern Prince’) (DDKO, KUK, Rizgari, KAWA, KIP, PSK, and PKK) (Connected-stage) PKK War of manoeuvre – Identity or modern 1984–2015: armed struggle Kurdishness a) 1984–1999 emerged(against external power) Non-PKK Predominantly war Postmodern b) 1999–2015 organisations; of position Kurdishness ‘many Kurds’ (passive revolution) in EU-isation as (‘postmodern a part Prince’) of the radical democracy and agonistic pluralist model (against internal and external agents: redefinition of identity and extension of democracy)

168  A Kurdish model historical bloc and therefore sought to engage in party politics. However, in engaging in both an internal and external hegemonic struggle, both tactics, namely the war of manoeuvre and war of positions, were pursued by Kurdish political organisations, such as Kawa and the PSK, but predominantly by the PKK. In fact, the PKK came to be the dominant Kurdish political agent at this time, particularly after the 1980 military coup. As a hegemonic history of the Kurds, the delineation of three chronological times, between 1923 and 1984, is not an arbitrary matter, as each one of them represents a turning point in the socio-political development of society. Each of these periods and their sub-periods are examined through the particularities of the power struggle in terms of the agents, conditions, strategies, discourse, and methods identified as mapped in Table 8.1. Later, the hegemonic struggle was also articulated in terms of identity politics with the aim of protecting the Kurdishness of the Kurds against Turkification and more recently has become articulated in terms of agonistic pluralism and radical democracy. Kurds have struggled for democratic principles, influenced by EU liberal values within the context of Turkey’s desire to join the EU, and most recently have begun to propose a more radical model of democracy shifting from demands for their own nation-state to the notion of being part of a democratic autonomy (self-governance), although these have been seriously contested and threatened by the events after the elections in Turkey in November 2015 and the attempted coup in July 2016.

‘Many Kurdishnesses’: agonistic pluralism in radical democracy The most recent period of Kurdish hegemonic struggle began from the post-1990s to the 2015 peacebuilding momentum. While new groups have (re)appeared in the Kurdish public sphere due to the transformation of mainstream Kurdish politics, which led these sub-identities to be included within a democratic bloc, which encompasses a variety of sub-groups and expanded the scope of Kurdishness politically. The hegemonic struggle of the previous period continues, but within identity politics, particularly after 1999 (i.e. Öcalan’s capture and EU candidacy statute). Here, Kurdish political identity has been reformed by Öcalan’s new ideas (e.g. democratic autonomy) and the PKK’s structural change alongside a softchallenge of various Kurdish subaltern groups. In this period, as our final case study, Kurdish politics has progressed in a complex collective will (EU-isation of Kurdishness) (see Chapters 6 and 7). The book is essential to undertake a detailed hermeneutic examination of the meaning of political identities and their new hegemonic articulations and antagonism, which helps to understand the different inner groups and sub-identity and their roles within political mobilisation (Table 6.1). Although these inner groups hold different ideologies and discourses in relation to their interpretation of politics, they share a common ground by being

A Kurdish model  169 shaped by a similar traditional cultural code and social structure within Kurdish national values. To understand the meaning of these identities for those who hold them, it became necessary to look at the transformation of political identity in this period in terms not only of Gramsci, but also though a social constructivist approach (the nature and relevance of which will become clearer later in this discussion). This contemporary period saw a challenge to leading Kurdish identity by a multiplicity of socio-political groups who sought to expand hegemonic Kurdishness during the 2000s, while a symbolic influence from the EU, as a soft-power, became influential in Kurdish politics. The inclusive left-wing populism of HDP, especially during the 2013 Gezi protest and June 2015 election victory (passed the 10 per cent electoral threshold for the first time), provided more opportunity spaces for different actors to enter the Kurdish chain of equivalence in the form of a new democratic coalition where antagonistic enemy relations could be turned into agonistic adversary ones, despite the fact the conflict still remains within this bloc. The intra-groups’ identities and strategies, their similarities and differences, and their challenge to mainstream identity are discussed in detail in Chapters 6 and 7. Despite differences, these domestic actors share quite similar cultural practices and traditional values by the fact of being Kurdish, and any distinction is mostly based on their ideology, strategy, and discourses (Table 6.1). These sub-agents are not resistant in questioning and deconstructing hegemonic Kurdishness. They agreed on this collective political identity as common sense but with an objection to deepen and widen its political frontier. The opportunity space was also created by the Kurdish struggle in the Middle East, along with the PKK and Öcalan’s intellectual transition from an ‘independent Kurdistan’ discourse to the democratic autonomy that is radicalisation and adoption of equality and liberty to all democratic principles. Within the opportunities provided, these sub-agents have striven to extend their individual terrain, and thus the emerging Kurdish political alliance is full of internal contradictions although it still stands against homogenisation. The period itself can be broken down into two separate sub-periods: 1984 to 1999 when the war of manoeuvre in the form of armed struggle was actively used, while, in the latter period commencing after 1999, the strategy applied the tactics of a war of position with an emphasis on democratisation, human rights, and cultural and linguistic rights through political parties and NGOs. During the pre-1999 period, nationalist demands and ethnic politics were increasingly prioritised over the classic political identity of the leading Kurdish groups, namely leftists, who offered modern, secular, and nationalist Kurdishness. This mainstream Kurdish political culture was distributed by organic intellectuals through a new moral and cultural leadership. Post-1999, the EU-ised Kurdishness was diffused and generalised by pro-Kurdish political parties (from HEP to the BDP) and PKK and its related institutions (e.g. TV, print media, social media). Interestingly, attempts were made to unite the various sub-political identities, including Islamic groups, by recourse to religion such as the use of religious symbols in street demonstrations (e.g. the Qur’an carried by pro-Kurdish imams and the civil Jum’a prayer congregation), the opening of TV10 for Alevis, Öcalan referring to

170  A Kurdish model the religious sensitivity of Kurdish society in his crucial ‘Newroz statements’ (in 21 March 2013 and later, similarly, in 2014), the organisation of the Democratic Islam Conference in Diyarbakır and Europe in May 2014, and making a social peace agreement with village guard tribes. The expansion of opportunity spaces through the EU-isation rhetoric also resulted in the adoption of strategies to demand social justice, political, and constitutional rights (including legal, linguistic, cultural, or even autonomous rights) in a passive, rather than active struggle. The Kurdish agents (namely the PKK and the pro-Kurdish political parties) were strong candidates for this leadership because of their existing cultural and political domination within Kurdish society but at this time were different from other pro-Kurdish political parties (e.g. HAKPAR) that challenge the hegemonic culture of the PKK because of its democratic deficiencies. However, recently, the EU’s leverage has dramatically decreased both within Turkey and the Kurdish region due to a stalling of the accession process between Turkey and the EU, the EU’s own internal political and economic crisis (including increased migration and right-wing populism), and the new structuring of the Middle East, while on the part of the Kurds there has been an interest again in the idea of democratic autonomy with their canton and regional self-governance in northern Syria (Rojava) and a state practice in northern Iraq (Başur). In a nutshell, social constructivism is considered as an overall theoretical framework for explaining the developments and transformation in Kurdish identity in the contemporary time. HDP’s new rainbow coalition between Kurdish actors and democratic groups (Alevis, Gezi components, leftists, LGBTs, etc.) must be understood as attempting to win the consent of groups that fell under the label of ‘other Kurds’ by defending their demands and representing their identities within an agonistic pluralism rather than through the use of violence or homogenisation, which is the essentialising of a certain identity.8 The author contends that to understand such complex, formative, and contemporary relations which led to the emergence of EU-ising politics, the Gramscian hegemonic perspective needs to be supported by a social constructivist approach9 in order to explain the ongoing identity transformation process. This assumes that the social construction of identity is a production of social agents (as reified in discourse and narrative), which recognises the importance of agency, the transformative identity process, and the internal self-transformation. A question, however, remains: if identity is predominantly the product of social groupings, social relations, or the construction of social reality, how could such an identity transformation be induced? Actual experience, however, indicates that political identity has always been subject to the process of construction, deconstruction, or reconstruction in Kurdish history as in any other society. The Gramscian hegemonic perspective cannot answer this question by itself and in the Kurdish case is inadequate in explaining the new social reality and opportunity spaces and have extended existing political identities, forcing them to embrace other identities within the society and the Kurdish democratic bloc. The social constructivist approach resists the notion of stability in identity but links with

A Kurdish model  171 Gramsci’s understanding of the importance of language, discourse, and culture in the project of social and political transformation although Gramsci avoids any detail of the construction of identity itself.10 As an aspect of social reality, social identities are constructed, preserved, and shared. They are not however purely arbitrary, dreamt up by the individual on a whim. In social constructivism, the knowledge and ideology are utilised in the process of identity construction and production, a process that remains without detail in Gramsci discussion of hegemony. For Gramsci, social reality is essentially only a political reality, and the concept of common sense is proposed only within a political interpretation. The book locates the social constructivist account within the Gramscian template in order to be able to analyse the ongoing developing of the political project which is produced and constructed through the plurality of many different identities, not all initially political, in fact, constructed out of an increasingly complex and changing social reality. Salamini (1974), accordingly, claims that Gramsci’s theoretical framework is discussed through social constructivism, such as the relationship between philosophy and sociology, theory and ideology, and the problem of objectivity. The cognition and discourse are, nevertheless, an element of social reality; as a result, the group cognition changes the group member’s behaviour, identity, and social reality. Conversely, Gramsci communicates these elements of reality in a different sense; the hegemonic struggle is still an ongoing process, either internal or external, but the context of the struggle changes rather than creating counter-identity. It is ultimately a hegemonic theory which is facilitated by the opportunity spaces emerged in the society. The more recent hegemonic struggle of the society has not only been the ethnic political struggle of Kurds against the state but has also been articulated in terms of democracy, pluralism, multiculturalism, and multi-identities whereby the opportunities within the democratic sphere have expanded to allow for the representation of the rest of the people in Turkey. The structure of Kurdish society has itself become more flexible, unmoored from its traditional identity, and now linked to different groups, cultures and identities, and even forged by diaspora and transnational institutions – a complex social and political reality. Before hoping to attain political hegemony as the ultimate goal of the power struggle, the main Kurdish political agents need to solve the issue of what is identity and how can its different elements, each with its own relationship to the existing hegemony, maintaining its own interests, experiences, and understanding of social and political reality form a new chain of equivalence that is introduced by the HDP and be seen as equivalent to that analysed in both Chapters 6 and 7.

Kurdishness: moral economy, EU-isation, and left-wing populism The book argues that the narrated experiences affect socio-political life and the nature of the movement by having diverse internal agents and external dynamics and by giving rise to an initiative for identity transformation and for the expansion

172  A Kurdish model of the concept of identity with a dialectic of hegemony. This cultural identity logic has always been based in a realm of tradition as social reality; it is a historically continuous construction that adapts to changing circumstances. Kurdishness has been under continuous historical construction that has adapted to changing circumstances while remaining true to a perceived essence of itself. As a result, the category of actors and their patterns of practice or underlying interests are all socially constructed as a reality of society. Chapters 6 and 7 have been driven by social constructivist concept, which offers a fruitful methodology in order to comprehend the particular social reality and knowledge, discourses, strategies, sub-identities, behaviour, and actions of agents in intra Kurdish affairs. Social constructivism in the Kurdish case focuses on the identity issue and considers the process of production of identity along with the creation (and closing) of opportunity spaces in the public sphere in which identity is produced, sustained, and changed.11 Social and political agents not only perform their identity within this context but also give it a meaning and here norms and linguistic formation become important elements in the reproduction of identity. The objectives of the book are to understand the discourse of identity used by different Kurdish socio-political agents in a national discursive practice. Language on both the Turkish and Kurdish sides, which uses Kurdish or implies Kurdishness in Turkish, conversely seems more than just a tool for conversation; instead, it appears within a Wittgenstein (2001) constructivist account through his famous language-game and family resemblance philosophical thinking alongside discourse. Language, and by extension discourse, are central to the foundation of identity (in the dialectical relationship between ideology, identity, and strategy) as with, for example, the discussion of whether the Kurdish New Year should be pronounced as Newroz or Nevruz, as the difference is aligned to different political positioning or meanings of Kurdishness, which provided a basis for hegemonic articulation among inner groups. For the period encompassing the 2000s, three main constituents and identities within Kurdish society were identified (Table 6.1). Each of these had an influence on Kurdish identity articulated through the opportunities that had opened in society and by the influence of the EU. As depicted in Figure 8.1, these three main agents largely agree on a democratic symbolic ground based on the nature of tribal kinship, shared memory, common history, traditions, and cultural values regardless of their ideological differences. It is not the intention to suggest that these three socio-political forces are the only ones in existence in society, nor that they are completely independent of one another. Rather than identifying each of these identities as parallel structures in Figure 8.1, intersected areas are identified to demonstrate their inevitable blending. We have attempted to define and contextualise the character and ideology of these sub-identities through their discourses, strategies, behaviours, and intermingled relations (towards each other or to the state). The book does not deny that they are causally related or that these identities are completely independent of one another. An attempt was thus made to map the identities and strategies of various agents (Table 8.1). In this mapping process, observations of the everyday actions

A Kurdish model

Kurdi-Secular Agent

173

Kurdi-Islamic Agent

opportunist/integrated Kurdish Agent

Figure 8.1 Intersections between Sub-identities

of these groups were valuable in combination with their discourses; this process was made possible through a social constructivist perspective, thereby suggesting that the internal and external division, or the inside–outside dichotomy, created a theoretical account to articulate the deconstruction or reconstruction of the political identity which constituted the Kurdish model of politics in a radical democracy discourse. The developments during the 2000s demonstrated that there had been a move towards passive revolutionary strategies through the process of EU-isation rhetoric among Kurdish political actors, which is practiced by the Kurdsih-led left-leaning populist HDP effectively between 2013 and 2015 (Tekdemir, 2019). This occurred through political parties, NGOs, regional mayors, and by directly engaging with the EU’s and country’s democratic institutions themselves while offering a challenge to liberal democracy without suggesting a withdrawal from it or exodus. In explaining the realities of this era and the limiting of the opportunity space in public spheres, the study first considers the process of Turkey’s neo-marketisation of the political economy in the period following the 2000s through President Erdoğan’s neoliberalism project (Adaman et al., 2017), which provided significant opportunity spaces for some suborders to penetrate into the system and thereby benefit from the regime in the same way that Islamically oriented Turks penetrated into the emerged opportunity spaces and consequently captured political power through the AKP’s electoral successes. Overall, renovation of Kurdish nationalism in a progressive way provided grounds for the HDP’s left-leaning populism. This new political economy had an impact on Kurdish nationalism, and it simultaneously triggered the development

174  A Kurdish model of the EU-ising of the Kurdish identity political project as a model, as well as a representation of conflict resolution, which also challenged the country’s democracy and the Middle East as a model of the Kurdish political movement(s).

Epilogue Kurdish political identity has expanded its meaning and borders with the appearance of various inner groups and their sub-identities in the Kurdish public sphere. These domestic actors with their emerging dynamism are now challenging the Kurdish national movement to deepen and widen the scope of Kurdishness. It is a demand for a collective will and a moment of renovation and reformation of hegemonic Kurdish political identity by subaltern groups and multiple identity positions in agonistic pluralism. However, the study has only focused on three main identities with their strategies, objectives and discourses’ characteristics, and stakeholders; on the one hand, there are leading secular, leftist, and nationalist Kurds, and on the other hand, there are conservative, cultural, and Muslim Kurds with an opportunist, pragmatist, and integrated ‘white Kurds’ in alternative discourse and hegemonic articulation. There has been an awakening of religious awareness, particularly among Islamic groups and culture (along with an Alevi consciousness, see Tekdemir, 2018), in the Kurdish political sphere. It is not because the dominant Kurdish national movement is aiming to gain the support of these groups in a purely pragmatic or instrumental way, rather the religiously oriented groups have presented a challenge to hegemonic Kurdishness as they seek representation in the Kurdish political sphere. It is more than simply the acceptance of pro-Islamic values into the secular and nationalist discourse by the PKK and pro-Kurdish political parties (such as the BDP). It more resembles the experience of Turkey in the way that Islamically oriented groups have pushed the political sphere previously dominated by Kemalists to open opportunities for themselves. Muslim Kurds have adopted several strategies such as the civil Friday prayer, as part of a strategy of civil disobedience that represents a passive struggle against official hegemonic religious practices of the state institution, Diyanet. The pro-Kurdish NGO, DTK (Democratic Society Congress), and the BDP organised a religious celebration to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed (something they consider as a religious obligation) in Diyarbakır on April 2014, which attracted thousands of people equalling the numbers attending the secular and national Newroz celebration. The Democratic Islam Congress met in May 2014 following the call by Öcalan to debate a solution to the Kurdish question and to discuss the relationship between Islam, democracy, and liberty. It also aimed to debate the issues of peace, justice, and pluralism in terms of the historical ‘Madinah Agreement’12 as well as discussing other religious issues (such as women in Islam, ecology, power, and colonisation) in the context of the norms and principles of Islam. This religious yet political initiative is a response to the demands of a grassroots mobilisation among Kurds rather than a top-down elitist initiative. It also

A Kurdish model  175 confirms that change comes from as much within Kurdish society as from outside or the EU-isation of Kurdish politics. It also indicates a change in the relation with the Turkish state and has generated the desire for a resolution of conflict and engagement in peacebuilding with the demands of radical citizenship and regional self-governance which practices radical democracy within ecology and women’s liberation in Rojava. From a Mouffeian perspective, these sub-identities have created a structure of adversarial politics in Turkey with the relationship between hegemonic actors turned into an agonistic adversarial connection rather than an antagonistic friend/ enemy war based on violence and a desire to destroy the ‘other’. Mouffe (2014) makes a distinction between political and politics. She highlights the limits of politics and liberalism that operate in parallel whereas the political is an antiessentialist and post-structuralist perspective that challenges the limits of politics and liberalism through new social–political movements in radicalising democratic institutions. Furthermore, Mouffe (2014: 150) stresses that “taking account of the dimension of the political means acknowledging the existence of conflicts that cannot have a rational solution”. This can be employed in the case of the divided and polarised society of Turkey. The political has come to be represented by the HDP’s inclusive left-wing populism that was shaped in a radical conceptualisation of democratic grammar. HDP’s discourse is formed in emancipatory politics and embedded in progressive Kurdish nationalism (Tekdemir, 2016, 2019). As Kurdish society is constituted in an agonistic pluralism by many different social, religious, and political groups and identities, a situation which can be termed as ‘many Kurds’, represented in the Kurdish public sphere by Sunni Muslims, Alevis, Êzidis, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, atheists, anarchists, and LGBT groups among others. The EU’s liberal and democratic values of human, civil, and cultural rights have infiltrated into the Kurdish region, so they have provided new channels and transnational opportunities for non-state actors with all their diversities to engage in the political sphere and to construct an EU-isation of Kurdishness as a new political identity. We have already mentioned that the EU-ising of Kurdish political culture does not imply that Kurdish society is fully Europeanising in a socio-cultural way, and they are in effect disavowing their Kurdishnesses; rather we argue that the political and social agents are drawing on the EU’s discourse of universal liberal and democratic rights and reinterpreting them in terms of progressive principles of equality and liberty for all with the hope of building a new radical democratic political culture that moves beyond Turkey’s long-term liberal democratic tendency. Until the peacebuilding of 2015, the EU accession process provided the opportunity spaces for the Kurds to engage in the legitimate political process and helped start the process of conflict resolution between the state and the PKK, initiated by the Oslo Negotiations in 2011. In the March 2014 local government elections, the BDP (as a successor of the pro-Kurdish political parties) pioneered a system of equally sharing all mayoral positions between male and female candidates to encourage female participation

176  A Kurdish model in politics. This progressive polity has gone beyond traditional Kurdish norms and has provided a foundation for the HDP’s support in the ‘east side’ as the Gezi protest creates ground for the ‘west side’ (Goksel and Tekdemir, 2018), while also recognising gender inequality and providing a large representation of women, including those projecting an Islamic orientation. Here, the BDP candidate, Diba Keskin, a mother of four, became joint-mayor of Erciş and continued to wear her headscarf, which at the time was unusual in Turkey. Another example was Fabruniye Akyol, a 25-year-old student and Assyrian Christian, elected into the joint-mayorship of Mardin, along with the 71-year-old well-respected and veteran Kurdish politician, Ahmet Türk, who became the first Christian woman in the history of the predominantly Muslim Republic to be elected to such a post. Kurdish political culture has evolved to recognise a pluralist distinctiveness in its representation in the political realm. This echoes Öcalan’s idea on the democratic union of free citizens and people with the Republic, in peace and fraternity (Gunter, 2016). In his historical Newroz manifesto (21 March 2013), he supported the peace process by stressing: “I call on the two strategic powers of the Middle East to build democratic modernity befitting our culture and civilisation. The time has come for dispute, conflict, and enmity to yield to alliance, unity, blessings, and a mutual embrace”.13 In endorsing an emancipatory political culture and agonistic pluralism for the Kurds and beyond, Öcalan strongly criticised the capitalist modernism’s ‘arrogant’ and dismissive approach to ‘others’ or ‘non-moderns’ as well as condemning the cruel principles of neoliberalism and exclusionary democracy by promoting a communal economy, social ecology, gender equality, and democratic autonomy implemented by the Syrian Kurds. In his 21 March 2014 Newroz statement, he continued by saying that “the clearest thing in front of us waiting for the answer, or repetitive blows with a complete and radical democracy is the question that we will continue on the road”. This new discourse is thus advocating a new type of democratic bloc in a chain of equivalence in the Kurdish model, not only for the Kurds but also for the Middle Eastern states who should adopt the ethical– political principles of equality and liberty for all, something I have identified and termed as a non-otherising democracy based on an agonistic approach. In this respect, Öcalan in the 2015 Newroz speech asked the PKK to lay down their arms and to construct a democratic community on what is termed radical citizenship. Similarly, within the context of radical democratic principles, the KCK in a vital statement of 15 March 201414 questioned the AKP government’s eligibility to lead the peace process in the light of the accusation of economic and moral corruption. The Kurdish understanding of democracy radically challenged the establishment and the AKP’s majoritarian democracy, illiberalism, and authoritarianism. The Kurdish transcendental proposal formulates the Middle East in a ‘stateless democracy’ model to generate a transnational system of autonomy that is contextualised as democratic autonomy in an ontological manner. It was very much evident in the PKK’s new policy of implementing canton-based regional government in association with the PYD in Rojava, as well as tentatively supporting the development of a regional federal state in the KRG in northern Iraq and its

A Kurdish model  177 suggestion of democratic autonomous zones in the East and Southeast of Turkey, particularly as a result of the March 2014 local elections. Until the June 2015 election (after violence, undemocratic practices and securityoriented policies started to dominate the country’s political life until the present), the new political identity of the Kurds (EU-ised Kurdishness) in a political ­project led by the HDP initiated a vigorous and active ongoing transformation process that promoted a peaceful and democratic solution to the long-lasting Kurdish question in Turkey. It looked towards a new democratic, comprehensive, and inclusive constitution that embraced the ‘otherised’ identities of the Republic, such as Armenians, Alevis, Assyrians, anti-capitalist Muslims, feminists, environmentalists, radical leftists, and LGBT members. Whereby, it offered space for various and distinct members of society on symbolic democratic grounds. Further, it located the counter-hegemonic positioning of these oppositional actors in their struggle for hegemonic power in terms of adversarial relations as well as a conflictual consensus, which refers to keeping the conflict in the centre of politics while instituting compromise through respect of each other’s rights in libertarian and equalitarian principles. The Kurdish model has come back into the political equation in the Middle East to define a new political economy and culture of full participation of differences beyond the classical understanding of the nation-state. Such initiatives will define the dynamics of the region beyond the ‘still-born’ nature of the Arab Spring in the Middle East; and it is expected that in this new turn, Kurds will play their regional role by fully understanding and responding to the expectations and their responsibilities beyond the borders of the nation-states in which they live. While Turkey’s changing political economy since 2013 in line with socio-political movements is also instrumental for the development of Kurdish political economy, as the maturation of collective identity will continue to re-define and regenerate itself as part of the legend of ‘living fire’.

Notes 1 The term of Kurdi refers to a pro-Kurdish and national perspective. It addresses historical and cultural Kurdishness (Kurdiness) without the impact and interpretations of the external dominant power, such as the Turkish state. It is a term that is set against officially defined ‘Kurdishness’. As a result, Kurdi represents the national consciousness or sensitivity to Kurdish rights and demands. 2 Polanyi (1957: 46) points out that in such societies “individual economic interest is rarely paramount, for the community keeps all of its members from starving unless it is itself borne down by catastrophe, in which case interests are again threatened ­collectively, not individually. The maintenance of social ties, on the other hand, is crucial. First, by disregarding the accepted code of honour or generosity, the individual cuts himself off from the community and becomes an outcast; second, in the long run, all social obligations are reciprocal, and their fulfilment best serves the individual’s give-and-take interests”. 3 For instance, for Gramsci, “society is civil society, which is always understood in its contradictory connection to the state (such as trade unions, political parties, mass education and other voluntary organisations) [. . .] was a new terrain of struggle that

178  A Kurdish model connected the state to the rhythms of everyday life. For Polanyi, society is ‘active society’, which is always understood in its contradictory tension with the market (such as trade unions, cooperatives, factory movement, political parties or Christian movements) [. . .] had an autonomy of its own: from saving the market from its destructive tendencies, it would become a fetter on the market, threatening to transcend and subordinate it” (Burawoy, 2003: 198–206). 4 Birchfield (1999: 28) states “the marriage of these thinkers is by no means a blissful one, nor are the ideological divisions between the two entirely unproblematic. However, the advantage of opening up a critical dialogue between the two far exceeds the disadvantage of pairing two otherwise very intellectually distinct thinkers”. 5 Gramsci’s “civil society combines with the state to absorb political challenges to capitalism. Gramsci, therefore, describes capitalism as a transition within capitalism from political dictatorship to political hegemony, which occurs in the West but not the East. Polanyi’s ‘active society’ thwarts the commodification of labor, land, and money. Here the transition is from market despotism [a self-regulating market] to market regulation, which occurs in Europe but not in colonies [. . .] They drew attention to the backwardness of their native Hungary and Italy but always in ways relative to the future of Western Europe and the United States. Looking in another direction, East rather than West, their analysis of the European periphery could be applied to the Third World. Gramsci’s disquisition on Italy’s Southern Question and his later ‘Notes on Italian History’, for example, contain the ingredients for the study of peripheral nations, the articulation of the modern industrial sector, and a semi-feudal agrarian sector” (Burawoy, 2003: 220). 6 To the non-democratic approach voiced by the alternatives to capitalism and communism. However, Polanyi sought a third way between neoliberal political powers, whereby, social conflict would automatically disappear as a result of the radical action of democracy. 7 Birchfield (1999: 40) states that “Gramsci’s conceptualisation of the relationship between structure and agency, articulated through his theory of hegemony, provides a deeper understanding of the formation and nature of counter-movements”. 8 The Labour, Democracy, and Freedom Bloc made up of Turkish socialists, social democrat parties, individual non-Muslims, LGBT activists, and artists achieved 36 MP seats in the election on 12 June 2011; in the 2007 election they united under the Candidates for Thousand Hopes and achieved 23 MP seats. They had institutional relations with the EU and international society through lobbying, diasporic events, and diplomacy. 9 According to Hung et al. (2011: 162), “from a social constructivist point of view, the work on identity would imply the meaning-making and dialogic processes of conceiving self-understanding. In other words, adopting the social constructivist notion that all knowledge is socially constructed as a meaning-making process, identity is the social construction or meaning-making about one’s self”. 10 Salamini (1974: 375) claims that “Gramsci, though he has never defined himself as a sociologist, has concerned himself with the most traditional problems of the sociology of knowledge [. . .] He has not elaborated a systematic theory of knowledge; he has, nevertheless, formulated certain very useful hermeneutic criteria for socio-historical analysis”. 11 Recent treatments of collective identity question the essentialism of collective attributes and images. “Anti-essentialist inquiries promote the social construction of identity as a more viable basis of the collective self. Other works stress the problems inherent in collective categorisation, presenting a postmodern challenge to arguments of unified group experiences” (Cerulo, 1997: 387). In such a process, “social constructionism drives a multifaceted literature on national identity. A rich collection of socio-historical works on commemoration, narrative, and symbolisation chart the ways in which

A Kurdish model  179 actors, particularly elites, create, manipulate, or dismantle the identities of nations, citizenships, allies, and enemies” (Cerulo, 1997: 390). 12 The Madinah agreement is a treaty or social contract signed by the Prophet of Islam and other religious groups in Madinah. 13 http://en.firatajans.com/news/news/full-text-of-ocalan-s-newroz-statement.htm. 14 See www.kurdistan-post.eu/tr/kurdistan/kck-akp-artik-muhatabimiz-degil.

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Appendix 1 Political historiography

1514 1639 03 November 1839 June 1847 23 December 1876 August 1880 1890–1891 21 September 1892 27 April 1898 24 July 1908 28 July 1914 30 December 1918 10 August 1920 06 March 1921 01 November 1922 23 April 1923 24 July 1923 03 March 1924 13 February 1925 05 October 1927 1926–30 1937–38 30 July 1943 07 January 1946

A contract between Sultan Selim and Idris-i Bitlisi. Kasr-i Shrin Agreement between Ottoman and Persian Empires for dividing Kurdistan into two parts. The Tanzimat Fermanı (Reforms). The Bedirkhan Beg uprising. The constitutional (Meşrutiyet I) regime of the Young Turks. The Sheikh Ubeydullah uprising. Establishment of the Hamidiye Cavalry by Sultan Abdulhamid II. Aşiret Mektepleri (tribal schools) created by Sultan Abdulhamid II. The first Kurdish newspaper, ‘Kurdistan’, is founded by Mithad Bedirkhan, in Egypt. The second period/coup (Meşrutiyet II) of Young Turks government. World War One (WWI). Kurdistan Teali Cemiyeti is founded. The Treaty of Sèvres. Koçgiri Rebellion. Destruction of the sultanate regime by Kemalist cadre. Establishment of the Republic of Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne. Abolishment of the caliphate institution. The Sheikh Said rebellion. The Khoybun was founded in Lebanon. The Ağrı (Ararat) rebellions. The Dersim (Tunceli) rebellion. Slaughter of 33 Kurdish villagers by General Mustafa Muğlalı, Özalp village, Van province. The establishment of the Democrat Party.

194 Appendix 1 Political historiography 21 July 1946 09 August 1949 18 February 1952 17 December 1959 50 27 May 1960 28 May 1960 03 February 1961 12 September 1963 29 June 1963 12 March 1971 19 December 1978 12 September 1980 14 July 1982 06 November 1983 15 August 1984 26 March 1985 19 July 1987 07 June 1990 02 July 1993 05 March 1993 28 February 1997 16 February 1999 12 December 1999 11 September 2001

03 November 2002

The end of CHP’s one-party regime. Turkey became a member of the Council of Europe. Turkey became an official partner of NATO. Kurdish intellectuals and students were arrested; one died due to sickness, and the incident became known as the case of the 49’s. Coup d’état by the Turkish army. The 55s incident: 55 aghas exiled by the coup’s government. Establishment of the Labour Party of Turkey (TIP). The Ankara agreement between Turkey and EEC. The 23s incident. A coup d’état by the army. Marash massacre against Alevis (mostly Kurds). Coup d’état by the army. Diyarbekir prison struggle – four PKK members: Hayri Durmuş, Kemal Pir, Akif Yılmaz, and Ali Çiçek self-immolated in protest against brutal torture. Turgut Özal became president – activating the liberalisation of politics and economy. The PKK starts an armed struggle against the state. The village guard system is founded. The OHAL system (emergency state rule) started in the Kurdish region in seven provinces. The establishment of HEP, the pro-Kurdish political party. Sivas massacre – 33 Alevi intellectuals and artisans are slaughtered. Six Kurdish DEP MPs arrested. A post-modern coup. Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of PKK, is captured in Kenya and brought to Turkey. Turkey became an official candidate for full EU membership. The 9/11 incident happened; Al-Qaeda suicide attacks happen against the United States, in New York and Washington. AKP won the general election, R.T. Erdoğan became prime minster in 2003 and spent 11 years in the office before becoming the country’s first directly elected president in August 2014.

Appendix 1 Political historiography  195 21 October 2007 01 January 2009 28 May 2009

19 October 2009 29 April 2009 08 February 2011 17 October 2011 28 December 2011 11 June 2012 August 2012

21 March 2013 28 May 2013 07 June 2013

01 November 2015

‘Kurdish initiative/opening’ started by the AKP government. Kurdish language TRT 6 (Kurdi) state TV launched. Under the KCK operation, many Kurdish activists (including politicians, academicians, and journalists) are arrested in 2012, numbering in the thousands (some claim the number reached approx. 8,000 people). The 34 PKK fighters entered through Habur border and surrendered as a gesture for the sake of peace process. A unilateral ceasefire is announced by the PKK. The Oslo meetings/negotiations happen between the PKK and the Turkish Secret Intelligence Agency (MIT). University of Mardin Artuklu began the country’s first Kurdish undergraduate classes. 34 Kurdish civilians (mostly aged between 12 and 19) were killed by a Turkish warplane near Roboski village in the Uludere district, Şırnak province. The Kurdish language became an optional language in secondary school commencing from the 2012– 2013 academic year. Dicle News Agency (DIHA) journalists uncovered an incident regarding Kurdish child political prisoners; prisoners, charged with throwing stones at the police during a street demonstration, were raped by other prisoners, in Pozanti Prison, Adana province. The historical peacebuilding process started between the Turkish state and the PKK via Öcalan Erdoğan’s initiatives. Gezi Park protests began in Istanbul and subsequently took over across Turkey as a social unrest spread. Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP) surpassed the 10 per cent election threshold for the first time in Kurdish political party history with support of the diverse groups. A snap (general) election happens, and the armed conflict between the state and the PKK flares again. It is the end of a 2-year fragile peace process seeing a return to political violence.

Index

Abdulhamid II (1876–1908) 35, 36, 52, 59, 140 Abdullah, Öcalan 2, 10, 50, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 122, 150, 151, 168, 169, 174, 176, 179 adversary 22, 103, 104, 152, 169 aghas 14, 15, 25, 33, 35, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 63, 64, 68, 77, 82, 86, 87, 89, 93, 95, 98, 109, 143, 144, 163, 164, 167, 194 agonism x, 5, 7, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 99, 104, 114, 147, 151, 152, 154, 158, 169, 175, 176 agonistic pluralism 4, 6, 15, 21, 102, 104, 117, 136, 142, 146, 167, 168, 170, 174, 176, 187 Ağrı 25, 76, 78, 79, 155, 167, 193 AKP 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 102, 138, 140, 142, 149, 150, 154, 157, 170, 173, 176 Albanian 14, 30, 39, 48, 50 Alevis 9, 11, 23, 50, 53, 73, 83, 86, 116, 107, 117, 123, 151, 170, 175, 177, 181, 194 Amed/Amid 8, 9, 12, 36, 70, 79, 113, 114, 121, 129, 136, 150, 155, 170, 174, 194 Ankara 9, 81, 82, 88, 113, 119, 148, 150, 194 antagonism 7, 10, 19, 21, 23, 52, 66, 152, 157, 164, 165, 168 Arab 1, 3, 4, 4, 37, 40, 50, 117, 134; nationalism 135 Armenian 35, 37, 52, 56, 57, 58, 76; genocide 35, 36, 40 articulation 5, 15, 26, 28, 31, 36, 37, 77, 78, 81, 99, 103, 106, 107, 108, 116, 122, 157, 164, 166, 172, 186, 190 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 5, 6, 65, 66, 67, 73, 78 authoritarian 1, 7, 8, 9, 11, 19, 21, 26, 27, 71, 77, 81, 82, 83, 99, 113, 147

ayans 31, 32, 41, 42, 56 Azadi 72, 75, 79, 94, 124, 133, 136, 163 Barzani 89 Bedirkhan 34, 71; beg 34, 79, 193 Berger, Peter L. 22, 23, 24, 128, 158 bloc 8, 19, 20, 21, 26, 34, 35, 66, 72, 75, 76, 83, 85, 86, 87, 96, 105, 112, 117, 121, 146, 151, 164, 166, 168, 176, 180, 182, 190; see also Gramscian historical bloc British 45, 64, 100 bureaucratic 19, 30, 31, 37, 38, 40, 41, 52, 61, 63, 69, 82, 146 caliph 36, 48, 50, 74, 78; see also caliphate caliphate 30, 35, 37, 52, 67, 69, 73, 74, 193 capitalism 2, 3, 5, 13, 38, 87, 88, 100, 106, 113, 118, 178 cemiyet 70, 72, 78, 79 193 centralisation 4, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 51, 52, 53, 55, 59, 60, 78 centre ix, 6, 7, 78, 9, 12, 15, 21, 22, 23, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 42, 45, 46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 63, 71, 77, 83, 84, 86, 89, 90, 91, 110, 114, 117, 12, 1123, 134, 141, 146, 158, 160, 176, 189; see also centralisation citizen 6, 7, 11, 12, 29, 75, 78, 82, 88, 90, 92, 100, 110, 121, 126, 176; see also citizenship citizenship 4, 5, 6, 7, 36, 81, 113, 117, 150, 157, 158, 175, 175, 176, 179, 187, 188 civil 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 20, 21, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35, 39, 42, 43, 72, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 89, 90, 92, 98, 99, 100, 103, 109, 111, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151, 153, 157, 165, 169, 174, 175, 177,

Index  197 178; society 10, 11, 15, 20, 26, 35, 39, 78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 90, 92, 98, 99, 109, 114, 121, 133, 136, 139, 145, 146, 150, 165, 177, 178 civilisation 5, 28, 45, 50, 62, 65, 72, 111, 163, 176 clubs xi, 72, 79; see also cemiyet coercive 81, 106, 145 Cold War 85, 87, 103, 147 colonialism 17, 45, 82, 93, 106, 108, 163; see also colonisation colonisation 13, 14, 35, 41, 72, 82, 93, 109, 164, 174 Committee of Union of Progress (CUP) xi, 36, 40, 54, 55, 57, 58, 69, 70, 71, 78, 88, 160 common sense 10, 26, 68, 69, 81, 84, 86, 90, 95, 96, 166, 169, 171 communism 19, 131, 178 community 3, 5, 18, 25, 30, 34, 40, 47, 48, 51, 65, 66, 74, 81, 88, 89, 90, 98, 116, 125, 131, 151, 165, 176, 177 conflict 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 21, 22, 23, 49, 52, 53, 54, 72, 77, 89, 97, 102, 103, 110, 111, 112, 114, 120, 123, 126, 129, 130, 144, 147, 149, 154, 158, 163, 164, 166, 169, 174, 175, 116, 178, 195; see also conflictual consensus conflictual consensus 7, 15, 99, 177 consent 19, 20, 21, 36, 66, 67, 68, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 95, 96, 97, 112, 136, 141, 145, 166, 170 constitution ix, 5, 15, 24, 26, 28, 34, 91, 92, 95, 121, 123, 160, 166, 177 Copenhagen criteria 4, 11, 23, 124, 147, 149, 150, 153 counter-hegemony 6, 15, 20, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 75, 76, 77, 85, 86, 89, 90, 96, 112, 133, 135, 163, 164 166, 177; see also counter-movements counter-movements 19, 34, 36, 37, 39, 53, 66, 70, 71, 75, 77, 89, 130, 162, 178 coup 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 36, 57, 80, 89, 91, 92, 107, 109, 136, 139, 166, 168, 193, 194 culture 2, 11, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 36, 38, 39, 48, 49, 50, 51, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 106, 107, 108, 110, 119, 125, 126, 128, 130, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 153, 155, 157, 158, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177

de facto autonomy 30, 38, 48, 135 democracy ix, x, xi, 1, 2, 4, 6, 11, 12, 15, 19, 21, 82, 84, 85, 99, 102, 104, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 142, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 165, 168, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 195; see also liberal, democracy; radical, democracy democrat xi, 178 Democratic Union Party 3, 24, 176 democratisation 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 22, 26, 84, 85, 102, 103, 104, 111, 112, 114, 117, 122, 125, 127, 147, 148, 149, 152, 157, 169 Democrat Party (DP) 84, 86, 137, 193 Dersim see Tunceli development ix, xi, 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 28, 31, 38, 39, 42, 45, 49, 54, 58, 59, 62, 64, 66, 76, 80, 85, 86, 89, 93, 117, 120, 122, 134, 147, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 168, 173, 176, 177 discourse vii, 6, 7, 8, 15, 16, 23, 26, 37, 58, 61, 71, 73, 74, 80, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 discursive 22, 26, 84, 95, 103, 121, 122, 147, 152, 153, 158, 172 disembedded/disembedding 17, 19, 26, 55, 62, 115, 160, 161, 162 Diyanet (Department of Religious Affairs) 9, 137, 138, 155, 174 Diyarbakır/Diyarbekir prison 97, 111, 123, 146, 194; see also Amed/Amid double movement 5, 17, 18, 25, 54, 55, 58, 106, 162, 163, 164, 165 East xi, 1, 13, 47, 53, 74, 78, 93, 94, 116, 123, 154, 176, 177, 178 Eastern 4, 8, 13, 53, 78, 79, 82, 93, 94, 100, 101, 107, 109, 123, 134 emancipation 19, 97, 110, 164 embeddedness vii, 17, 18, 25, 33, 38, 44, 45, 61, 66, 87, 157, 160; see also disembedded/disembedding emirates 14, 30, 34, 35, 38, 42, 44, 47, 48, 54, 77, 161, 162, 164; see also Kurdish identification, mîrs

198 Index empire 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 69, 70, 74, 80, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163; Ottoman vii, 2, 14, 15, 25, 28, 29, 30, 39, 40, 44, 45, 66, 71, 100, 123, 126, 135, 143, 157 equality xi, 2, 3, 6, 12, 21, 42, 103, 115, 117, 151, 152, 169, 175, 176 eshir 14, 61, 79 eşraf families 31, 36, 52, 159 ethnic 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 19, 29, 37, 39, 40, 42, 58, 67, 70, 72, 73, 74, 81, 85, 105, 111, 113, 117, 122, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 140, 141, 145, 150, 155, 157, 163, 165, 169, 171 EU-isation/EU-ising vii, 7, 11, 15, 21, 23, 26, 27, 99, 103, 104, 114, 122, 125, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177 EU-ised see EU-isation/EU-ising Europe x, 6, 29, 42, 44, 59, 62, 87, 89, 107, 112, 119, 122, 147, 148, 149, 153, 170, 178, 185, 194 European Union (EU) xi, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 22, 24, 102, 103, 104, 106, 112, 113, 114, 117, 120, 122, 124, 125, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 168, 170, 172, 178 February 28 process 136, 155, 194 feminist 11, 19, 95, 99, 104, 107, 117, 151, 177 feudal 14, 17, 39, 46, 52, 56, 70, 94, 107, 109, 111, 123, 143, 161; see also semi-feudal feudalism 93 fictitious commodities 17, 25, 161 fin de siècle 38 First World War (WWI) 37, 157, 193 foreign policy 12, 32, 51, 101, 102, 139 France 43, 112 Gezi protest 1, 7, 151, 169, 170, 176, 195 Gökalp, Ziya 142 Gramsci, Antonio x, 4, 19, 20, 21, 24, 66, 67, 68 78, 80, 81, 84, 100, 112, 158, 164, 165, 169, 171, 177, 178 Gramscian historical bloc 7, 20, 21, 26, 66, 96, 121, 122, 164, 166, 168 Great Transformation 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 28, 38, 39, 44, 45, 50, 59, 63, 66, 67, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164 Greeks 37, 39, 57, 62, 88, 100, 128 Gülenists/FETÖ 10, 11, 106, 134, 137, 138, 139

Gülen movement see Gülenists/ FETÖ Hamidiye Cavalry (Alayları) 14, 35, 36, 52, 57, 79, 138, 143, 193 hegemony 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 2, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 48, 49, 51, 52, 58, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 133, 135, 140, 142, 146, 148, 152, 153, 154, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177; see also counter-hegemony High Election Committee (YSK) 146 Hizbullah, Kurdish-led 65, 105, 111, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 154, 155 homogenising 1, 5, 7, 9, 37, 54, 65, 140, 164 house 47, 59, 60, 133 Hüda-Par (Free Cause) 133 identity x, ix, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29, 35, 54, 55, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 78, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 151, 152, 153, 157, 158, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 177, 178; European 11, 153; Kurdish political and national 4, 7, 9, 13, 15, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 67, 70, 71, 74, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 166, 169, 170, 172, 174 ideology 2, 5, 6, 21, 25, 40, 68 73, 77, 91, 92, 94, 96, 99, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 113, 127, 131, 152, 154, 166, 169, 171, 172 imperial 14, 15, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37 40, 51, 52, 57, 58, 66, 67, 73, 75, 77, 80 imperialism 17, 34, 41, 66, 129 imperialist 28, 34, 52, 55, 62, 94, 130, 155 independence 2, 7, 14, 21, 30, 41, 42, 50, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 110, 125, 130, 154

Index  199 inner 46, 103, 165; groups 26, 106, 111, 122, 126, 168, 172, 174 institute 120, 121, 123, 137 institution 41, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 60, 67, 70, 73, 79, 82, 86, 94, 119, 146, 154, 174, 193; see also institutionalisation institutionalisation 6, 25, 80, 82, 140, 148 intellectuals (including organic and traditional) 20, 26, 50, 54, 57, 70, 71, 74, 76, 79, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 106, 108, 118, 119, 128, 132, 135, 141, 153, 155, 166, 167, 169, 194 Iran 4, 13, 20, 24, 67, 76, 89, 107, 109, 138, 157 Iraq 2, 4, 9, 67, 89, 107, 109, 128, 146, 153, 157, 170, 176 Islam 1, 12, 29, 38, 42, 50, 53, 67, 69, 100, 107, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 146, 170, 174, 179 Islamic 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 16, 26, 31, 36, 40, 44, 53, 61, 62, 68, 75, 86, 88, 96, 105, 106, 112, 118, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145, 146, 154, 155, 161, 169, 173, 174, 176; see also Kurdish Islamic Istanbul 31, 35, 52, 70, 75, 77, 70, 81, 88, 100, 101, 106, 110, 120, 132, 134, 138 Jacobin 9, 82, 86, 127 Janissary 31, 32, 41, 137 Jews 40, 56, 100, 175 justice 39, 52, 85, 93, 104, 107, 115, 136, 149, 170, 174 Justice and Development Party xi, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 102, 138, 140, 142, 149, 150, 154, 156, 157, 170, 173, 176, 194, 195; see also AKP Justice Party (AP) xi, 91 Kemalism 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81, 86, 91, 98, 131, 140, 167 Kemalist 2, 5, 8, 9, 25, 37, 59, 65, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 96, 108, 115, 127, 130, 131, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 149, 154, 155, 165 Khoybun 76, 79, 94, 167, 193 kinship 18, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 74, 161, 162, 172 Kurdi 11, 12, 70, 74, 80, 88, 106, 119, 127, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136, 147, 173, 177

Kurdish identification, mîrs 14, 16, 25, 30, 33, 34, 35, 41, 42, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 127, 135, 161, 167 Kurdish Islamic 88, 105, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 155 Kurdish language 73, 74, 76, 82, 113, 117, 120, 134, 135, 136, 137, 145, 154, 156, 195; Islamists 38, 88, 105, 126, 127, 128 129, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 155; political economy ix, 13, 15, 16, 17, 24, 25, 28, 29, 35, 41, 44, 50, 54, 56, 58, 59, 64, 109, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 177; political identity 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, 15, 22, 24, 26, 67, 78, 81, 84, 102, 103, 113, 121, 123, 146, 147, 153, 154, 158, 166, 168, 174; question ix, 2, 4, 5, 15, 24, 26, 84, 94, 113, 114, 118, 146, 151, 154, 158, 174, 177 Kurdishness 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 23, 25, 26, 37, 69, 70, 71, 74, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 99, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 118, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 153, 154, 157, 162, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177 Kurdishnesses 175; many 26, 104, 168 Kurdistan xi, 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 13, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 45, 51, 52, 56, 62, 64, 69, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 89, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 118, 122, 123, 126, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 146, 154, 159, 166, 169, 179, 193; geography 107 Kurdistani 3, 4, 7, 70, 71, 136 Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) xi, 2, 3, 7, 9, 24, 176 Kurdistan Workers’ Party ix, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 24, 26, 46, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175, 176, 194, 195; see also PKK Kurmanji 107, 145 Laclau, Ernesto 7, 19, 21, 24, 104, 125, 151, 165 laicism 75, 127, 137; see also laiklik laiklik 72

200 Index language 73, 74, 82, 93, 105, 107, 120, 122, 128, 130, 135, 141, 154, 155, 171, 172, 195 Lausanne Peace Treaty 73, 74, 100, 193 liberal 6, 7, 9, 17, 36, 37, 41, 55, 56, 59, 60, 70, 71, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 110, 113, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 125, 147, 148, 152, 153, 156, 159, 168; democracy 6, 11, 12, 85, 102, 104, 139, 147, 151, 153, 173, 175; economy 41, 56, 59, 71 liberalisation 5, 19, 31, 41, 54, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 98, 103, 104, 113, 114, 194 liberalism 1, 11, 12, 17, 18, 33, 38, 78, 90, 102, 156, 164, 167, 175 liberty 6, 12, 21, 103, 107, 109, 147, 152, 157, 169, 174, 175, 176 local 2, 6, 13, 14, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 41, 42, 45, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 73, 74, 76, 79, 82, 88, 94, 106, 110, 111, 115, 131, 133, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 145, 151, 153, 159, 160, 175, 177 Luckmann, Thomas 22, 23, 24, 128, 158 madrasa 43, 73, 74, 88, 105, 131, 137, 138, 139 majoritarian 1, 7, 27, 176 mal see house many Kurds 82, 102, 108, 155, 167, 175 mapping 106, 119, 142, 172 Marshall Plan 85, 87, 102 Marxism 109, 122; orthodox 3, 15, 109, 119, 122, 152; post-modern 122 Med-Zehra 133, 135, 155 Middle East 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 15, 24, 27, 47, 107, 150, 153, 157, 161, 169, 170, 174, 176, 177 military 5, 9, 10, 11, 21, 29, 31, 32, 42, 43, 51, 52, 71, 72, 73, 75, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87, 91, 97, 100, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 136, 138, 144, 146, 148 millet system 28, 30, 37, 39, 48, 54, 142, 159 minorities 3, 9, 40, 54, 57, 82, 88, 100, 112, 124, 128 mobilisation 5, 7, 11, 22, 31, 38, 40, 73, 89, 92, 95, 107, 109, 110, 115, 122, 131, 133, 168, 174 model 1, 5, 6, 7, 13, 15, 21, 24, 40, 45, 54, 63, 92, 113, 143, 157, 164, 165, 167, 168, 174, 176; Kurdish 3, 16, 24, 27, 157, 158, 173, 176, 177; Turkish 6

modernism 42, 70, 71, 103, 130, 137 moral economy 17, 18, 19, 25, 33, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 55, 58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 159, 160, 161, 164, 171 Mouffe, Chantal ix, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 19, 21, 24, 99, 104, 125, 150, 151, 165, 175 multiculturalism 2, 171 Musa Anter 90, 101, 166 Mustafa Kemal see Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal Naqshbandi 79, 88, 105, 137, 139 nation 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 13, 17, 22, 25, 27, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 48, 49, 50, 54, 59, 64, 66, 67, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 81, 98, 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 126, 129, 135, 137, 138, 140, 155, 157, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168; Kurdish 111, 145, 150, 162; Turkish 57, 166 national x, xi, xiii, 4, 7, 9, 12, 16, 22, 26, 27, 35, 37, 38, 52, 54, 55, 58, 69, 71, 76, 79, 82, 83, 84, 86, 90, 93, 94, 97, 100, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 131, 135, 136, 142, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 157, 169, 172, 174, 177, 178; identity 29, 99, 102, 108 128, 178 nationalism ix, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, 17, 21, 24, 37, 40, 42, 48, 53, 57, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 87, 89, 91, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 106, 109, 113, 121, 125, 126, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 145, 163, 164, 167, 173, 175 nation-state 2, 3, 13, 17, 27, 36, 38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 50, 54, 59, 64, 66, 72, 74, 109, 112, 113, 126, 138, 140, 157, 163, 165, 166, 168, 177 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) xi, 87, 102, 194 Newroz 95, 111, 112, 114, 123, 134, 170, 172, 174, 176; see also ‘newrozification’ ‘newrozification’ 26, 107 new Turkey 1, 6, 91, 154 nineteenth century 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163; see also fin de siècle non-economic institutions 18, 25, 31, 33, 38, 44, 45, 60, 61, 62, 159, 160, 161, 163 non-otherising democracy 6, 8, 11, 99, 151, 154, 176

Index  201 northern 2, 3, 9, 109, 132, 147, 151, 158, 170, 176; Iraq (Başur) 2, 9, 170, 176; Syria (Rojava) 3, 151, 170 notables 14, 31, 32, 48, 54, 57, 87 Nurcus 106, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139; Gülenists 10, 11, 134, 137, 139; Kırkıncıs 138; Zehra 105, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 154, 155; see also Med-Zehra opportunity 4, 5, 7, 14, 25, 27, 28, 35, 36, 39, 40, 48, 52, 54, 59, 63, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 103, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122, 131, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 149, 156, 169, 171, 172, 174, 175; space 10, 11, 21, 22, 23, 27, 83, 84, 85, 87, 91, 92, 98, 102, 104, 113, 117, 149, 151, 152, 153, 157, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175 organic crisis 10, 77, 85 organisation 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 26, 37, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 80, 81, 82, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 119, 120, 121, 123, 130, 131, 133, 137, 138, 139, 142, 146, 150, 164, 167, 168, 177 Ottoman 2, 4, 5, 14, 15, 16, 17, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 100, 123, 126, 134, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 157, 159, 160, 162, 193; economy 25, 32, 33, 41, 56; politics 30, 36, 51, 62; society 5, 29, 34, 36, 40, 41, 57, 140 Özal, Turgut 12, 113, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143, 193, 194 pashas 14, 42, 52, 54, 57, 72, 78 passive 4, 26, 83, 85, 92, 96, 115, 119, 121, 127, 130, 151, 166, 167, 170, 174; revolution 20, 21, 26, 69, 80, 81, 84, 90, 96, 98, 110, 153, 165, 173; struggle 9, 97, 99, 110, 129 peace xi, 8, 10, 12, 101, 103, 115, 116, 117, 144, 146, 149, 150, 152, 170, 174, 176, 195 Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP) xi, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 22, 116, 117, 121, 123, 125, 133, 136, 144, 151, 152, 153, 164, 165, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177, 195 Peoples’ Protection Unit (YPG) 3 peripheral 30, 31, 33, 34, 41, 56, 62, 63, 71, 91, 153, 159, 178

periphery 9, 17, 21, 22, 25, 28, 31, 33, 45, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 59, 71, 72, 78, 82, 83, 86; see also peripheral PKK ix, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 24, 26, 46, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175, 176, 194, 195; see also Kurdistan Workers’ Party pluralism 2, 4, 6, 15, 21, 26, 100, 102, 103, 104, 114, 117, 121, 136, 140, 142, 146, 158, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176 Polanyi, Karl ix, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 28, 38, 44, 45, 47, 66, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 177, 178 Polanyian 17, 19, 21, 24, 25, 45, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66 160, 161, 163, 164, 165 political economy ix, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 48, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 78, 88, 105, 109, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 173, 177 political identity ix, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, 22, 26, 71, 90, 93, 96, 103, 104, 108, 148, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 166, 169, 170; Islam 9, 53, 126, 138, 139; movement 2, 6, 37, 66, 75, 83, 94, 103, 104, 112, 123, 147, 148, 153, 165, 174 populism 1, 6, 7, 8, 15, 19, 21, 24, 27, 151, 153, 157, 165, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175 populist xii, 4, 6, 7, 8, 116, 163, 173 postmodern 19, 22, 24, 26, 99, 103, 106, 108, 122, 136, 138, 146, 147, 158, 167, 178 poststructuralism x, 24 progressive 6, 7, 8, 36, 40, 71, 78, 84, 101, 103, 108, 151, 173, 175, 176 pro-Kurdish political parties 9, 12, 92, 105, 107, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 131, 133, 136, 138, 142, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 154, 169, 170, 174, 175, 177, 194 PYD see Democratic Union Party radical 4, 6, 11, 15, 19, 22, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 104, 110, 112, 114, 125, 129, 131, 138, 139, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 168, 175, 176, 177, 178; democracy x, 2, 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 21, 99, 104, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 123,

202 Index 125, 142, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 157, 165, 167, 168, 173, 175, 176; pluralism 3, 22, 114, 147, 152 rebel 53, 59, 63 reciprocity 17, 18, 25, 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 48, 60, 63, 160, 161, 162 redistribution 17, 18, 25, 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 48, 60, 63, 160, 161, 162 religion 2, 21, 28, 30, 31, 39, 49, 53, 54, 56, 67, 71, 73, 74, 86, 87, 88, 93, 95, 105, 107, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 139, 140, 155, 169 Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP) xi, 11, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 88, 91, 140 Republic of Turkey 14, 25, 63, 65, 66, 131, 150, 193 resistance 3, 5, 7, 25, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 49, 55, 58, 61, 69, 72, 75, 76, 84, 88, 92, 93, 95, 108, 111, 112, 122, 142, 159, 162, 166 Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Organisation (DDKO) ix, 93, 94, 167 rhetoric 6, 7, 8, 11, 26, 53, 104, 127, 148, 152, 153, 154, 170, 175 Roboski (Uludere) 9, 136, 146, 195 Rojava 3, 7, 151, 170, 175, 176; see also northern, Syria (Rojava) Russia 24, 35, 38, 52 Said-i Kurdi 78, 79, 128, 133, 134, 135, 139, 155 Said-i Nursi see Said-i Kurdi secularism 11, 71, 75, 78, 80, 126, 137, 139, 156, 167 self-determination 34, 51, 68, 75, 95, 113, 114, 121, 151; governance 2, 3, 4, 25, 30, 31, 35, 41, 50, 51, 99, 113, 114, 168, 170, 175; rule 2, 25, 39; sufficiency 14, 34, 45, 61, 81, 161 self-regulating market 14, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 31, 33, 34, 41, 42, 47, 48, 50, 55, 60, 61, 62, 64, 159, 162, 163, 178 semi-feudal 31, 32, 41, 45, 56, 63, 160, 178 Sèvres 73, 94, 148, 193; agreement 73, 193; syndrome 94, 148 sheiks 14, 15, 16, 25, 33, 35, 42, 46, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 63, 68, 70, 71, 77, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 98, 100, 109, 128, 161, 162, 164, 167 Sheik Said 25, 67, 68, 75, 76, 78, 88, 128, 133, 135, 136, 137, 193 signifies 76, 77, 80, 98, 115, 153, 161

social constructivism 21, 22, 23, 24, 140, 170, 171, 172; see also Berger, Peter L.; Luckmann, Thomas socialism 80, 93, 107, 130, 167 society xi, 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 116, 117, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 152, 153, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 175, 177, 178; civil 10, 11, 15, 20, 26, 35, 59, 78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 90, 98, 99, 109, 114, 121, 133, 136, 139, 145, 146, 150, 165, 177, 178; Kurdish ix, 4, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 114, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146, 150, 155, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 170, 171, 172, 175; Turkish 8, 9, 82, 119, 126, 128, 145, 147 sovereign 25, 36, 110 sovereignty 2, 3, 5, 21, 30, 34, 48, 50, 52, 53, 57, 66, 71, 75, 108, 138, 151, 163, 166; see also sovereign stateless 151, 176 Sufi 38, 53, 137, 161 sultan 6, 30, 35, 36, 52, 56, 134, 193; see also sultanate sultanate 37, 66, 163 Sunni 5, 29, 30, 40, 49, 52, 53, 74, 84, 91, 98, 107, 128, 137, 138, 139, 140; see also Sunnism Sunnism 73, 137 Sykes–Picot agreement 109, 157 Tanzimat 29, 31, 34, 40, 42, 55, 56, 69, 159, 167, 193 tımar system 14, 31, 32, 33, 41, 51, 61, 159 transformation 4, 5, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64,

Index  203 66, 67, 72, 77, 81, 83, 86, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 103, 106, 112, 113, 115, 118, 122, 142, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170, 171, 177; see also Great Transformation tribe 35, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 62, 65, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 79, 100, 106, 109, 143, 144, 145, 155, 161, 162, 170; see also eshir Tunceli 25, 37, 68, 76, 77, 78, 80, 193 Turkey xii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 24, 25, 26, 27, 37, 38, 39, 44, 57, 59, 63, 65, 66, 67, 73, 76, 78, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 116, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 129, 131, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 194, 195; see also new Turkey Turkeyfication 15, 116, 124, 151 Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD) xii, 9 Turkishness 8, 37, 39, 57, 66, 73, 80, 94, 115, 120, 140, 141, 145 ummah 30, 40, 93, 94, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 134, 137, 140, 142 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) 85, 87, 147 united 11, 49, 50, 92, 108, 178 United Kingdom (UK) xii, 7, 112, 119, 120, 124 United States (US) x, xii, 24, 76, 85, 87, 112, 120, 131, 139, 178, 194 unity 9, 34, 38, 40, 46, 49, 51, 55, 57, 69, 72, 77, 79, 82, 83, 90, 93, 99, 111, 119, 121, 126, 128, 130, 134, 140, 146, 162, 176 uprising 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 63, 66, 67, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 137, 164, 166, 193 urban 9, 12, 29, 32, 37, 51, 52, 54, 56, 59, 92, 95, 106, 121, 139, 145 urbanised 19, 39, 108, 118, 141, 144, 145

vernacularised 6, 11, 95 village 49, 60, 146, 193, 195 village guard system 46, 105, 111, 112, 138, 142, 143, 144, 155, 170, 194 violence 3, 10, 15, 20, 49, 54, 58, 66, 68, 80, 81, 95, 97, 98, 102, 103, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 117, 119, 122, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 143, 144, 151, 154, 163, 170, 175, 177, 195 vote 47, 85, 88, 91, 116, 124 war 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 18, 20, 21, 37, 63, 74, 85, 87, 94, 102, 103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131, 136, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 157, 175, 193; of maneuver 20, 21, 25, 37, 68, 72, 75, 77, 78, 83, 87, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169; of position 20, 21, 26, 68, 69, 72, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169 welfare 2, 9, 147 Westphalian xi, 107, 113 Western 1, 5, 13, 14, 40, 48, 56, 70, 71, 74, 80, 82, 85, 110, 112, 121, 127, 130, 131, 134, 139, 145, 160, 161, 178 Westernisation 4, 5, 36, 137, 149, 159 ‘white Kurds’ 26, 106, 140, 145, 151, 153, 174 Women Protection Unit (YPJ) 3 Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) xii, 91, 93, 98, 194 World War I 5, 37, 193 World War II 85 Yezidi see Yezidism Yezidism 3, 34, 49, 53, 107, 123 Young Turks 5, 29, 36, 40, 57, 58, 69, 70, 73, 160, 193 YPG see Peoples’ Protection Unit (YPG) YSK see High Election Committee (YSK) Zehra 105, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 154, 155; see also Med-Zehra zeitgeist 1, 17 Zoroastrianism 107, 146