The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey: Critical Perspectives on Identity, Narratives, and Resistance (Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology) 3031332903, 9783031332906

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY

The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey Critical Perspectives on Identity, Narratives, and Resistance

Edited by Ercan Şen Elif Sandal Önal Mete Sefa Uysal Yasemin Gülsüm Acar

Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology Series Editors

Paul Nesbitt-Larking, University of Western Ontario London, Canada Catarina Kinnvall, Lund University Lund, Sweden Tereza Capelos, University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK Henk Dekker, Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

The Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology book series profiles a range of innovative contributions that investigate the leading political issues and perspectives of our time. The academic field of political psychology has been developing for almost fifty years and is now a well-established subfield of enquiry in the North American academy. In the context of new global forces of political challenge and change as well as rapidly evolving political practices and political identities, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology builds upon the North American foundations through profiling studies from Europe and the broader global context. From a theoretical perspective, the series incorporates constructionist, historical, (post) structuralist, and postcolonial analyses. Methodologically, the series is open to a range of approaches to political psychology. Psychoanalytic approaches, critical social psychology, critical discourse analysis, Social Identity Theory, rhetorical analysis, social representations, and a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies exemplify the range of approaches to the empirical world welcomed in the series. The series integrates approaches to political psychology that address matters of urgency and concern from a global perspective, including theories and perspectives on world politics and a range of international issues: the rise of social protest movements for democratic change, notably in the global South and the Middle East; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its broader implications; patterns of global migration and associated challenges of integration and religious accommodation; the formation and deformation of political, economic, and strategic transnational entities such as the European Union; conflicts and violence resulting from local and regional nationalisms; emerging political movements of the new left and the new right; ethnic violence; legacies of war and colonization; and class conflict. To submit a proposal, please contact Senior Editor Ambra Finotello ambra.finotello@ palgrave.com.

Ercan Şen • Elif Sandal Önal Mete Sefa Uysal  •  Yasemin Gülsüm Acar Editors

The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey Critical Perspectives on Identity, Narratives, and Resistance

Editors Ercan Şen Ankara, Turkey Mete Sefa Uysal Friedrich Schiller University Jena Jena, Germany

Elif Sandal Önal Bielefeld University Bielefeld, Germany Yasemin Gülsüm Acar University of St Andrews St Andrews, UK

ISSN 2946-2592     ISSN 2946-2606 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology ISBN 978-3-031-33290-6     ISBN 978-3-031-33291-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contributor: Westend61 GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

The story of this edited volume starts with waiting. When we first began to delve deeper into the research conducted in Turkey on Kurdishness, we were all in different states of uncertainty and waiting. Acar had left her position at Özyeğin University and was waiting to hear if she would leave the country for a post in Scotland. She emptied her home and entire life, and then was suspended in a position of waiting. Sandal Önal was also waiting. She had been dismissed from her position by decree law and was hoping to start a new life in Germany. Her husband and son left ahead of her, and she was waiting for the right time to make the journey herself. Şen was also dismissed by decree law. He was a PhD student who was suddenly faced with having to decide if this new Turkish academia would accept him, and whether he needed to consider his life going in a different direction. Uysal was a PhD student, only to find his university had been shut down by the government, and he was uncertain what this meant for him and his future. We dedicate this edited volume to everyone affected by the political oppression and uncertainty in Turkey, who are still waiting for justice, peace, and democracy.

Contents

Introduction  1 Ercan Sen, Elif Sandal-Önal, Mete Sefa Uysal, and Yasemin Gülsüm Acar  Overview of the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict Narratives and An Their Effects on Intergroup Relations  7 Özden Melis Ulug  Understanding the Implications of Victimhood Identity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict 29 Nisan Alici  Collective Identity in Kurds: From Collective Memory of Rights Violations to Rights Consciousness 53 Pelin Karakuş-Akalın, Melek Göregenli, and Mehmet Karasu  Oath to Death: An Analysis of Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s Contested Memory 77 Zeynep Küçük, Bülent Küçük, and Deniz Çagtay Yılmaz  The Other of the Other: Syrian Refugees from the Perspective of Kurdish Minority in Turkey103 Yasin Duman

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CONTENTS

 From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers129 Orhan Kaya and Yasemin Gülsüm Acar  Reflexivity and Positionality in Qualitative Research: On Being an Outsider in the Field145 Gülay Türkmen  How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy167 Aydın Bayad and Ercan Sen Conclusion195 Ercan Sen, Elif Sandal-Önal, Mete Sefa Uysal, and Yasemin Gülsüm Acar Index197

About the Editors

Ercan Şen   received his BA in Guidance and Psychological Counseling from Istanbul University in 2006. He received his PhD in Social Psychology from Ankara University in 2023. His research interests include intergroup processes, social identity, and peace and conflict studies. In February 2017, he was dismissed from his post at the university by decree law due to a declaration to the government to end violations in Turkish Kurdistan. Şen and other academics who were dismissed are not allowed to work in universities in Turkey. Elif  Sandal-Önal  is a postdoctoral  researcher at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) in Bielefeld University working on the politics of uncertainty, political psychological accounts of war and peace, and transnationalism and social cohesion. She received her MSc in Social Psychology from Middle East Technical University and her PhD in Political Science from Istanbul Bilgi University, where she studied othering and the politics of diversity. Her research interests also include social and political identities, nationalism, citizenship, and collective memory with a focus on historical representations. Mete Sefa Uysal  is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the department of social psychology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and visiting postdoctoral researcher at the School of Psychology, University of Sussex. He is awarded British Academy Newton International Fellowship with a project entitled Understanding the Legitimacy of Intergroup Violence using a Culturally Contextualized Lens: The Role of Honour Values in ix

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Intergroup Relations. His research focuses on collective action, violence, environmental activism, leadership, social identity, populism, and intergroup relations. Yasemin Acar  is a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of St Andrews. Acar’s research interests include outcomes of collective action, social (ethnic, religious, political) identity, and intergroup conflict. She received her PhD from Claremont Graduate University in 2015, where she specialized in social identity and identity politicization through collective action. Acar has published two books, including a recent edited volume entitled Researching Peace, Conflict, and Power in the Field: Methodological Challenges and Opportunities as part of Springer’s Peace Psychology book series. She has additionally published numerous book chapters and articles on consequences of collective action, as well as participated in research projects and produced publications on various perceptions of the Kurdish-Turkish Peace Process in Turkey.

List of Contributors

Yasemin Gülsüm Acar  University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK Nisan Alıcı  Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, UK University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Aydın Bayad  Biefeld University, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, Biefeld, Germany Yasin  Duman  KU Leuven, The Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, Leuven, Belgium Queen Margaret University, The Institute of Global Health and Development, Edinburgh, UK

Melek Göregenli  Izmir Solidarity Academy, Izmir, Turkey Pelin Karakuş-Akalın  Department of Psychology, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Northern Cyprus Mehmet Karasu  Department of Psychology, Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, Van, Turkey Orhan Kaya  Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland Bülent Küçük Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey Zeynep Küçük Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey Elif Sandal Önal  Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

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List of Contributors

Ercan Şen  Ankara, Turkey Gülay  Türkmen Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Berlin, Germany Özden  Melis  Uluğ School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK Mete Sefa Uysal  Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany Deniz Çağtay Yılmaz Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

List of Figures

An Overview of the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict Narratives and Their Effects on Intergroup Relations Fig. 1 Conceptual model of the antecedents and outcomes of the Turkish-­Kurdish conflict narratives

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Oath to Death: An Analysis of Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s Contested Memory Fig. 1 Ismet Özevcek and Sait Kırmızıtoprak, before their wedding ceremony (1961). (Image source: http://www.drsivan.info/tr/ (retrieved in 2022)) 82 Fig. 2 Sait Kırmızıtoprak with a cadaver. (Image source: http://www. drsivan.info/tr/ (retrieved in 2022)) 87 Fig. 3 Dr Şıvan in guerilla clothing. (Image source: http://www. drsivan.info/tr/ (retrieved in 2022)) 88 Fig. 4 Sait Elçi (first from the left) and Sait Kırmızıtoprak (fourth from the left) in Harbiye Open Military Prison following the Trials of 49. (Image source: http://www.drsivan.info/tr/ (retrieved in 2022))90

From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers Saturday Mothers’ 600th week action (Getty Images: https://www.evrensel.net/fotograf/190/cumartesi-­ anneleri-­600-­kez-­bir-­araya-­geldi/s/15)

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List of Figures

How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy Fig. 1 Interpretative repertoires utilised to refer to Self throughout the selected texts Fig. 2 Interpretative repertoires utilised to refer to Others throughout the selected texts

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Introduction Ercan Şen, Elif Sandal-Önal, Mete Sefa Uysal, and Yasemin Gülsüm Acar

The photograph you see on the cover of this book is of what was Hasankeyf, a city with a predominantly Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey. We say “was,” because this ancient Kurdish city with a history of 12,000 years, which harbored the birth of Eastern and Western civilizations, is now underwater. The destruction of Hasankeyf was not due to a disaster or natural event, but due to the construction of the Ilısu Dam, E. Şen (*) Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] E. Sandal-Önal Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Sefa Uysal Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Y. G. Acar University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_1

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one of many barrage projects in the region. There were many efforts, starting with the initiatives of environmental activists, to prevent the project, but to no avail. In addition to environmental activists, the initiatives of famous writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Yaşar Kemal and famous artists such as Tarkan and Sezen Aksu could not stop the Turkish State’s persistence that concluded with flooding Hasankeyf. Attending the opening of the barrage project at Hasankeyf on May 19, 2020, President Erdoğan emphasized that a wind of peace, fraternity, and prosperity would blow from the Ilısu Dam (Gazete Duvar, 2020). Similarly, many bureaucrats stated that the project would contribute 412 million dollars to the country’s economy due to the amount of energy it would produce, and provide job opportunities for many people (Euronews, 2020). Although the Turkish State presented the project as a powerful, renewable energy source and employment opportunity, the project was criticized for its devastating effects on the Kurdish resident population in the region (Zhang, 2021). In addition to the destruction of Hasankeyf, its population was forcibly migrated to the newly established city center, evoking the memories of Kurds who were forcibly displaced from their villages in the 1990s (Dissard, 2021). People removed from  their traditional houses were forced to choose; stay in Hasankeyf but live in houses sold by the state for high prices, or leave. Furthermore, it was  not only the villagers but also some of the historical buildings that  were moved to the new settlements (Euronews, 2020). Despite everything, the project was carried out by the government, most of the fertile lands in the Mesopotamian Basin were destroyed, the ecosystem in the region changed, and the Kurdish locals who live in this area faced different and destructive forms of state violence once again. The Kurdish issue, which is at the forefront of Turkey’s deep-rooted problems, continues to shape the colonialist governmental policies of Turkey, as seen in the example of Hasankeyf. Although these policies are addressed in different ways on varying levels by parties with different political backgrounds, they are far from the solution to this issue, as they share or reproduce official state narratives. This predominant approach and rhetoric in politics are also reflected in academic knowledge (for exceptions see Beşikçi, 1968, 1977) and emerge as an obstacle to academic production that is supposed to produce valid and critical pathways to addressing the Kurdish issue. This limited production in the field of social sciences is also reflected in the discipline of psychology, and it is seen that the first productions on the centenary Kurdish issue emerged after the 2000s (Şen et al., 2021).

 INTRODUCTION 

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Rationale The inspiration for this edited volume comes from research, reviews, and meta-analyses conducted by the editors on political psychological research into Kurdishness in Turkey. We all bring our unique perspectives as researchers to this work. Şen, who is a native Kurdish speaker and spent his childhood in Turkish Kurdistan, was introduced to different aspects of state violence at an early age. His childhood experiences in Kurdistan, as well as his experiences of discrimination in the major cities of Ankara and ̇ Istanbul, where he studied and worked as an academic, spurred his interest in studying different aspects of the Kurdish issue academically. Sandal-­ Önal has her roots in Dersim, but never lived in Kurdistan, nor speaks Kurdish/Zazaki. Apart from her research interests and being an Academic for Peace, her relationship to Kurdishness is linked to the stories her grandparents told her about the Dersim Massacre. Uysal is a Turkish researcher who has never been to Kurdistan and does not speak Kurdish. His first experiences of Kurdishness came when he politicized in his university years. His understanding, position, and identity related to Kurdishness are based on his relationship with close Kurdish friends and his wife, as well as his research into the Turkish-Kurdish conflict and Kurdish resistance. Acar is Turkish-American and only lived in Turkey as an adult. She studied the Kurdish language as a means to better connect with her Kurdish friends, as well as to support her field research into the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Her experience of Kurdishness is primarily through close friends and research into the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, as well as her later status as an Academic for Peace. Kurdishness as a subject has often functioned as an applied context for many researchers seeking to replicate social psychological theories in Kurdish and Turkish contexts. This approach, however, misses the crucial questions that exist around studying Kurdishness in Turkey. For one, Kurdishness as an identity has been hotly contested and it is only in recent years that a political identity of “Kurdish” exists. At the same time, this identity is often a trigger word for political issues, such that even defining oneself as Kurdish can be a political act. At the same time, research on Kurdishness does not often enough recognize the dynamic social and political context of Turkey, and the historical and contemporary dynamics of the ongoing Turkish-Kurdish conflict when discussing its outcomes, losing out on important elements of data as well as reasons for the outcomes that are found.

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We believe that research into Kurdishness touches on many of the important global issues within contemporary social and political psychology—questions about the rigors of methodology, the importance of reflexivity, issues of replicability, and the role of decolonization in research on actors in intractable conflicts. This volume will provide an in-depth account of historical and contemporary research on Kurdishness in Turkey, including research on social identity, intergroup contact, conflict and conflict resolution, as well as collective action and resistance. It will also address methodological issues including fieldwork in conflict zones, reflexivity in research, and intersectionality. This volume also provides lessons from related disciplines such as Kurdish studies and sociology to provide political psychologists some insight into their own research practices from disciplines wherein questions of intersectionality and reflexivity have long been ongoing.

The Chapters This volume is divided into three overarching sections, though many of the chapters may speak to themes in different sections. The first section, Intergroup conflict in Turkey: Conflict narratives and conflict-related identities, explores the way that the Turkish-Kurdish conflict is understood by the general public of Turkey as well as how Kurds have ingrained the conflict in their own identities. There are three chapters in this section. Uluğ starts the volume with a focus on the conflict frames that have been identified and endorsed about the Turkish-Kurdish conflict (chapter “An Overview of the Turkish-­Kurdish Conflict Narratives and Their Effects on Intergroup Relations”). The content of these frames, their antecedents and their outcomes are all discussed. The section continues with the topic of victimhood and victim identity. Although most of the studies on the Kurdish community in Turkey focus on the antecedents and consequences of victimization of this community, little is known about what “victimhood identity” means for those who are victimized. Alıcı scrutinizes the concepts of victimhood and the meanings of victimhood identity for Kurds around the concepts of vulnerability, agency, resistance, and empowerment (chapter “Understanding the Implications of Victimhood Identity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict”). The last chapter of this section by Karakuş and colleagues deals with the dynamics in the formation of Kurdish identity as a politicized collective category. The authors introduce the concept of rights consciousness as the key explanatory factor that politicizes

 INTRODUCTION 

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Kurdish identity while they propose that this consciousness evolves from the intergenerational transmission of violations of rights. The second section, Collective action: Memory, inter-minority relations, and Kurdish resistance, focuses on the many ways that resistance has taken place within the Kurdish movement. The first chapter by Küçük, et  al. (chapter “Oath to Death: An Analysis of Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s Contested Memory”) presents a sociological account of Kurdish collective memory by narrating the life and death of a prominent Kurdish figure, Sait Kırmızıtoprak, or Doctor Şıvan. The authors reflect on the oblivion of his memory and argue that Kurdish people do not have an official history and their memories are fading, resulting in the loss of their collective meaning making systems and the continuation of colonial violence. Then, Duman continues the section with a focus on the relationship between Kurdish (the largest internally displaced population in the world and Turkey) and Syrian (the largest refugee population in the world and in Turkey) communities in Turkey (chapter “The Other of the Other: Syrian Refugees from the Perspective of Kurdish Minority in Turkey”). The chapter examines the Kurdish community members’ perceptions of and attitudes toward Syrian refugees within the political psychological frameworks of social dominance orientation, social identity, and collective psychological ownership. Last, Kaya and  Acar focus on a specific group, the Saturday Mothers, and how their nearly 30 years of resistance has been passed from one generation to the next (chapter “From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers”). They discuss how they met and engaged in research with the Saturday Mothers, and how growing up in a protest movement has affected the subsequent generations. The third section, Reflexivity and positionality in Kurdishness and Kurdish Conflict Research in Turkey, focuses on the methodological and epistemological aspects of the issues discussed in previous sections. Türkmen starts the third section with the importance of positionality in social scientific research. In this chapter, based on her field research among Kurdish religious elites in Southeastern Anatolia, where she was an outsider, Türkmen discusses the challenges and advantages of the outsider position (chapter “Reflexivity and Positionality in Qualitative Research: On Being an Outsider in the Field”). In the last chapter, Bayad and Şen analyze the colonial legacy of Turkish psychology by using the interpretative repertoire method (chapter “How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy”). By tracing influential figures and publications in psychology

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dealing with the social problem of their eras, Bayad and Şen discuss the colonial traces of the history of psychology in Turkey.

References Beşikçi, I.̇ (1968). Doğuda degĭ sim ve yapısal sorunlar: Göçebe Alikan Asireti [The change and structural problems in the East of Turkey: The nomadic Alikan tribe].Yurt Kitap Yayın. Beşikçi, I.̇ (1977). Türk tarih tezi" güneş-dil teorisi" ve Kürt sorunu [Turkish history thesis, the sun language theory and Kurdish question]. Dengê Komal. Dissard, L. (2021). Hasankeyf, the Ilısu Dam, and the Kurdish Movement in Turkey. In S.  E. Hunt (Ed.). Ecological solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Thought, practice, challenges, and opportunities (pp.  191–202). Lexington Books. Euronews (2020, July 10). Hasankeyf sular altında: Peki yerel halk şimdi ne yapacak?. https://bit.ly/3JPdUSw. Gazeteduvar (2020, May 19). Hasankeyf'i sular altında bırakan Ilısu'nun açılışı yapıldı. https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/gundem/2020/05/19/hasankeyfi­sular-­altinda-­birakan-­ilisunun-­acilisi-­yapildi. Şen, E., Uysal, M. S., Sandal-Önal, E., & Acar, Y. G. (2021). Nêrîneke rexneyî li xebatên derbarê qada derûnnasiya civakî [Critical review of social psychological studies]. Psychology Kurdi, 12, 23–32. Zhang, I. (2021). Submerging Kurdish history in Turkey: A case study of the Ilisu Dam. The Middle East International Journal for Social Sciences, 3(1), 1–8.

An Overview of the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict Narratives and Their Effects on Intergroup Relations Özden Melis Uluğ

The Turkish-Kurdish conflict in Turkey is an intractable conflict that has been ongoing for decades. After the foundation of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923, non-Turkish identities, such as Kurdish identity and their cultural expressions, were denied and repressed by the Turkish state under the state ideology, Kemalism (Kirişçi & Winrow, 1997). This state ideology has been argued to be one of the reasons for the conflict in the country. To challenge the repression on Kurds, the armed wing of the Kurdish national movement, the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan–Kurdistan Workers’ Party) launched its first major attacks in 1984. Since 1984, there have been many periods of escalation and de-escalation. The most recent attempt to build peace in the country also failed in 2015 (Özpek, 2017).

Ö. M. Uluğ (*) School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_2

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The Turkish-Kurdish conflict has been affecting millions of lives since its inception. It has led to the death of as many as 45,000 people and thousands of murders by unknown assailants (see Çelik, 2005; Çelik & Kantowitz, 2009). Over a million people have also been displaced from the east and southeast Turkey to cities in the south and the west (e.g., Mersin and Izmir; see Saraçoğlu, 2011; Uluğ et al., 2017). In response to the ongoing Turkish-Kurdish conflict, conflicting parties and other ethnic groups have tried to make sense of it. As a result, different conflict narratives have been constructed since the start of the conflict. In this chapter, I aim to provide an overview of how Turkish-Kurdish conflict narratives have been studied in social-psychological studies, as well as the antecedents and outcomes of endorsing such narratives.

Conflict Narratives in the Context of the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict Conflict narratives can be conceptualized as stories that frame the conflict, including how it is defined, its causes, and potential solutions (Uluğ et al., 2023). How people see conflicts and endorse conflict narratives shapes their reactions to possible solutions to the conflict (e.g., Bar-Tal, 2013; Kaufman et al., 2003). Therefore, one can argue that conflict narratives have consequences for conflict- and peace-related outcomes. Previous studies have shown that the Turkish-Kurdish conflict may be identified at three levels, or in other words, in three conflict frames (Çelik & Blum, 2007; see also Bilali, 2014): (a) a terrorism frame or an armed conflict frame that defines the conflict as a conflict between the Turkish state and PKK; (b) a minority rights frame that sees the conflict as a conflict between the Turkish state and an ethnic minority group, Kurds; and (c) an ethnic tension frame that sees the conflict as a conflict between two ethnic groups, Turks and Kurds (see also Çelebi et al., 2014; Ergin, 2014). However, Çelik and Blum’s (2007) frames are not based on empirical research but on theoretical observations. In addition, I argued in my previous work that there might be other conflict frames that are equally substantial (e.g., Uluğ, 2016; Uluğ & Cohrs, 2016, 2019). For example, some people may see the conflict as an economic problem that stems from the underdevelopment of the Kurdish region (e.g., Tan, 2008). Therefore, I conducted empirical studies to provide additional insights into the Turkish-Kurdish conflict frames not only from the perspective of (a) lay

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people but also from the perspective of (b) academics and journalists as well as (c) members of Parliament in Turkey. I first conducted focus group discussions with Turks and Kurds as well as collected data through open-ended questions in Mersin and Diyarbakır. Thus, I could collect people’s perspectives on the Turkish-Kurdish conflict (Uluğ et al., 2017). Then, based on the qualitative data I collected from these studies, I designed Q methodology studies to collect data from three segments of society (i.e., lay people, academics/journalists, and politicians). I used Q methodology in these studies because it is suitable for finding socially shared perspectives across different groups (especially conflicting groups). In addition, this methodology helps explore people’s subjective positions on the topic. In my own work, I used Q methodology to identify conflict narratives across all segments of society. I collected data from 71 lay people from different ethnic backgrounds, 41 academics and journalists from various universities and media outlets (i.e., experts), and 23 members of Parliament from four different political parties. As a result, I found four conflict perspectives across lay people (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2016), two conflict perspectives across academics and journalists (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017a), and four conflict perspectives across members of Parliament (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017b). Later, I analyzed these ten perspectives using a second-­ order analysis and found five overlapping perspectives. I wrote these five narratives based on the findings of these three studies across all segments of society (see Table 1 for the labels of these perspectives in the original studies, similarities, and differences; Uluğ, 2016). I explain each of them

Table 1  Summary of narratives #

Factors

Factor labels

Final narrative

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Politicians–1 Politicians–2 Politicians–3 Politicians–4 Experts–1 Experts–2 Lay people–1 Lay people–2 Lay people–3 Lay people–4

Turkish Nationalist Social Democratic Islamist Pro-Kurdish Democracy and identity problem Democracy and economy Terrorism and foreign power Class, economy, and democracy Rights, freedom, and democracy Independence

Terrorism narrative Democracy and rights narrative Democracy and Islam narrative Independence narrative Independence narrative Democracy and rights narrative Terrorism narrative Economic narrative Democracy and rights narrative Independence narrative

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below (see Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c for a more detailed overview of these narratives): 1. Terrorism Narrative. “In my opinion, this problem is a problem created by the PKK. The causes of this problem are the PKK and the instigation of foreign powers. If we want to solve this problem, the PKK should lay down its weapons, and the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) should fight and end terror through active counter-terrorism policies. However, the profiteers from this problem are barriers to the solution of the problem. At the same time, the unitary state structure of Turkey should not be changed.” 2. Economic Narrative. “In my opinion, the Kurdish problem is an underdevelopment and unemployment problem in the region, not an identity problem. Because the problem stems from the feudal structure of the region, the problem is also a class-related problem in the region. If we want to solve this problem, there should be economic development and increased job opportunities, and the implementation of agrarian and land reform. At the same time, the unitary state structure of Turkey should not be changed.” 3. Democracy and Islam Narrative. “In my opinion, the Kurdish problem is a democratization problem which stems from the abandonment of Muslimness and forcing Turkishness instead. If we want to solve this problem, there should be deep-rooted democratization and implementation of human rights, and strengthening of local administrations as well as economic development and increased job opportunities. The most promising solution to the problem is Turks’ and Kurds’ uniting again under the umbrella of Islam. However, the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) is a barrier to the solution of the problem because this party puts an emphasis on the ‘Turkishness.’” 4. Democracy and Rights Narrative. “In my opinion, the Kurdish problem is a democratization problem as well as a right and freedom problem. The denial of the Kurds for many years and the assimilation policies over Kurds, and the withholding of their cultural rights caused this problem. If we want to solve this problem, there should be deep-rooted democratization and implementation of human rights and strengthening of local administrations. However, we should also accept that the PKK is a terrorist group and should, therefore, lay down its arms.” 5. Independence Narrative. “In my opinion, the Kurdish problem is an independence problem for Kurds because the status of Kurds living in

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Turkey is like a colony under the Republic of Turkey. Therefore, if we want to resolve this problem, an independent Kurdistan should be established, and its imprisoned leader should be released.” Even though these narratives exist across different segments of society, they are usually endorsed by different ethnic groups. For example, while the independence narrative is largely endorsed by Kurds, who have a disadvantaged position in society, the terrorism narrative is largely endorsed by Turks, who have an advantaged position (see, e.g., Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c; Uluğ et al., 2021a). However, I should note that this does not necessarily mean that there are no Kurds who endorse the terrorism narrative or Turks who endorse the independence narrative. The economic narrative is usually shared by the advantaged group members, Turks, although in a couple of studies, it has also been shown that there are ethnic Arabs who endorse this narrative (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2016, 2019). The democracy and Islam narrative is also endorsed mostly by Kurds (e.g., Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017b). However, the democracy and rights narrative is endorsed by people from different ethnic backgrounds, such as Turks, Kurds, and Arabs (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2016). Based on these findings, it is fair to argue that ethnic identity may shape the way people understand conflicts in their society. Below, I first discuss how different social-psychological predictors, including ethnic identity, may play an important role in people’s endorsement of these conflict narratives in the context of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Second, I discuss how these narratives, in turn, may shape people’s attitudes toward conflict resolution and peacebuilding in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context (see Fig. 1 for a visual illustration of these antecedents and outcomes).

Fig. 1  Conceptual model of the antecedents and outcomes of the Turkish-­ Kurdish conflict narratives

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Antecedents of Endorsing Different Turkish-­Kurdish Conflict Narratives When looking at the works adopting a social psychological perspective on the predictors of endorsing conflict narratives in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context, I see three interrelated antecedents: (a) ethnic identification, (b) allyship and ally identity, and (c) intergroup contact. Below, relying on empirical articles with a social psychological approach, I provide an overview of the antecedents of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict narratives. Ethnic Identification One can argue that identifying with one’s ethnic group may have positive and negative outcomes for intergroup relations (Masson & Verkuyten, 1993; Phinney et al., 1997). On the one hand, ethnic identification predicts more ingroup favoritism and more positive evaluations of one’s own group (Maloku et al., 2016; Masson & Verkuyten, 1993) as well as more wellbeing, especially among disadvantaged group members (Zdrenka et al., 2015). On the other hand, ethnic identification predicts less warmth towards outgroup members, less intergroup trust (Cakal & Petrović, 2017), less support for minority rights (Uluğ & Uysal, 2023; Verkuyten & Yildiz, 2006), and more prejudice and discrimination against outgroup members (Mummendey et al., 2001; Negy et al., 2003). A few studies conducted in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context have also shown important findings on how ethnic identification may be related to intergroup outcomes. To illustrate, higher ethnic identification among Turks is related to negative outgroup attitudes (Bağcı & Çelebi, 2017) as well as to patriotism (Çoymak, 2018). Similarly, Çelebi et al. (2014) indicated that higher ethnic identification among Turks is associated with lower trust in Kurds, highlighting negative outcomes of ethnic identification for the intergroup relations between Turks and Kurds. After identifying those above-mentioned Turkish-Kurdish conflict narratives, I conducted other empirical studies to examine possible antecedents of endorsing such narratives. For example, in one study (Uluğ & Uysal, 2023), I examined the role of ethnic identification in the endorsement of the minority group’s conflict narrative (i.e., independence narrative) among both ethnic Turks (advantaged group members) and Kurds (disadvantaged group members). I hypothesized that stronger ethnic identification with the minority group (i.e., Kurdish identification) would

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predict higher endorsement of the independence narrative among the minority group. However, I also hypothesized that this would be the opposite for the majority group members: stronger ethnic identification with the majority group (i.e., Turkish identification) would predict less endorsement of the independence narrative. Across both studies, these hypotheses were confirmed. While higher Kurdish identification was associated with higher endorsement of the independence narrative among Kurds, higher Turkish identification was associated with less endorsement of the independence narrative among Turks. Allyship and Ally Identity In addition to ethnic identity, another identity that may play a key role in conflict settings is ally identity (see Selvanathan et al., 2020, for a discussion on the impact of allies on intergroup relations). Allies are usually defined as majority group members who (a) support egalitarian ideals and social justice (Ashburn-Nardo, 2018), (b) advocate “for others motivated by the values and norms of the ingroup for its own ends” (Louis et al., 2019, p.  1), and (c) take action against the oppression of members of minority groups (Uluğ & Tropp, 2021; Wijeyesinghe et al., 1997). Allies generally tend to have lower prejudice and higher internal motivation to respond without prejudice (Ostrove & Brown, 2018) and be more ingroup-critical (Case, 2012) than non-allies. They are also more likely to take action for disadvantaged groups to the extent their privilege awareness is high (Uluğ & Tropp, 2021), they are close to people who are targeted by prejudice (Tropp & Uluğ, 2019), and communicate about group differences in power during contact situations (Tropp et al., 2021). I conceptualize allies in conflict settings as “a person or group in a privileged position that advocates and actively works for the inclusion of marginalized, victimized, or otherwise oppressed individuals or social groups, challenges power inequalities, and seeks to amplify their voices in society in order to achieve equality between advantaged and disadvantaged (conflict) groups” (Uluğ et al., 2022a). In line with this definition, I define Turkish allies as people who support Kurdish rights in general in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context. Even though Turkish allies may have different positions on which rights should be supported (e.g., language rights vs. independence for Kurds; Uluğ & Uysal, 2023), Turks who support the Kurdish movement and/or Kurdish rights can be seen as allies.

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In one of my recent studies, I aimed to understand the moderating role of allyship in the relationship between ethnic identity and endorsing the independence narrative among advantaged group members (i.e., Turks; Uluğ & Uysal, 2023). I expected that the strength of the relationship between Turkish ethnic identification and endorsement of the independence narrative would be particularly strong among strong allies. I found the relationship between ethnic identification and the endorsement of the independence narrative was strongest among strong allies, thus supporting the moderation hypothesis. The results of this study show that the allyship of advantaged group members should be taken into account in conflict settings as the way people, especially advantaged group members, construct identities and endorse certain narratives may be affected by people’s other ideological identities (i.e., ally identity). In a similar work, I also tested the relationship between ethnic identification and endorsement of dominant conflict narratives (i.e., terrorism & independence narratives) among Turks. However, in this recent study (Uluğ, 2023), rather than focusing on Turks as the advantaged group, I focused on a subgroup of Turks: çapulcu Turks. To give some context to this identity, a few days after the Gezi Park protests started in 2013, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called the protestors “çapulcu” (looter in English) as an insult (Odağ et al., 2016). As a result, some protestors quickly adopted the term meant to derogate the protesters, instantly becoming a badge of honor and identification (Ertem, 2018; Uluğ & Acar, 2019). Therefore, in my work, I specifically focused on this group because it has both an advantaged ethnic (Turkish) and disadvantaged opinion-based identity (çapulcu), so one could argue that they are more likely to become allies to Kurds than non-çapulcu Turks. In this study (Uluğ, 2023), I tested whether ethnic Turkish identification would be related to the endorsement of the terrorism and independence narratives among çapulcu Turks. I hypothesized that ethnic Turkish identification would be positively related to the endorsement of the terrorism narrative, whereas it would be negatively related to the endorsement of the independence narrative among this group. Similar to other studies (e.g., Uluğ & Uysal, 2023), I found support for my hypotheses. Thus, I showed how both ethnic and ally identities might be an important predictor of endorsing various conflict narratives in conflict contexts.

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Intergroup Contact Another crucial social-psychological factor in conflict contexts is contact between conflicting groups. In such contexts, intergroup contact has been used as an effective way to reduce intergroup conflicts (Paluck et al., 2019) because intergroup contact may change people’s broader views on intergroup relationships, such as by helping people engage more deeply with the other’s views (Tropp et al., 2021) as well as changing people’s perspectives to be more in line with the outgroup (Davies et al., 2011). Intergroup contact is generally described positively in the psychology literature as it seems to positively affect especially majority/advantaged groups’ perspectives (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). However, some recent studies have also shown that contact outcomes may not be so positive for minority groups (Dixon et al., 2010). For example, a meta-analytic review suggests that the effects of contact are weaker for minority than for majority group members (Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). Moreover, in conflict settings, positive contact with majority group members (e.g., Kurds’ having positive contact experiences with Turks) might not be beneficial for minority group members (e.g., Kurds). The reason is that positive contact experiences with majority group members might increase their support for pro-majority rather than pro-minority policies (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c). The role of intergroup contact from a social-psychological perspective in the context of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict has been frequently studied thanks to Bagci and colleagues (see Bagci et al., 2022 for a recent discussion). They have conducted numerous studies to disentangle the role of intergroup contact on collective action (Bagci et al., 2019a), prejudicial attitudes (Bagci et  al., 2020), and acculturation (Bagci et  al., 2019b). However, the role of intergroup contact in endorsing conflict narratives has been less examined. In one of my works (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c), I tested whether intergroup contact would be associated with the endorsement of five conflict narratives. I tested this relationship not only among minority group members (i.e., Kurds) but also among majority group members (i.e., Turks) but separating them into two subgroups: (a) majority-­ status (i.e., non-çapulcu Turks), and (b) majority-status, but excluded at the political level (i.e., çapulcu Turks; for a similar approach, see also Uluğ, 2023). The results were different for each group. Among non-çapulcu Turks, contact with Kurds was unrelated to any conflict narratives. Among çapulcu Turks, contact with Kurds was a negative predictor of the

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endorsement of terrorism and economic narratives and a positive predictor of the endorsement of the independence narrative. Among Kurds, contact with Turks was a negative predictor of the endorsement of the independence narrative and a positive predictor of the endorsement of (a) terrorism, (b) economic, (c) democracy and rights, and (d) (marginally) democracy and Islam narratives. This study shows how relevant intergroup contact may be in understanding the way people understand, frame, and see conflicts. However, the results also highlight the role of group status in moderating these relationships.

Conflict- and Peace-Related Outcomes of Endorsing the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict Narratives Many works adopting a social psychological perspective on the outcomes of the conflict narratives in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context focus on conflict- and peace-related variables. These variables could be summarized under five interrelated outcomes: (a) competitive victimhood, (b) forgiveness and reconciliation, (c) attitudes toward conflict resolution and peacebuilding, (d) intergroup solidarity, and (e) support for minority rights. Like the antecedents of the conflict narratives section, I again provide an overview of the outcomes of endorsing the Turkish-Kurdish conflict narratives by relying upon empirical articles with a social psychological approach. Competitive Victimhood Competitive victimhood is a type of victimhood based on a belief that one’s own group has suffered more than the adversarial group (Noor et al., 2012; Sullivan et al., 2012). Competitive victimhood has been studied in many different conflict contexts, such as Chile (e.g., Noor et  al., 2008), Israel (e.g., Kahalon et al., 2019), and Kosovo (Andrighetto et al., 2012). Competitive victimhood has also been studied in Turkey. For example, both Kaval (2021) and Bagci et al. (2021) examined the predictors of competitive victimhood in Turkey by focusing on factors such as outgroup trust, collective narcissism, ingroup satisfaction, moral defensiveness, cross-group friendships, outgroup perspective-taking, and ingroup identification. Even though Adelman et al. (2016) showed how exposure to inclusive vs. exclusive conflict narratives might affect

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competitive victimhood among Kurds in Turkey, there were few attempts to understand how endorsement of different conflict narratives is also related to competitive victimhood. To give an example, in one of my works, I investigated how endorsement of the dominant conflict narratives (i.e., terrorism and independence narratives) is associated with competitive victimhood (Uluğ et al., 2021a). I found that endorsing the terrorism narrative predicts more competitive victimhood among the advantaged group members, in other words, Turks in Turkey. However, endorsement of the independence narrative was not related to competitive victimhood among Turks. Similarly, I found that reading an inclusive victimhood narrative (e.g., both ingroup and outgroup suffering) instead of an exclusive narrative (e.g., only ingroup suffering) reduces competitive victimhood among Turks in Turkey (Uluğ et  al., 2022b). However, this was the case only among non-allies (i.e., people who do not support the Kurdish movement) but not among allies in Turkey. These results show that both (a) being exposed to and (b) endorsing different conflict narratives may shape how people engage in competitive victimhood and, thus, may increase or decrease their competitive victimhood beliefs. Forgiveness and Reconciliation Forgiveness can be conceptualized as “a change of motivations and restoration of discordant relationships by abandoning the negative feelings towards a perpetrating outgroup” (Baysu & Coşkan, 2018, p.  749). Similar to, yet different from, forgiveness, reconciliation is defined as “the process of removing the psychological barriers that block the path to healing discordant relationships and restoring the adversaries’ positive identities” (Harth & Shnabel, 2015, p. 676; see also Kelman, 2008; Shnabel & Nadler, 2008). Forgiveness and reconciliation have been examined in various conflict and post-conflict societies (e.g., Cehajic et  al., 2008; Hornsey & Wohl, 2013; Uluğ et al., 2021b). These two social-psychological processes have also been studied in the context of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict (e.g., Baysu & Coşkan, 2018; Baysu et  al., 2018; Bocheńska, 2018; Şen & Coşkan, 2021). In my own work, I examined the role of conflict narratives in both majority and minority members’ willingness to reconcile with the outgroup members (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c) and majority group members’ willingness to forgive outgroup members (Uluğ et  al., 2021a). First, I

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investigated how endorsement of these five different conflict narratives (i.e., terrorism narrative, economic narrative, democracy and Islam narrative, democracy and rights narrative, independence narrative) are associated with willingness to reconcile with outgroup members among both Turks (çapulcu Turks vs. non-çapulcu Turks) and Kurds. The results showed that stronger endorsement of the terrorism narrative predicts lower support for reconciliation across three groups (i.e., çapulcu Turks, non-çapulcu Turks, and Kurds). The economic narrative and democracy and Islam narrative did not predict support for reconciliation across all groups whereas the democracy and rights narrative consistently predicted greater support for reconciliation across all groups. Last, the independence narrative consistently predicted lower support for reconciliation in all three groups (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c). In my recent work, I also examined how dominant conflict narratives (i.e., terrorism and independence narratives) are related to Turks’ willingness to forgive Kurds for their misdeeds (Uluğ et al., 2021a). The results showed that endorsement of both conflict narratives was not related to forgiveness among Turks; however, through increasing competitive victimhood, one can argue that endorsement of the terrorism narrative may indirectly decrease Turks’ willingness to forgive Kurds. However, this was not the case through the endorsement of the independence narrative for Turks. Attitudes Toward Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding As I mentioned earlier, the way people understand conflict shapes their attitudes toward conflict resolution and peacebuilding. In my work, I also examined people’s support for (a) peace, (b) nonviolent conflict resolution, (c) stopping violence, as well as (d) aggressive policies in the Turkish-­ Kurdish conflict context (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c; Uluğ et al., 2021a). The results showed that the effects of conflict narratives on these conflict- and peace-related outcomes depend on the participants’ group status (i.e., advantaged vs. disadvantaged). Stronger endorsement of the terrorism narrative predicted lower support for stopping violence but higher support for aggressive policies among Turks (Uluğ et al., 2021a) and lower support for peace among Kurds (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c). Similarly, stronger endorsement of the economic narrative predicted lower support for the peace process across all groups (i.e., çapulcu Turks, non-çapulcu Turks, and Kurds). Endorsement of the democracy and Islam narrative only

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predicted higher support for peace among non-çapulcu Turks, but it was not related to supporting peace among çapulcu Turks and Kurds. Stronger endorsement of the democracy and rights narrative also predicted greater support for peace, but this relationship was not significant among Kurds. Last, a stronger endorsement of the independence narrative was unrelated to support for peace among Kurds, but it was associated with greater support for the peace process (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017c) and support for nonviolent conflict resolution among Turks (Uluğ et al., 2021a). Intergroup Solidarity I have recently examined how endorsement of dominant conflict narratives may be related to intergroup solidarity, especially among advantaged group members (i.e., Turks; Uluğ, 2023). In this study, I focused on çapulcu Turks’—who have both advantaged (Turkish) and disadvantaged identities (çapulcu)—support for solidarity with Kurds. The findings showed that among çapulcu Turks, higher endorsement of the terrorism narrative predicted less political solidarity with Kurds. In contrast, higher endorsement of the independence narrative—the narrative of Kurds—predicted more political solidarity with Kurds. Support for Minority Rights Finally, the relationship between conflict narratives and support for minority rights in the context of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context has been studied as well. However, this time, only the role of the minority group’s conflict narrative (i.e., independence narrative) in support of minority rights (i.e., Kurdish rights) has been examined both among Turks and Kurds (Uluğ & Uysal, 2023). The results showed that more endorsement of the independence narrative was associated with more support for minority rights across both groups. However, allyship again moderated this relationship among Turks: the strength of the relationship between endorsement of the minority group’s conflict narrative and support for minority rights is particularly strong among weak allies.

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Conclusion and Future Directions In this chapter, I provided an overview of recent studies on Turkish-­ Kurdish conflict narratives. After presenting these five conflict narratives in detail, I showed in which contexts these narratives have been studied and with which groups. In addition, I also summarized empirical studies of the antecedents of conflict narratives as well as conflict- and peace-related outcomes of endorsing such narratives. Overall, it is fair to argue that the content of narratives (e.g., whether it frames the conflict as a terrorism vs. independence problem) and the group status of those who endorse such narratives (e.g., advantaged or disadvantaged or both) matter for intergroup relations. I suggest several avenues of research that may be helpful for those who wish to broaden their understanding of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict narratives. For example, whether the Turkish-Kurdish conflict narratives are generalizable to other (post-)conflict societies should also be examined. So far, only the dominant Turkish-Kurdish narratives have been adapted and tested in Israel (Uluğ et al., 2021a) and Northern Ireland (Uluğ et al., 2023) but not in any other contexts such as Columbia, Cyprus, Spain, Indonesia, or Sri Lanka. Future studies may also focus on other narratives, such as the democracy and rights narrative, to see whether the contents of those narratives are replicable in and generalized to different contexts. Similarly, the same narratives may be tested with diaspora groups in various countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K. One of the limitations of the narratives I use in my work is that these narratives may have the potential to be multi-barreled and, therefore, multi-dimensional (Uluğ et al., 2021a). For example, people may agree with the definition and the causes of the conflict but not with the solution suggested for the conflict. In that case, their response to these narratives (i.e., to what extent they endorse them) may not represent their actual position. Therefore, future studies may also create more narratives with similar definitions yet different solutions to see how those narratives may be associated with people’s attitudes toward conflict resolution and peacebuilding. In addition, some social-psychological variables and their relationship to conflict narratives have not yet been examined in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context. These include but are not limited to emotions (e.g., anger, hatred) as a response to endorsing certain narratives, mental health outcomes of endorsing those narratives (e.g., endorsing the independence

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narrative, yet, not achieving the desired outcome), the role of acknowledgment of ingroup responsibility in the conflict in rejecting some narratives (e.g., rejecting the terrorism narrative for Turks), and the role of narratives in supporting various forms of justice (e.g., Kurds’ support for retributive justice). Before I conclude the chapter, I want to mention two critical points. I believe researchers should consider (1) the importance of contextual factors while studying these narratives and (2) the difficulty of studying such narratives in this context. Even though social psychologists in Turkey were silent on this conflict in the past and did not study this topic for a long time for various reasons (Göregenli, 2010; see also Bayad & Şen, this volume, chapter “How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy”), more researchers have started studying the Turkish-Kurdish conflict after the peace process. However, the failure of the peace process, increasing authoritarianism, and polarization in Turkey have also changed the way researchers approach this topic. Given that studying conflict is a sensitive topic, and in contexts where trust between groups is low, it is easy to be labeled by the participants as a spy or someone who works for the government (Moss et  al., 2019). Similarly, as the Turkish government targets those who support Kurdish rights or study these topics (except those who endorse the terrorism narrative), studying such topics also puts researchers at risk in Turkey. It is important to bear the contextual factors in mind when examining the findings of the existing research, as well as to recognize that context may be a reason that more research from a social-­ psychological perspective has not been produced. Overall, conflict narratives play a crucial role in shaping the course of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. In the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context, these above-mentioned studies have shown how people (a) construct their ingroup and political identities and (b) interact with outgroup members may help them see the conflict from a particular viewpoint. Similarly, the findings highlight how endorsing some narratives may (a) increase people’s willingness to choose peace over conflict, (b) reduce their support for violence, (c) forgive and reconcile with one another, as well as support (d) the disadvantaged group and (e) their rights to achieve their political aims. I hope this chapter is useful for organizing the conflict narratives literature in a meaningful way to provide an overview of the studies and the gaps by using the Turkish-Kurdish conflict context as a conflict case.

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Understanding the Implications of Victimhood Identity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict Nisan Alici

Introduction The meanings attached to the victim status in a particular society are shaped by a set of criteria, actors, and practices. Social norms and customs play an important role in determining it. While many studies have analysed the Kurdish conflict’s impact on populations, the complexities and constructions of the category of victimhood have been understudied. Understanding the implications and connotations of victimhood is crucial to capture how different victim groups make sense of their experiences and how they are seen by civil society representatives who work closely with them. This chapter, therefore, explores the issues surrounding the

N. Alıcı (*) Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, UK University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_3

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construction and complexities of victimhood in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict, by primarily focusing on Kurds who have experienced state violence. Drawing on 24 in-depth interviews with individuals who either have a victimisation experience or worked closely with victim groups, I focus on the connotations of the term victim and analyse (1) how victims identify and make sense of their victimhood and (2) what various perceptions of victimhood the grassroots actors hold. Capturing the implications of victim status and connotations of victimhood may help design peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms in line with the demands and experiences of those who have been most affected by the conflict. Understanding how some groups relate to the victimhood category also provides us with a better picture of where they stand in intergroup relations in Turkey. Once the conflict has ended, and a reconciliation process has started, this will be even more relevant for creating long-term, sustainable peace. This chapter is part of a broader research project focusing on transitional justice in Turkey’s ongoing Kurdish conflict from a victim-centred and grassroots-oriented approach. In the larger frame of this project, I also analyse how organised victims of conflict can advance the goals of transitional justice in the absence of a fundamental political transformation, specifically focusing on the Saturday Mothers movement1 in Turkey. Enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings were among the most systemic practices of state violence against the Kurdish population in the1990s under the state of emergency rule (between 1984 and 2012). The Saturday Mothers movement started mobilising in 1995 in Istanbul to stand against enforced disappearances, primarily with the suggestion of mostly women and feminist activists alongside the families of the disappeared.2 By consistently asking for truth, justice, and accountability for decades, the Saturday Mothers movement has gradually become one of Turkey’s most systematically organised, longest lasting, and visible social movements. Given the limited length of this chapter, I do not analyse the movement 1  For more information on their struggle, see: Alici, N. (2021) “The Saturday Mothers movement in Turkey: 26-year quest for justice and truth” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ wps/2021/09/09/the-saturday-mothers-movement-in-turkey-26-year-quest-forjustice-and-truth/. 2  For more details on the gendered aspects of enforced disappearances as one of the most systematic human rights violations during the Kurdish conflict, see: Alıcı, N. “Using the transformative justice lens to address the gendered aspects of the Kurdish conflict” https:// of f-university.com/en-US/Blog/Detail/kur t-sor ununun-toplumsal-cinsiyetdinamiklerini-do.

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itself, but provide an analysis of the victimhood portion only (for detailed analysis of the movement, see Kaya & Acar, this volume, chapter “From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers”). Among the different ways of understanding the victimhood category, the term victim has varied connotations. Most of my interlocutors3 consider the term victim to have shortcomings in capturing victimhood’s complexities. It is striking that even those who express discomfort with the word still use it in everyday conversations, even in the reports they write for their organisations. It shows that despite the perceived shortcomings of the word, there is no alternative term that has been agreed upon. Whether or not someone agrees with the word, the agency of the victims is at the core of this discussion. As explored in section “Agency of Victims”, challenging the ascribed identities is a form of exercising political agency (Bouris, 2007). For this reason, studying how victims relate to victim identity and how they resist and challenge that identity is crucial to acknowledging victims’ political agency. The next section begins by giving a brief description of my methodology. The chapter then continues with a review of the literature on the political agency available to victims. The following section explores the different uses of the term victim in Turkey. The next section presents my findings about the perception of the victim by my interlocutors. The chapter ends with a discussion on the implications of the construction and complexities of victimhood category in the ongoing Kurdish conflict.

Methodology The chapter draws on 24 in-person and online interviews conducted with activist leaders,4 practitioners, and lawyers, based in Istanbul and Diyarbakır between 2019 and 2021. I adopted a qualitative case study approach to fulfil the need for empirical studies conducted on my research topic. I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews to understand the perspectives, experiences, and expertise of a broad range of actors. To reach 3  Following Krystalli (2019), I refer to those whom I interviewed as interlocutors. She argues that the word interlocutor refers to a dialogic relationship, because interlocution is a conversation, and it leads to theoretical insights. 4  By activist leaders, I refer to people who have been part of the Saturday Mothers movement, but not necessarily with a victimisation experience themselves.

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the contextual information, and benefit from the creative potential embedded in in-depth interviews, the questions are open-ended and semi-structured. I carried out data collection through two phases of fieldwork which allowed the analysis to build over time and be more rigorous than a one-­ off process.5 The first set of interviews was designed to explore the views of experts and was undertaken in July-August 2019 with 13 experts in Istanbul. Regarding the expert knowledge I sought to acquire, I followed Meuser and Nagel (2009, p. 24) in the sense that “not only professional knowledge is treated as expert knowledge”. The expertise, or the unique knowledge my interviewees had, was gained “through their activity—and not necessarily through their training—because they have privileged access to information” (Meuser & Nagel, 2009, p. 24). In line with this understanding, I used my existing network of contacts to recruit the first set of interlocutors who have the expertise in, and experience with, working with the victims of conflict-related human rights violations. Among those, there are lawyers who represent the victims in national courts and international human rights courts, practitioners who support the victims through different means, human rights advocates who take part in organising public demonstrations, and researchers who document human rights violations, create archives, and use research as a tool for advocacy. The key themes they focus on in their activities are gender-based violence, forced disappearances, compensation law, memory, and dealing with the past. The variety of the interviewees’ backgrounds and expertise enabled a broadly representative sample. Those interviews shaped both the following stages of the research and my analysis. I designed the second phase of the fieldwork based on the analysis of data and the insights gained in the first stage of the fieldwork. I chose the activist leaders from the participants of the Saturday gatherings to explore how the demands for justice and truth were formulated and made visible through a collective struggle. These activist leaders are those who have been part of the movement, but not necessarily with a victimisation experience themselves. Saturday Mothers movement is based on an extensive network of relatives, activists, human rights advocates, and lawyers (see Kaya & Acar, this volume, chapter “From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers”). My interlocutors reflect 5  For both phases, I obtained ethical approval from Ulster University’s Ethics Filter Committee.

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that diversity. They are also members or active volunteers of the Human Rights Association, which works closely with Saturday Mothers. I contacted the interviewees through my established network and scheduled the interviews through email. All of the interviews were conducted by me in Turkish via Skype. In the second phase, I conducted 7 online expert interviews between July and October 2020, in addition to the 13 face-toface interviews in the first phase. I also completed 4 online interviews with activist leaders.

Agency of Victims The significance of agency lies in its capacity to challenge the approach that perceives victims as passive apolitical beings. For Robins (2017, p. 53), “agency is understood primarily as the autonomy of the subject, both as individual and community: the sense in which victims are in control of their own destiny and are agents in processes to address their needs”. Similarly, Shepherd (2011, p. 506) considers the critical aspect of agency as “the idea of autonomy (literally ‘self law’), the capacity to act independently of external constraints or coercion”. Björkdahl and Selimovic (2015) argue that when the agents employ agency to challenge existing norms, power relations, and inequalities and claim their rights, they exercise critical agency. Baines (2015) discusses the political agency available to wartime victims and the notion of agency in complicity and responsibility after violence by looking at Sara’s story. Sara is a Ugandan woman who was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as a child and then sexually abused by the LRA. She faced violence in her family before she was recruited. In adulthood, she faces several challenges in her community and is neglected by society because she was part of the LRA. Baines (2015, p.  321) presents a narrative that draws on four significant moments in Sara’s life, “characterized by periods of transformation and critical reflection”. These moments are when she verbally confronts her oppressors/ perpetrators and draws attention to the harm they cause. The first one is when she confronts her father, then the old LRA commander who sexually abused her, then the rebels who tried to kill her and her child and finally her husband, who gave her no food. Baines (2015, p. 321) considers these moments of confrontation with those who hold power as “a particular form of politics practised by subordinate groups in settings of extreme violence, which might be understood as a negotiation over the value of a

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human life”. She uses the concept of political agency as the assertion of one’s “personhood in relation to others who would treat otherwise” (Baines, 2015, p.  328). According to this definition, “Sara is a political agent in the sense that she asserts her personhood in relation to others who would treat her otherwise, contesting their actions and forcing them to recognise their complicity and responsibility” (Baines, 2015, p. 328). Baines’ understanding points to an essential aspect of victims’ agency: its political character. In other words, victims may be vulnerable, but it does not strip them of their capacity to go beyond coping and survival strategies. In her book, Complex Political Victims, Bouris (2007) discusses how political victims exercise their agency, how they act in a way that will challenge their victimisation and how we understand political victims as possessing agency. She argues that the agency of political victims derives from several roles they might take up during the peacebuilding process in the aftermath of the conflict. Like Baines, Bouris (2007) indicates that it comes from their capacity to render the oppressing discourses visible and challenge them. Similar to Baines, Bouris also sees the agency in relation to resistance to the oppressing discourse and practices. She refers to Foucault’s concept of technologies of self, which is related to the subjectivation of one’s self as resistance to politically attributed identity, which involves ethical principles and behavioural practices (Foucault, 1988, as cited in Bouris, 2007). As Foucault argues, challenging the attributed roles by the dominant, oppressive power is itself resistance, and it is the actualization of one’s agency. He argues that “victim” is such a role that is ascribed by the dominant power. Self-care (including bodily care), contemplation, and self-reflection enable the subjectivation and create a new experience of self (Foucault, 1982 cited in Bouris, 2007). In this understanding, subjectivation practises might become political resistance as well: “The practice of the care of the self has much political resonance and importance as well; it is the rejection of the politically ascribed identity, the rejection, in this case, of the identity enabling victimisation and the identity of the ideal victim” (Bouris, 2007, p. 122). This is how victims might exercise political agency by challenging the ascribed identities and creating new ones. In this regard, resistance or the realization of agency does not need to alter the physical conditions that victimise the victim. Challenging the discourse or making it visible is a way to exercise agency. For Bouris (2007), this is also how political victims contribute to peacebuilding since it rejects the discourse that enabled victimisation. Although it might not give an end to oppression or the war, it still challenges the setting that enables the

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oppression to happen and allows victims to go beyond their victim position.

Different Uses of the Term Victim There are two different words that are used as the Turkish translation of victim. One is kurban, and the other one is mağdur. Kurban has religious connotations, and its literal translation would be the sacrificed.6 Over time, kurban has increasingly lost its popularity in political and academic discourse, and mağdur has become more common. However, kurban is still used in mainstream media and some academic publications to refer to those who were killed due to violence committed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê). Those publications and media outlets also choose a specific terminology to refer to the context. In line with the state’s narrative (explained in section “Victim as a Legal Category”), they refrain using the armed conflict and terrorism instead. In this sense, the word kurban accentuates the sense of terror and horror in the violent act, by drawing a picture of an evil armed group who sacrifices innocent people. Discussing the hierarchies between different victim groups is beyond this chapter’s scope, but it is important to note that different groups use different words to differentiate victim groups from one another. Therefore, the user’s political camp is a determining factor in choosing which word to use. The legal term for those subjected to violations is mağdur, which is more commonly used in peace and conflict terminology. However, it has some negative connotations. Mağdur edebiyatı, for example, is an expression which would translate as “the literature of the victim”. It is used for situations where someone uses a discourse that puts themselves in a position to be pitied. When people talk about the hardships they go through or the bad things that happened to them, then they might get the reaction mağdur edebiyatı yapma, which translates as “do not do victim literature”. Put another way, they are using their suffering to gain sympathy, which is 6  This is in line with the original meaning of the English word victim, which derives from the Latin victima, meaning the animal or person killed and offered as a sacrifice to the gods or a supernatural power.

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considered humiliating. Standing strong is praised, while adopting a weak and vulnerable position is not seen as heroic. It is not uncommon for researchers and activists around the world to feel uncomfortable using the term victim, assuming that it might have passive and apolitical connotations that strip people of agency and undermine the multiple experiences surrounding victimhood (Saeed, 2016; Brett & Druliolle, 2018; de Waardt & Weber, 2019). In feminist scholarship and practice, survivor is preferred as a more feminist term (Krystalli, 2020). Kelly (1988) argues that the term victim hides some essential aspects of women’s victimisation, such as survival and resistance. Rudling (2019) highlights that the term survivor is associated with individuals whose victimisation experiences no longer dominate their lives, who overcame passivity and recovered agency. Which term is preferred over others changes from one country to another, from one person to another and even within the same country. Some people might find the word victim inappropriate and pacifying, while others consider it empowering (Saeed, 2016). For example, Hamber (2009, p.  41) explains that in South Africa, those involved in the Khulumani process7 usually referred to themselves during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as victims, because “at that moment they still felt like victims of the past”. Similarly, Krystalli (2020) asserts that the women who identify as victims in Colombia believe that the victim label provides a space for politics and enables certain claims to be made. In line with global trends, feminist activists and researchers in Turkey prefer the term survivor especially when addressing gender-based violence. For instance, the Association for Struggle Against Sexual Violence (Association for Struggle Against Sexual Violence, 2016) states that it is vital to change the language that weakens and victimises the survivor: “Instead of commonly used words like ‘kurban (sacrificed)’, ‘mağdur (victim)’ which weakens an individual who experienced sexual violence and gives the sense of despair, we find it important to use the word ‘hayatta kalan’, that we adopted from survivor in English”. Although these formulations are important, this suggests that the term survivor exists primarily in relation to gendered violence but is rarely used for state violence or the Kurdish conflict.

7  Khulumani Support Group was founded in 1995 to provide assistance to those testifying before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

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How Is the Victimhood Category Understood? Victim as a Legal Category While the word victim does not seem to be fully embraced, it is very present in the language due to the dominance of the legal terminology. The judiciary, especially the court cases, seems to be the primary area where victim is the commonly used word despite the challenges. To bring conflict-­related human rights violations to the court, one needs to be referred to as a victim. A Diyarbakır-based lawyer who has been working with the families of the disappeared says that she never discussed the appropriateness of the word with anyone before, and the families use it, too. She indicates that the families are more interested in the legal implications of it. Because the legal terminology defines them as victims, they do not feel uncomfortable using it (Interview no:19). Another Diyarbakır-­ based lawyer agrees that there is nothing problematic about using the word victim and the families use it during trials. He never came across anyone who was bothered by it. As this interlocutor notes “being harmed directly from the crime makes that person a victim” (Interview no:22). A lawyer, who is also a relative of a disappeared, has a similar feeling. He does not see any problems with the word and admits that he has not thought about its meaning before. He says he perceives it literally as the person harmed due to a crime, and that they fit into this definition. He notes: “by no means do I see it as a word of humiliation, neither an increasing nor a decreasing meaning. I haven’t thought about it before, honestly. We are victims in the end” (Interview no:24). Another lawyer I spoke with did not have a problem using it while filing a lawsuit, but when he reflected on it during the interview, he found it problematic. Throughout the interview, until the point when I ask him what he thinks about the term victim, he uses it both to refer to himself and others. But when he hears the question, he first says that it is not suitable to use victim. Then I ask him what would be right, and he says it is correct, legally. There is victimisation, but it is not sufficient. I need to think about it. I guess it remains light. The word victim is insufficient against the sheerness of the victimisations experienced. How they use it changes from one person to another, one incident to another. A family who lost their child and who

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are political would not say ‘we are victims.’ They would say, ‘you slaughtered our child’. (Interview no:9)

Some of my interlocutors highlighted that the legal terminology is rigid and that is why the term victim has to be used even if its implications do not match how victims identify (Interview no:10). A lawyer and researcher who has experience in working with the victims explains that there is a violation, which means that there is someone responsible for that violation: “Perhaps ‘the one that suffered damage by the violation’ is the correct definition. But when you change the terminology then you have some issues in the legal world about what you want to say” (Interview no:3). The fact that the legal terminology dictates the use of the term victim does not mean that there is conflict-specific legislation that defines victimhood. Unlike some conflict or post-conflict countries with legislation that defines and determines the victim status, Turkey’s institutional structure around victimhood regarding the Kurdish conflict is limited. For instance, in Northern Ireland, the Commission for Victims and Survivors (CVSNI) was created in 2008 as a public body “to improve the lives of all victims and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland” (CVSNI, 2022). The CVSNI was established by the Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006, which also determined a definition of victims and survivors. Section “Agency of Victims” of the Order states that victims and survivors are individuals who have been physically or psychologically injured as a result of a conflict-related incident, who are regular caregivers of those injured, or who have been bereaved as a result of a conflict-related incident (Victims and Survivors [Northern Ireland] Order, 2006). A more recent example is Colombia, where the state bureaucracy of victimhood goes earlier than the 2016 peace agreement. Even before the peace process began in 2012, the 2011 Law on Victims and Land Restitution established the Victims’ Unit, a governmental body dedicated to those recognised as victims of the armed conflict by the state (Cronin-­ Forman & Krystalli, 2020). There is a comprehensive institutional transitional justice framework that registers and defines victims, enabling them to participate in transitional justice processes (de Waardt & Weber, 2019; Nussio et al., 2015). In these examples, an institutional system of varying degrees requires people to officially register as victims to attain victim status and be entitled to benefits. The benefits might include counselling and social support, a pension scheme for some in Northern Ireland (most recently for those permanently injured), vocational training, educational

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opportunities, and financial compensation, as is the case in Colombia (Cronin-Forman & Krystalli, 2020). An important reason for the lack of institutional framework for conflict-­ affected populations is that the official state narrative has always referred to the Kurdish issue as a terrorism issue and refused to recognise it as an armed conflict. Accordingly, Turkish governments have framed the PKK as a terrorist group and defined the state’s armed forces’ operations in the Kurdish region as counter-terrorism operations rather than armed conflict (for detailed analysis on different conflict narratives in Turkey, see Uluğ, this volume, chapter “An Overview of the Turkish-­ Kurdish Conflict Narratives and Their Effects on Intergroup Relations”). Nejbir (2021, p.  41) explains that “in doing so Turkey priorities its own counter-­ terrorism and national security legal regime rather than international humanitarian law”. Even during the peace process in 2014, the legislative framework that authorised the government to take the necessary steps to move forward was titled the Law to End Terror and Strengthen Social Integration. Similarly, one of the few laws designed to address conflict-related victimhood is named Law on Compensation for Losses Resulting from Terrorism and the Fight against Terrorism (2004). The law aimed at compensating individuals who experienced material damage because of the “terrorist attacks” or “fights against terrorism activities”. As Biner (2013, p.  73) explains: Compensation was to be granted for losses resulting from physical damage to movable and immovable assets as well as losses that resulted because a person was denied access to his property during that period. Loss of life and injuries were also included in the compensation categories, but nonpecuniary damages were not.

Even though this law implied a victimhood category, the word victim is not present in the text of the law. For example, Article 1 states the purpose of the law as “to determine the basis and procedures of compensating the loss of the persons who experienced material damage resulting from terrorist acts or fight against terrorism activities” (Law on Compensation for Losses Resulting from Terrorism and the Fight against Terrorism, 2004). The rest of the law also refers to the victims as “the persons who experienced damage” without using the actual word victim. Therefore, the existence of the law does not undermine the absence of a comprehensive

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institutional context where one needs to register as the victim of the conflict to have access to some rights and benefits. The example of the Compensation Law demonstrates that the dominance of legal terminology around victimhood derives from the general use of the term victim in legal language, but not the conflict-specific laws. It is likely that if, in future, a comprehensive institutional framework is established to deal with the victims of the conflict, the implications of the term victim may shift. Victimhood as a Category That Points Toward the Responsible Party In my interviews, addressing the responsible party behind the violation stands out as an essential aspect of the debates around the word victim. Krystalli (2020) points out that the word victim demonstrates that there is a person who suffered from the harm done by a victimiser. Similarly, among my interlocutors, some think using the word victim addresses the perpetrator, who is responsible for the violation and the victimhood. According to this view, using the word victim is critical to denote that someone is responsible for the human rights violation and that there is someone to hold accountable. This is to say, if you avoid using victim, you blur the fact that there are people who committed the crime and who need to be held accountable. For instance, an Istanbul-based lawyer working with the families of the disappeared comments that although the victimhood identity has a passive connotation, the word victim points to the state’s responsibility (Interview no:10). An Istanbul-based Kurdish researcher also thinks the word victim is acceptable if it is used in a context which mentions not only the victimised, but also the victimiser (Interview no:4). In their opinion, if the focus is on the people and institutions who caused the victimisation, there is no problem with using it. In a similar vein, a researcher argues that any hesitation in using the word victim runs the risk of undermining the injustice that the person suffered: “There is a loss, and there is a harm. When you don’t tell that part fully, I feel that there is not a full demand for justice and peace” (Interview no:1). Likewise, an interlocutor whose father was extrajudicially killed in the 1990s, considers himself a victim without hesitation. He emphasises that he is a victim precisely because his father was murdered. He feels that what needs to be said is victimised. He believes that it is essential to clearly state that one is a victim as a result of state violence. Although he insists on the accuracy of the word victim, he seems hesitant to be put in a box of

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victimhood and denied agency. He expresses his desire to be accepted as an individual: “as a victim, I don’t want to go into the category of the son of an extrajudicially killed Kurd in a snap. I want to know who will represent me; I want to have a say” (Interview no:18). He also emphasises that one needs to transcend their individual victimhood eventually and talk about the general demands of the victims’ families, rather than crying over their pain. An Istanbul-based researcher with expertise in the relatives of the disappeared states that the victim should not be used to identify the person, but the act could be named victimisation. But then, as she continues to reflect on how she uses the term, she elaborates: “I say those who were victimised. Or, actually, I don’t even say they were victimised. I say those whose rights were violated. Because victimisation is a heavily charged term, and I don’t want them to be squeezed in this identity” (Interview no:4). This shows that victim is seen as a restricting category, almost as a fixed category in which people are placed, a locked identity with no room for other roles. Victim as Disempowerment My interlocutors commonly understand that the word victim undermines agency, positions the victims in an inferior position compared to the perpetrators, and fails to capture the complete picture of a complex identity. My interlocutors perceive the victims of the Kurdish conflict, especially those in an active political struggle, as powerful political subjects. The following quote by an Istanbul-based Kurdish researcher reflects this position: “The word victim makes one miserable. I am not in favour of using it. We could instead say those whose rights were violated, who face rights violation, whose rights were taken away” (Interview no:2). A significant concern is that describing people as victims may deny their political agency and reduce them to passive victims without the capacity to act against the conditions that victimised them. These concerns are based on the view that is identifying as a victim and leading a political struggle are mutually exclusive. One of my interlocutors thinks the rejection of the term could be a defence mechanism to focus on its resistance aspect as opposed to suffering: “Yes, we suffered a lot, but we are still standing. We did not perish” (Interview no:4). Being defined as a victim has the negative connotation of passivity, which contrasts with active political mobilisation. The

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following quote of a lawyer working with the families of the disappeared illustrates this position: Especially for those who chose to stand up against state violence as part of a political struggle, those who see the search for justice as a continuation of the struggle, that their Kurdish identity was offended for years and now they want to be vocal about it, that passive essence [of the term victim] may be disturbing. (Interview no:3)

Although most of my interlocutors define the act of being harmed as victimisation, the problem begins when an individual or a group is associated with the victim label because it undermines their agency. This is evident in my interview with a Diyarbakır-based journalist. Although he agrees that victim is appropriate as a legal term, he does not think those who resist ongoing violations would identify as victims: “I am a rebel, I am a fighter, I am carrying out a popular struggle. Therefore, I am not a victim, I am in a position of being subjected to violence, violation, my rights denied” (Interview no:14). Kaya and Bozkurt (2014) also underline this aspect of the political struggle. They explain that their interlocutors, whose husbands forcibly disappeared, do not see themselves merely as people who have been subjected to violence, but also as political subjects with views on political issues on the macro level. An Istanbul-based Kurdish researcher points out the shift in how people identify in different stages of the conflict. For example, he argues that while the clashes in 2015–20168 were ongoing, the feeling around victimhood was different. According to this account, following the self-­ governance declaration, Kurds would not identify as victims while the clashes were still ongoing because they felt that resisting the oppressor by violent means could lead to victory. But when the clashes were over, when they felt defeated, they started using the victim discourse, as it was the 8  Following the collapse of the peace process, the winter of 2015–2016 was the peak of the fatality rate in the armed conflict. This was after the re-securitisation of the Kurdish issue by the government in summer 2015, and the self-governance declarations by the PKK.  The warfare shifted from rural areas to Kurdish towns and cities, resulting in months-long blanket curfews a heavy military presence of the security and paramilitary forces. The clashes in towns ended up causing the deaths of many civilians and forced displacement of those whose houses were destroyed by the clashes. For a detailed account of the human rights violation during that period, See the UN United Nations (2017) Report on the human rights situation in South-East Turkey. Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

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only thing they were left with (Interview no:5). This interview addresses the commonly attributed weakness and disempowerment to the victim position. Likewise, in the quote below, shame, self-pity, and being defeated with the victim label are contrasted to power, pride, self-confidence, and resistance: ‘We experienced everything from this state. Our village was destroyed. We were forcibly disappeared, tortured. What else can we experience from this state?’ The wall of fear was passed. With the self-governance declaration, that self-confidence reached its peak, and then we just fell from the peak. (Interview no:5)

Associating the victim position with defeat or disempowerment is not unique to the Kurdish case. For example, de Waardt (2016, p. 433), who examines the politics of victimhood in post-conflict Peru, highlights a similar view in his interlocutors: “However, in his view, naming oneself as a victim implies a loss of dignity and an acceptance of defeat rather than an identity to be proud of”. Her research illustrates a “dialectic interplay between external and internal definitions of the concept” (de Waardt, 2016, p. 449). Despite the negative connotations of the concept, victims use it as an external definition to make their experiences known to the public and assert their rightful claims. This is similar to the Kurdish conflict, where victim is the only term available for legal claims. Interlocutors argued on several occasions that when you say victim, it implies an expectation from the victimiser, which puts the victimised in a hierarchically lower position. An Istanbul-based Kurdish lawyer comments: “If you say, ‘I am the victim, and you are the victimiser, assume responsibility for that,’ it will mean that you are trusting the state, submitting to the state and asking the state for something” (Interview no:9). In his account, being in the position of expecting something from the state (oppressor) puts you in a weak position. Accordingly, identifying as a victim means that you are putting yourself in an inferior place to your oppressor, the one who holds power, and means that you are asking for something from the oppressor. Expecting that the state will do something is seen as humiliating and subservient. The same interlocutor explains this as the resisting person’s psychology which encompasses the psychology of being defeated (Interview no:9). A Diyarbakır-based civil society member also positions the victim identity and resistance as opposites of one another.

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The following quote shows that, like others, he understands the victim position to signify a position of surrendering instead of resisting. Under torture, one is in fact not a victim, they show they are proud by standing upright. They can be conveying the message of ‘yes, you might be torturing my body, but you will never be able to touch my soul or my mind’ from deep inside. That is why we say the one who was tortured, we don’t say the torture victim. (Interview no:20)

The concept of “standing upright” resonates with the Arabic word sumud, which means steadfastness, perseverance, and determination. Sumud has been used in terms of Palestinian resilience, i.e., in how Palestinians resist oppression (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Sobout, 2017). Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work reveals that for many Palestinians, steadfastness, resistance, and survival are coping mechanisms to deal with the presence of the oppressor but at the same time survival is equated with resistance. I asked an interlocutor who is a human rights defender primarily working with torture survivors to clarify if he sees the victim (mağdur) and proud (mağrur) as opposing each other and whether the victim discourse undermines pride: It is precisely that. Because the reason why the victim is used is that: Look, this person was victimised, as the tolerant society, as the kind person I am, let’s save the victim one from the victimhood. Assuming responsibility for myself, in fact, I look down on that person. This means, they are in a bad place, oppressed, and damaged. It gives me the feeling: You don’t touch them, I am not going to allow them to be oppressed anymore, I take them under my wings. I am their saviour. (Interview no:20)

This quote shows that in addition to positioning the word victim as the opposite of showing a stance and resisting oppression and violation, there is also some lowering associated with being a victim. The word victim is used for someone below you, someone you can feel compassion for, but it also produces a hierarchy. If someone is a victim, they need protection, they need to be saved and rescued. And this could only be done by someone from a higher position, which in this context would be the oppressor. A Diyarbakır-based researcher confirms that the victim fails to address the political struggle, resistance, and mobilising (Interview no: 17). This view is shared by another Diyarbakır-based lawyer who emphasises that even though victim is the correct legal term, it does not capture the realities of

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the complex political identities of victims. His views reflect an understanding that most of my interlocutors expressed: that the victim does not address active struggle and undermines people’s agency. He argues that if you are harmed because of your active engagement in a political act, whether by being vocal about your political ideas or actively resisting oppression, then the term victim can only refer to a legal category, but it cannot capture the complexities of the situation. Bridging the gap between the legal terminology and the reality of the struggle is a crucial task yet to be fulfilled. He refers to the relatives of the disappeared specifically and strongly stresses that they are part of a political struggle: The struggle of the relatives of the disappeared is at the same time a struggle for advocacy for life … The word victim, I repeat, fits, definitely fits because you are also a victim in something you are emotionally affected by … But on the other hand, these victims are part of a struggle at the moment and there is a need for a definition like that. (Interview no:15)

As someone who has been involved with the families of the disappeared as a lawyer, as a human rights advocate and on a personal level in Diyarbakır, his focus on the families taking a stance is critical. It shows that although the word victim does not have to have a negative connotation, this is only one part of a complex reality. He does not deny the victim category, but he points out the necessity of addressing political mobilisation at the same time. The families are not only reacting to what happened to them, but they also advocate for broader political goals such as the resolution of the conflict and peacebuilding. Therefore, being a victim is not so much of an identity for the families as it is one part of a complex story. Direct victims were not randomly chosen, but instead they were subjected to violence because of their political identity or political activities. While referring to the trials of several high-ranking military officers,9 one of my interlocutors 9  In a set of trials that began in 2009, several high-ranking military officers were tried on charges of plotting a coup d’état. Many of those military officers were also involved in the 1990s crimes in the Kurdish region, including enforced disappearances. Those cases were a crucial legal component in the justice struggle and the fight against impunity. It was the first time that the most senior military officers were ever put on trial for conflict-related human rights violations. Saturday Mothers followed the trials closely, attended the hearings, and used it as an opportunity to amplify their demands for justice and accountability. See Göral, Ö. S. (2019) Any hopes for truth? A comparative analysis of enforced disappearances and the ̇ missing in the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus. Istanbul: Truth Justice Memory Centre.

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highlighted that for families, the official acknowledgement of the fact that their loved one was disappeared as part of a systematic state policy was crucial (Interview no:19). It was important to acknowledge that was a reason behind the loss. It meant honouring the disappeared person’s life and struggle. She also explains that in the court, they would make it clear that although these people had not committed any crimes, they were selected purposefully because they led a political struggle in a party or said things out loud about the Kurdish issue. The families, according to her, would find it empowering when it was stated clearly that their loved ones were taken away because they had political ideas, beliefs, or a struggle.

Concluding Discussion This chapter has unpacked the implications of the victimhood category in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict. Drawing on the different conceptions of victimhood put forward by my interlocutors, I have demonstrated that the term victim does not fully capture the complexities of victimhood. It is considered a limiting word that excludes some critical dimensions of one’s identity. Another understanding of the term victim is a disempowering word that undermines the political agency of victims and situates them in an inferior position relative to the oppressor. Those victimised by state violence during the conflict can be potent political actors. The victim label is seen as contradictory to this position by assigning them passively. However, although there is not a legislative or institutional framework that regulates the category of victimhood in relation to the conflict, the general legal terminology requires the use of the word victim. There are also those who have a different view and suggest that the term victim addresses the responsibility of the oppressor, especially in a legal setting. Most of my interviews entail an understanding of victimhood that imply the vulnerabilities of victims automatically means stripping the victims from their agency. As discussed earlier, victims exercise political agency through challenging the roles and identities that the oppressor assigns. The refusal of the term victim is based on similar reasoning, that the term undermines victim agency and assumes that they have not transformed their victimhood status by resisting the oppressor. Perceiving victim status as lacking political subjectivity is common in other contexts. Krystalli (2020) explains how dominant narratives around victimhood in Colombia portray victimhood as lacking the necessary conditions for political subjectivity and agency; as something that needs to be left behind,

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to be transcended, and transformed into something positive, something powerful such as political subjects who enjoy full citizenship. The risk of these dominant narratives is that the effort to suppress victimhood and transform it into empowered political subjecthood might mean hiding psychological needs. It could mean that feeling weak and vulnerable because of a potentially traumatising act is associated with negative meanings. While discussing the terminology around victimhood in the South African context, Hamber (2009, p.  41) argues that “the line between being politically correct for the sake of being politically correct and avoiding some of the real issues facing victims can be a thin one”. Similarly, I argue that the dominant political terminology that emphasises the empowerment and resistance of the victims risks ignoring some essential parts of the victimisation experience. Furthermore, an overemphasis on political subjectivity could lead to romanticising resistance. It will fail to capture the complexities of victimhood, including suffering, trauma, pain, and the longer-term psychosocial effects. Natural emotions that will emerge could be seen as a sign of political weakness, whereas grief is a non-linear process, and it gets more complicated when people are left in limbo as is the case in most instances of disappearances. Moreover, I argue that vulnerability and agency are not mutually exclusive; and difficult emotions such as pain, mourning, anger, and despair can coexist with agency, empowerment, and resistance. Instead of thinking in binaries, I propose a more complex and multidimensional understanding of victimhood that leaves space for vulnerabilities as much as empowerment. As noted earlier in section “Agency of Victims”, vulnerable victims are not incapable of challenging the conditions that victimised them. They can at the same time be empowered victims and make sense of the conditions that gave rise to their victim status, especially through collective action as in the case of the Saturday Mothers movement. Moving away from this binary understanding towards a more nuanced view of victimhood that encompasses different positionalities may be more aligned with the realities of how victims suffer, survive, mobilise, empower, and pursue collective goals often simultaneously. Highlighting only one aspect of victimhood reproduces the binary understandings mentioned above. The binary understanding of the victim identity as a vulnerable position that lacks agency informs the assumption that there is a linear process where victims first empower, then become political actors, and finally go beyond victimhood. Vulnerability and empowerment can coexist, and victims do

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not have to fully transcend the difficult emotions to exercise political agency and get involved in transformative collective mobilisation. Brett and Druliolle (2018, p.  2) define victimhood as “victims, their individual and collective identities, and their role in and impact upon post-­ conflict societies” while politics of victimhood concerns “how victimhood is defined, negotiated and contested, both socially and politically”. They argue that a variety of practices, criteria, and actors play a role in shaping the construction of victimhood, and “ideas of victimhood may vary across time and space” (Brett and Druliolle 2018, p.  2). While analysing the implications of victimhood in Turkey, it is essential to note that if a state-­ led transitional justice process begins, victimhood will develop new meanings. Through the establishment of new mechanisms or new legislation, conflict-related victimhood is likely to be defined as a legal category. If one needs to register as a victim to participate in a truth commission hearing, for example, or to be entitled to reparations in different forms such as psycho-social support and monetary compensation, the implications for victimhood can be expected to change. A new institutional framework could bring some benefits to identifying as a victim, and the social and political discourse around that institutional framework could add new dimensions to how victimhood is perceived. The strong emphasis on the resistance capacity of victims also risks leaving less politicised or organised victims out of the discussions. In conflict and post-conflict contexts, agency is particularly important, because the victims of the conflicts usually have been victimised and marginalised long before direct violence starts. They are often subject to discrimination based on poverty, ethnicity, and gender (Robins, 2017) and are excluded from political power. Putting the emphasis on the agency of victims has the potential to challenge the existing power relations that enabled the conflict in the first place, and which tend to continue in the aftermath of the conflict. These power relations must be acknowledged and challenged for the conflict to truly end and transform (Parlevliet, 2010). Recognising victims’ agency plays a crucial role in challenging those power relations. Without recognising those power relations, elite groups are likely to determine and implement peacebuilding and post-­ conflict justice mechanisms on behalf of the victims and reproduce the same power hierarchies. This chapter is part of an empirical and theoretical study that situates the Kurdish conflict within a transitional justice framework from a victim-­ centred perspective. To move the victim-centred transitional justice agenda

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further, future research can focus on differences in the discursive content of victimisation in different political camps in Turkey. Another important topic of inquiry would be how victims who are less politicised or less organised make sense of their victimisation experiences. This will ensure a broad understanding of diverse experiences, perceptions, and demands of those affected by the Kurdish conflict in different ways, and for different reasons. Such an understanding can inform the conflict transformation, peacebuilding, reconciliation, and transitional justice scholarship and practice in Turkey.

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Collective Identity in Kurds: From Collective Memory of Rights Violations to Rights Consciousness Pelin Karakuş-Akalın, Melek Göregenli, and Mehmet Karasu

Starting with the work of Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues (Sherif et al., 1961; Sherif & Sherif, 1969), social psychologists have been afforded the opportunity to advance our knowledge of collective behavior and the dynamic nature of intergroup relations. Since then, much of our understanding of collective identity in social psychology has based on social identity theory (SIT; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). In particular, the ensuing formulations of SIT focusing on rights-based collective behavior,

P. Karakuş-Akalın (*) Department of Psychology, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Northern Cyprus M. Göregenli Izmir Solidarity Academy, Izmir, Turkey M. Karasu Department of Psychology, Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, Van, Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_4

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especially through collective action, have broadened the area in terms of understanding how intergroup relations are affected by the dynamic, fluid, and variable nature of context (e.g., Drury & Reicher, 2000; Reicher, 1996). This perspective has not only allowed us to identify the various routes of social identity development but also the formation of collective identities as generated aspects of the social identification process in intergroup contexts. More specifically, collective action has been widely considered to be associated with collective identification in the literature. In a seminal work by Klandermans (1984) and in his following postulates (Klandermans, 2005, 2014), collective action has been identified as a major contributing factor to the actualization of collective identity. Further, Simon and Klandermans (2001) have offered the concept of politicized collective identity as a form of collective identity that underlies less powerful group members’ explicit motivations to engage in a struggle with power asymmetries in society. Moreover, David and Bar-Tal (2009) have defined the coordination among the members and care about collective welfare, readiness for sacrifice, and mobilization among the key aspects of collective identity. Similarly, Göregenli (2021) has noted that the political transformation of collective identity refers to an intention among the members of disadvantaged groups to coexist by sharing willpower in an attempt to act politically together rather than a given feature of them. So indeed, many well-known examples of this collective identification can be clearly seen in the historical struggles of disadvantaged or oppressed communities (i.e., black liberation, the labor movement, women’s suffrage, or the LGBTI+ movement) across the world. Such groups exposed to injustice and inequality in community life have realized that they can change the social world by voicing their needs and even by leading to legislative regulations or policy determinations on account of collective movements (e.g., the right to protest). For the present study, we offer a new insight into the political transformation process of a group membership into a collective identity by focusing on the Kurdish population, which has been both the most deprived segment of society in terms of socio-economic indicators, and has benefited the least from national resources as a result of structural discrimination practices in Turkey (see Ayata & Yükseker, 2005; Çelik 2012; Yeğen, 2015). Looking at the prolonged history of the Kurdish Issue, Kurds have persisted in demands for both identity rights and democratization of Turkey as a whole, such as through insistence on civil politics despite more

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intense oppression and the establishment of new political parties for the parliamentary struggle despite being closed down many times. We believe these can be interpreted as signs of collective identification, coordination, and action, all social dynamics worth exploring from a social psychological perspective. Nevertheless, the issue of collective identity regarding collective acts for resisting unfair treatment among Kurds has received far too little attention in the agenda of social psychologists in Turkey (but see Alparslan & Kuşdil, 2020; Cakal et al., 2016 for some exceptions). To date, the social psychological research on the Kurdish Issue has tended to focus on several aspects of intergroup contact in order to highlight the ways of reducing prejudiced attitudes of the majority group or the ways of improving the outgroup attitudes (e.g., Bilali et al., 2014; Çelebi et al., 2014; Çelik et al., 2016). However, mainly focusing on the attitudes or behaviors of advantaged groups that usually hold numerical, economic, or political power may put majority groups into a position of domination in intergroup relations by determining how and how often the contact will take place. Collective action may provide us a useful perspective which enables us “to reframe the view of targets of discrimination from passive recipient or victim to active agent” (Wright & Lubensky, 2009, p. 4). In this context, we assume that Kurds are able to both evaluate their current political positions and infer how they are supposed to act collectively. Thus, we propose a new sort of framing that the Kurdish identity as a collective identity can be formed and politicized at the core of rights consciousness, which is shaped by commonly shared rights violations and inherited from one generation to another along with collective memories over the course of time (for a detailed discussion on intergenerational transmission in the Kurdish movement, see Kaya & Acar, this volume, chapter “From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers”). We argue that the events involving rights violations against Kurds have created a kind of collective trauma experience and that this experience has been transferred to collective memory based on rights violations. Collective trauma can contribute to the construction of meaning and social identity for the victimized group, giving the group a sense of common destiny and a sense of struggle and resilience (Hirschberger, 2018). Therefore, we concentrate on a set of opportunities which have been engendered through collective trauma in order to understand the basis for Kurdish collective action, instead of focusing on the psychopathological or destructive aspects of the traumatic experiences. In other words, we consider that this

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experience of collective trauma is framed by Kurds as tragic but meaningful and instructive shared memories that signal the fact that Kurds exist not only today but also but also in the past (for further discussion on victimhood identity of Kurds and political agency, see Alıcı, this volume, chapter “Understanding the Implications of Victimhood Identity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict”). So far, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study in the social psychology literature has discussed the concept of rights consciousness within the context of collective action. Therefore, we aimed to provide a scoping review (see Arksey & O’Malley 2005; Peters et al., 2015) of the social psychological literature in order to see if there is evidence that carries the traces of our suggestion. We first begin with a brief overview of the socio-political history of the Kurdish Issue in Turkey. We will then define rights consciousness regarding the political transformation of Kurdish collective identity. Next, we will introduce the scoping review research with the method and the results. Finally, we will give a brief summary of the results along with our critiques and identify the areas for further research in the discussion.

The Socio-political History of the Kurdish Issue in Turkey Turkey, as a nation-state and a secular republic is a very dynamic society where many social tensions and intergroup conflicts have been experienced since its establishment in 1923. The constitutional order in the society has been established through military coups that have taken place at various intervals starting from 1960. This order has generally relied on oppressive practices to protect and maintain both the capitalist structure and the monistic social structure based on Turkishness. The rights violations experienced in Turkey are not only based on ethnic monism, but also on religious, sectarian, gender, sexual orientation, and class control that have been practiced by governments as a rule, with few exceptions, throughout the history of the republic. Even if the democratization demands from different parts of society have sometimes reached massive dimensions (e.g., mass strikes, a strong feminist and LGBTI+ movement, Gezi Park protests), it is still hard to say to what extent and whether the majority in Turkey has been conscious of citizenship and human rights in general.

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The Kurdish population constitutes approximately 20% of the general population in Turkey (Rawest Research Report, 2020). Although the Kurds have not been assigned official minority status in terms of the Constitution of the Turkish Republic, the constitutional and daily non-­ recognition of the individual and collective identity rights of the Kurds as an ethnic minority have been one of the most burning and chronic issues that have sometimes led to armed clashes in Turkey. The centralized structure of the newly-founded Turkish State with an emphasis on Turkish identity has provided a basis for some unfair practices (i.e., forcing displacement in the 1930s and 1990s, inhibiting the use of the Kurdish language, changing Kurdish settlement names to Turkish, destruction of Kurdish villages, closing Kurdish political parties, torture, and extrajudicial killings against Kurds (see Bozarslan, 2001; Çelik, 2012; Hannum, 2011; McDowall, 2021; Natali, 2005; Whitman, 1993). For instance, by October 1996, Turkish security forces had evacuated approximately 2400 villages and hamlets in Turkey to prevent logistical support to the PKK (Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, The Kurdistan Workers’ Party; U.S. Department of State 1997). Consequently, many people were forcibly displaced and subjected to living in unfamiliar living conditions. The conflict has been constantly instrumentalized by different governments through a discourse of terrorism and threat of division of the country in order to legitimize antidemocratic practices (for more on discourses around the Kurdish Issue and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, see Uluğ, this volume, chapter “An Overview of the Turkish-­Kurdish Conflict Narratives and Their Effects on Intergroup Relations”). Thus, it can be said that not only Kurds but the society as a whole has been affected by antidemocratic and oppressive practices. Furthermore, the findings of several studies have shown that Kurds have been exposed to assimilationist policies throughout history and are generally worried about being discriminated against or ostracized in their daily lives (e.g., Başer & Çelik, 2014; Çelik, 2012; Yeğen, 2015). Similarly, an exploration of othering patterns of Turkish citizens noted that Kurds are the most othered group both in private and public areas (Çelik et al., 2017). Recent evidence suggested that 70% of Kurdish youth, especially those living in the Western part of the country where the Kurdish population is relatively lower compared to the Eastern part, reported that they were exposed to discrimination more or less in their daily lives (Rawest Research Report, 2020). Thus, all unjust practices against Kurds have paved the way for the Kurds to seek their rights on legitimate (e.g.,

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establishing political parties, protesting the unjust practices) and illegitimate (e.g., founding and acts of violence of the PKK) grounds (see Yeğen, 2015).

From Collective Memory of Rights Violations to Rights Consciousness As mentioned above, there seems to be no previous account of rights consciousness in the social psychology literature. What we know about this phenomenon is largely based on other disciplines, such as political science and law. Yet rights consciousness, which is defined as a state of awareness of rights expressed towards others, and especially against the government (Wasby, 2005), is worth considering to understand the dynamics behind the intergroup conflict. This term has been used by scholars to refer to a tendency in which everyday relations are evaluated in terms of rights, and a tendency to recognize and protect these rights (Li, 2010). In the same study, Li (2010) developed a different conceptualization and states that rights awareness arises from the awareness of being attentive to rule-­ making authorities and the desire to guarantee such attentiveness by engaging in the rule-making process. For Engel (2012), rights consciousness is a kind of psychological attitude that involves people’s diversified understanding of laws and their associated behaviors about everyday life. In view of the social psychological perspective, we expand these definitions by conceptualizing rights consciousness as a sense of awareness that is formed by the carrier of a collective memory created by either the violations of rights experienced throughout history or the gains of rights by participating in collective action developed in the face of these violations. In his seminal work, Halbwachs (1980) stated that the collective memory of a group is formed by the memories of those who witnessed important events experienced by this group and the transmission of these traces to subsequent generations. Previous evidence reported that Kurds have been exposed to many rights violations in the historical period from Ottoman State to the Turkish State (see Hannum, 2011; Olson, 2013). In the historical course, the events included in the Kurdish Issue constitute a collective memory, and in our view, this memory serves collective action as time passes from the events in question. In other words, we consider that Kurds’ shared memories can shape the nature of their collective action. In particular, shared memories that signal the survival of a group despite

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discrimination or oppression can contribute to the construction of collective action (Harris, 2006). More precisely, these memories can inspire collective action, and may even function to increase solidarity among group members, making it easier to interpret the socio-political environment and providing opportunities for how to act as a group. For example, Harris (2006) examined how four important events (i.e., Scottsboro Hearings, Brown Decision, Emmett Till Murder, and Montgomery Bus Boycott) were transferred to the collective memory and how these events served the collective action of Blacks in the 1960s. Accordingly, group members transform these events into collective memory—through the process of social appropriation—by evaluating them as opportunities or threats to their own activism. Depending on the strength of the shared events and the continuity in the meanings of the memories therein, political actors or prominent actors reclaim and reframe this memory. In this process, on the one hand, the socio-political conditions of the given environment are evaluated, and on the other hand, pathways of collective action are produced on how to act as a group within these conditions. The roots of rights consciousness among Kurds dates back to before the declaration of the Turkish Republic. For instance, Kurds sought their rights by demanding justice against heavy taxes, demanding freedom against oppressive government style, or demanding greater autonomy in the Ottoman State (see Hannum, 2011; Olson, 2013). Following the establishment of the Turkish State, Kurds can be considered as maintaining this consciousness by giving concrete answers to concrete rights violations against them, with collective action based on the demands of those rights; thus, by claiming citizenship through everyday resistance practices, they have become an avant-garde community in the process of transforming themselves and society. We have witnessed this understanding of citizenship in various contexts, and through research results and through the following examples: demanding lawyers in the face of violence, perceiving the European Union as a tool for change and improving social-cultural conditions, and demanding their rights not only from the state but also from their affiliation groups (e.g., political party) after the rights violations in Diyarbakır/Sur (Göregenli, 2020). Therefore, we can assume that all these experiences of the Kurds throughout history offer us strong clues that they have developed a consciousness of rights as we have suggested. From this point of view, the research questions that we ask here are as follows: a) Is there evidence in the existing social psychological research of

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the notion of rights consciousness in Kurds? b) What are the key factors or indicators associated with rights consciousness among Kurds?

Method To provide evidence concerning our research questions, a scoping review of the earlier findings was conducted. Using this method not only enabled us to identify potential evidence in the social psychological literature as a given field but also allowed us to examine how the Kurdish issue is framed. We sampled studies with relevance to the Kurdish issue in Turkey from the social psychological literature. The studies on Kurds and the Kurdish issue with the keywords (“social identity” OR “collective identity” OR “collective action” OR “collective memory”) AND (“Kurdish question” OR “Kurdish issue” OR “Kurdish conflict”) AND (Kurds OR Kurdish) AND (Turks OR Turkish) AND (Kurdishness OR Kurdish identity) in English and/or Turkish versions were searched in TR Index (Turkish National Database), YÖK (CoHE-Council of Higher Education) Thesis Center, ProQuest, and Web of Science databases without any limit for publication years. The entire search process was carried out in December 2021. Inclusion Criteria Included papers were those with studies conducted only with Kurdish participants or at least with a sample including Kurdish participants while also focusing on the collective identification, action tendencies, and rights-­ based practices of the Kurds. Although the search criteria were also limited to published articles and unpublished theses written in Turkish and English, two books written by Göregenli (2004, 2005) on the violation of rights against Kurds were included in the scope of the review after reaching a consensus among all authors. Exclusion Criteria Studies were excluded if they were reviews, discussion papers, unpublished conference presentations, or research reports; did not involve the Kurdish sample or only focused on Turkish participants; focused only on experts or specific groups such as village guards; were based on developing a scale;

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were not central to the Kurdish Issue in Turkey; and did not rely on social psychological theories. The initial literature search identified 87 studies (23 theses and 64 publications), and this body of literature was first screened by all authors independently reading titles, abstracts, keywords, the sample characteristics, and the general theoretical perspective of all studies. Twenty-six studies (11 theses and 15 publications) were excluded for not meeting the inclusion criteria. After removing duplicates (3 theses published in a peer-­ reviewed journal), 58 studies remained. All studies were fully read and coded in terms of their aims, methods, findings, and discussion by using encoding sheets, and 36 studies (7 theses and 29 publications) focusing on issues relatively distant from the central focus of the present study (e.g., intergroup contact, conflict frames, national identification, etc.) were excluded. Subsequently, 22 studies (2 theses and 20 publications) were left. The aims and results sections of the remaining studies were analyzed using a deductive qualitative data analysis (Bingham & Witkowsky, 2022) based on the existing literature in order to capture any outcome demonstrating the links between collective identity, collective action and the construction of Kurdish identity in terms of rights consciousness. The initial set of codes was predetermined in terms of research questions and the theoretical suggestions of collective action models and then the data was sorted into theory-based categories.

Results The final theory-driven inquiry of the publications revealed that the results of only six studies included evidence for the relationship between collective identity and collective action tendencies among Kurds. Further, the content of eight studies covered findings supporting the right-based approach among Kurds. In sum, the findings from 22 studies were classified regarding four theory-­based categories. Since the results of one study contained more than one piece of theoretical evidence, this study was included in multiple categories, which leads to 29 research records: (a) perceived discrimination and ingroup identification (n  =  7), (b) system justifying ideologies and attitudes towards human rights and peace (n = 8), (c) collective identity and collective action (n = 6), and (d) from violations of rights to rights consciousness (n = 8). In the following section, these main categories will be described by providing the evidence we detected in the final inquiry.

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Perceived Discrimination and Ingroup Identification In the social psychology literature, numerous studies have demonstrated evidence that there has been a significantly positive association between perceived prejudice/discrimination and ingroup identification among stigmatized group members or minority groups (e.g., Leonardelli & Tormala, 2003; McCoy & Major, 2003). In particular, the studies focusing on the rejection-identification approach (Branscombe et  al., 1999) have reported that being rejected on the basis of group identity may lead to an increasing salience of ingroup identification. Furthermore, the salience of ingroup identification has been a widely accepted factor that contributes to collective action tendency (e.g., Klandermans, 1997; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). For this review, seven studies conducted with Kurdish individuals in Turkey revealed promising results consistent with the previous evidence regarding the positive relationship between perceived discrimination and ingroup identification. In particular, these studies reported that Kurds perceive more intergroup conflict and discrimination compared to Turks. Çoymak (2018) showed that Kurds perceive themselves to be a devalued group in public places more than Turks. The same study found that Kurds perceive individual and collective discrimination more than Turks. Bagci et al. (2020) similarly showed that Kurdish participants with higher perceived threat are more likely to perceive discrimination. Şen (2017) demonstrated that being affected by the conflicts in the Eastern and South-Eastern regions of the country is a significant predictor of perceived ethnic discrimination among Kurds. Concerning the increasing salience of ethnic identification as a social competitive strategy to cope with perceived discrimination, Kurds were found to be more concerned with their ethnic identity compared to Turks (Çoymak, 2018). Another study conducted to assess the core social identities related to the self-concept showed that ethnicity is a core component of self-concept among Kurds (Göregenli and Karakus-Akalin 2018). Yılmaz et al. (2018) revealed that ethnic identification is the primary predictor of Kurds’ negative attitudes toward Turks. Further, Eser (2015) showed that being exposed to discrimination, the inhibition policies of their mother tongue, and political struggles with the majority group are the significant determinants of Kurdish identity construction. Finally, findings from Karaçanta (2002) indicated that Kurds perceive themselves as a group that is positioned at the lowest status in society. In the same study,

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Kurds reported the highest perceived ethnic identification, and their perceived discrimination level was significantly higher than the other ethnic groups in Turkey. System Justifying Ideologies and Attitudes Towards Human Rights and Peace The prior research based on different social psychological theories has shown that individuals who support the ideologies related to social hierarchies (e.g., system justifying, social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, blind patriotism) tend to be less concerned with the endorsement of human rights (e.g., Kay & Jost, 2003; McFarland & Mathews, 2005; Moghaddam & Vuksanovic, 1990). Further, the evidence from Turkey has also confirmed that the more people justify the system, the more they accept social inequalities as natural components of life (e.g., Göregenli et al., 2012; Karakus-Akalin & Göregenli, 2022). On the other hand, further local evidence from Turkey provided an important insight that peace with an endorsement of universal human rights and ending social inequalities and injustice constitute one of the focal aspects of peace representations (Karakus-Akalin & Göregenli, 2022). Eight studies were included as a separate category covering the other related variables such as system-justifying ideologies and attitudes towards human rights and peace among Kurds. Karaçanta’s (2002) study suggested that Kurds have lower levels of social dominance orientation and patriotism than Turks. Likewise, Göregenli’s studies (2004, 2005) conducted with large-scale samples living in Izmir and Diyarbakir demonstrated that Kurds have significantly lower levels of authoritarianism, system and torture justification, belief in a just world, and social dominance orientation than Turks. Solak et al. (2022) revealed that Kurds have a lower level of system justification and a higher level of civil political willpower for peace-building than Turks. On the other hand, Yılmaz et al. (2018) showed that Kurds report more negative attitudes towards Turks when they have lower levels of system justification and social dominance orientation. Further, Bayad and Cesur (2018) showed that compared to identification with a leftist political view, there is a stronger positive association between ethnic identification and orientation with the values of Self-­ Transcendence and Openness to Change. In the same study, researchers reported that Kurds with a higher endorsement of universal, altruistic, and

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benevolent values are more likely to discover their ethnic identity, and ethnicity is the main feature that has an impact on Kurds’ value orientations. Another study conducted to assess Kurdish youths’ conflict frames about the Kurdish Issue and visions of peace in the future showed that Kurdish youths’ frames are shaped by themes of ending social exclusion and socio-economic marginalization of the Kurdish identity, preserving political and cultural rights as well as a nonviolent approach for conflict resolution (Baser & Celik, 2014). Finally, Demirdağ and Hasta’s findings (2020) indicated that Kurds support the peace process when the call for peace comes from a member of the outgroup and this level of support is as high as when the peace call comes from a member of the ingroup. Collective Identity and Collective Action Collective action has been considered a way of getting in contact with the outer world (Melluci, 1995) to make minorities socially visible (Klandermans, 2014) and to make their voices heard. Thus, we may assume a mutual and dynamic relationship between collective identity and collective action. Likewise, Melluci (1995) stated that “the actors of the collective and collectivity create each other in a mutual relation and collectivity can only connect with the outer world through the collective actions and by this connection individuals can develop a collective identity” (p. 46). It can be proposed that the results of the six studies conducted with Kurdish individuals pointed out a similar pattern between these variables. Findings from Şen (2017) highlighted that the salience of collective identity among Kurds is stronger than among Turkish participants. In the same study, the salience of collective identity was found to be one of the significant predictors of perceived individual discrimination among Kurds. Kaya and Mamatoğlu (2017) examined the relationship between identification with several social identity categories and the perception of social justice among Kurdish and Turkish university students living in Turkey. The findings of this study revealed that the participants who defined themselves primarily as Kurdish activists reported lower levels of social justice compared to the participants who defined themselves primarily as university students. Moreover, the participants who defined themselves as Kurdish activists were found to have a higher level of readiness for joining any collective action, even if it ends with legal liability.

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Bagci et al. (2019) indicated that imagined contact with Turks is significantly associated with higher levels of perceived discrimination and of ethnic identification among Kurds and in turn, this imagined contact leads to a higher level of collective action tendencies. Cakal et al. (2016) found that perceived threat is a significant predictor of collective action tendencies in both Kurds and Turks. In the same study, perceived threat mediated the relationship between social identification and collective action tendencies among both the advantaged and disadvantaged group. Bagci and Turnuklu (2018) showed that positive intergroup contact has an indirect effect on the relationship between ingroup identification and collective action tendencies among the Kurds. Similarly, Alparslan and Kuşdil (2020) provided evidence that Kurds showed more collective action tendencies when they perceived that the status quo is illegitimate and when they reported a lower level of system justification tendencies. In other words, the less Kurds justified the system, the more they perceived injustice in society. The level of system justification was also found to be negatively correlated with social competition strategy among Kurds in this study. In general, the findings of these studies supported that there seems to be an interplay between the perception of injustice, the formation of collective identity, and the tendency to act collectively. From Violations of Rights to Rights Consciousness Previous research has demonstrated that perceived discrimination is closely associated with higher support for rights among minority groups (e.g., Verkuyten, 2005). This suggestion has also been supported by eight studies derived from our review. Çelebi et al. (2016) revealed that Kurds have higher support for their language rights as they perceive higher levels of discrimination. In Çoymak’s (2018) study, Kurds perceived their disadvantaged position as higher, as they collected more information about their cultural background and ethnic group identity. Additionally, Baysu et al. (2018) found that identification with the Kurdish identity as a group membership is associated with a rights-based approach (i.e., identity rights, freedom, and confederative rights) among Kurds. In the same study, identification with the Muslim identity as a superordinate identity was linked with a dialogue-based approach (i.e., dialogue, recognition, emotions, and peace) among Kurds. Further, Kurds defined the concept of reconciliation with an emphasis on cultural and political rights. Turks approached accepting the cultural rights of Kurds more positively, while

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they tended to ignore their political rights (Baysu et al., 2018). As mentioned above, Baser and Celik (2014) found that Kurdish youths’ frames about peace are associated with preserving political and cultural rights and a nonviolent approach to conflict resolution. Şen and Coşkan (2020) found that identification with Kurdish and the Kurdistan geo-cultural territory are higher than identification with Turkey citizenship among the Kurdish participants. In the same study, higher Kurdish identification predicted a higher desire for reconciliation through an increased sense of power (i.e., hunger strike efficacy and hope from defense) and a higher wish for reconciliation based on rights. The qualitative findings of Göregenli’s studies (2004, 2005) also revealed that Kurds have higher levels of the tendency for rights actions for struggling with violence and torture than Turks. Lastly, Uluğ and Uysal (2021) revealed that a stronger level of Kurdish identification predicts more support for minority rights through the pathway of more endorsement of the independence narrative.

Discussion For the present study, we aim to suggest an additional facet of collective identity based on the generation of rights consciousness among the members of disadvantaged groups, and in particular, the Kurdish population in Turkey. We conceptualize rights consciousness around exposure to a socialization process along with the first-hand experiences and/or the transmitted intergenerational memories of rights violations. We argue that the Kurdish ethnic identity as a social identity is formed through the experience of rights violations by different governments from the past to the present. This identity construction, generated from the collective memory of rights violations that are commonly shared, experienced, and “transmitted” over generations, is transformed into rights advocacy and rights consciousness (see Kaya & Acar, this volume, chapter “From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers”). In this sense, collective trauma is conveyed not only as a continuing history but as a shared memory of rights violations; it also creates an empowering social-collective bond and builds resilience through agency. Therefore, we assume that “the rights consciousness in Kurds, rather than an abstract, universal and theoretical endorsement of human rights, has emerged spontaneously with unequal living conditions and is a collective action-­ oriented concept for Kurds as a necessary way of survival” (Göregenli, 2021, p.  78). Within this context, we examined the social psychology

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studies that are (in)directly related to this topic and encountered a set of findings that we could fit into a number of theoretical models of collective action. The findings of the scoping review revealed no direct evidence examining the issue of rights consciousness among Kurds and there has been no social psychological research that directly addresses this transformation process. Nevertheless, the evidence in the literature was interpreted as supporting the various facets of the collective identity, which can be associated with rights consciousness among Kurds. This body of literature was categorized into four main themes. Here, it is important to bear in mind that these four themes can be viewed as either a distinct category or intersecting categories with some aspects. That is, perceived discrimination was significantly associated with the increase in salience of ethnic identification (e.g., Çoymak, 2018; Karaçanta, 2002; Şen, 2017), perceived social injustice in daily life (e.g., Alparslan & Kuşdil, 2020), salience of collective identification (e.g., Şen, 2017), and collective action tendencies (e.g., Bagci & Turnuklu, 2018; Çakal et al., 2016; Kaya & Mamatoğlu, 2017). Furthermore, the increasing salience of Kurdish identity has been reported to be associated with a higher tendency to struggle for political rights (e.g., Baysu et al., 2018; Şen & Coşkan, 2020) and language rights (e.g., Çelebi et al., 2016). In particular, the higher identification with the social category of Kurdish identity or Kurdish activist was significantly related to higher collective action tendencies (e.g., Kaya & Mamatoğlu, 2017). Besides, Kurds were found to justify social inequalities less when they perceived the status quo as more illegitimate, and they reported higher desire to engage in social competition and a higher intention to participate in collective action when they justified the systemic inequalities less (e.g., Alparslan & Kuşdil, 2020; Göregenli, 2004, 2005; Solak et al., 2022). As can be followed from these findings, a transitivity appears between the categories which underline the need for a holistic approach in order to understand the role of rights consciousness in political transformation of Kurdish collective identity in due course. As mentioned above, the social identity approach enables us to understand this dynamic nature of intergroup relations. According to Reicher (2004), the dynamic nature of social action cannot be understood by focusing only on psychological processes such as how the outgroup is characterized or how the ingroup is defined. It also requires taking non-­ structured dimensions of the human condition into account, such as the

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influence of how the outgroup is perceived by the ingroup, or the assumptions that determine our behavior towards the outgroup. We do not use an essentialist explanation such as being a “naturally born Kurd” as a means to interpret why Kurds show different patterns in terms of rights consciousness and related social psychological mentality structures compared to Turks. On the contrary, we argue that the main thing that differentiates these two groups in terms of raising rights consciousness is the difference between being oriented to collective action or not. Thus, such a social transformation occurs as a result of being action-­ oriented. Indeed, Akarsu and Cingoz Ulu (2018) highlighted that political identities are more decisive than ethnic identities in terms of historical representations and that these identities are shaped not only by social identities but also by ideologies and political party orientations. Therefore, the political transformation of the Kurdish identity from an ethnic identity to a collective identity seems to be closely related to a collective consciousness of rights. Furthermore, this transformation may point to a process that transforms not only the Kurds but also the Turks in terms of their democratic transformation demands. Islambay’s (2019) study examining the dynamics of forgiveness processes in intergroup relations emphasizes that political ideologies are of great importance in the willingness to forgive groups in conflict. For example, a Turk who supports the HDP (Turkish: Halkların Demokratik Partisi, The People’s Democratic Party), a pro-Kurdish political party, may have similar ideas or tendencies as a Kurd who supports the HDP. Moreover, a Kurd who supports the AKP (Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, The Justice and Development Party), the ruling party in Turkey, may have similar ideas or tendencies as a Turk who supports the AKP, even though they identify as ethnically Kurds or Turks. We therefore argue that the political orientation and the party which is supported may serve as a litmus test to reflect the different thoughts and tendencies among the citizens in Turkey. Overall, we have discussed our research questions with SIT and collective action theories as the main framework, but our questions can also be discussed by relating them to basic theories of social psychology and perhaps more satisfying answers can be given. For instance, Jost et al. (2017) have discussed the situations in which collective action leads to social change and proposed an integrated model of collective action. Unfortunately, the limitations of this present chapter require us to postpone such a discussion to further studies, but we consider that the theory

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of system justification may provide an important insight into finding answers to our questions about collective action and the formation of political group identities and rights consciousness. We hope that research conducted from the perspectives of different disciplines of social sciences, especially social psychology studies, will generate new questions and call for new studies on tracing the real-life counterparts of a demand-fueled quest for citizenship and meta-analyses for a large number of studies.

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Oath to Death: An Analysis of Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s Contested Memory Zeynep Küçük, Bülent Küçük, and Deniz Çağtay Yılmaz

Reflecting on the ’68 movement in Turkey quite often invites, if not requires, a deliberation that revolves around the idea of death. A social researcher delving into the ’68 generation in Turkey, then, has a double task of familiarizing themselves with death: Death as a dark historical factuality that marks the endless political violence experienced by the leading figures of the movement, and as a thematic nodal point that navigates the discussions concerning its aftermath. Drawing sustained attention to the largely neglected memory of the Kurdish ’68 within the context of Turkey, our ongoing research project, titled “One Generation Two Legacies,” has taken shape under such awareness.1 It is indeed a hard task to resist the centrifugal aura that emanates from the iconic figures of the ’68 1  One Generation Two Legacies is a research project that aims to investigate the ways in which actors, who were positioned within the politicized Turkish and Kurdish youth movements, remember and forget past events. This particular analysis is an output of the aforementioned project that is supported by BAP (Bilimsel Araştırma Projeleri Komisyonu) with Boğaziçi University Research Fund Grant Number 17602.

Z. Küçük (*) • B. Küçük • D. Ç. Yılmaz Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_5

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experience in Turkey, such as the likes of Deniz Gezmiş, whose zeal for liberation has always been widely recognized by the Turkish left. Their death in their 20s recurrently invokes a premature death image in the social memory of the ’68 generation, which is often referred to as “a death in the spring of their life,” as the Turkish idiom goes. On the other hand, the deaths of the Kurdish political figures who were a pivotal part of the same ’68 movement hardly make it to the social memory of the Turkish left. We contend that it is crucial to problematize why some deaths appear more memorable than the others without suggesting any hierarchical relationship between such widely circulating stories. Thus, this effort of ours recognizes the need for a cross-examination between the oral histories of the actors and the official historical reconstruction in memory-making, as the very nature of official historical archive often imposes silences and constraints, especially onto those that are not deemed as legitimate objects of historical inquiry (Hartman, 1997). That is why this work is situated along the disciplinary contours of critical social history, which arguably is the field where the Kurdish people speak about themselves, contribute to the history writing, and inscribe their own experiences as a value (Şen, 2020) by subjecting historical evidence to the critical eye of personal testimonies and autobiographies. During the interviews we conducted, one name was repeatedly mentioned, not for the sake of name-dropping, but as a crucial figure who had a paramount influence on the ideological landscape of the Kurdish left in the ’68. It was Sait Kırmızıtoprak, otherwise known as Dr Şıvan, a Kurdish medical doctor who was also one of the socialist leaders of the Kurdish left during the 1960s. Although we had encountered his name during our preliminary research, we were hardly aware of the wide range of political endeavors in which Sait Kırmızıtoprak was invested, including guerilla warfare, formation of political parties/organizations, albeit all illegal, maintaining local and international political networks, and intense intellectual production. For many, he was a perfect selfless revolutionary who forsook all he had in Turkey to join the guerilla mobilization in Iraqi Kurdistan, as an inspiring and informative source for the Kurdish guerilla mobilization in Turkey, which he aimed to initiate in the forthcoming years. Just two years after his departure, he was executed by the Mustafa Barzani regime on November 26, 1971, at the age of 36. This work is inspired by his death, for his death constitutes a founding enigma in Kurdish social memory, an unresolved conundrum frequently cited as the

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“Two Saits Incident” (Arık, 2015, pp.  186–208; Demirel, 2013; Kaya, 2012, pp.  140–149; Şur, 2018b) resulting in the tragic death of some notable Kurdish political figures including Sait Kırmızıtoprak and Sait Elçi. Although the incident still informs many heated public debates among politicized Kurdish groups, its effects took an anticlimactic turn as Kırmızıtoprak’s political biography and vision neither enjoyed much memory work nor culminated in a vigorous political program. The new leftist leaders of the Kurdish mobilization positioned themselves onto a blank slate rather than embracing the political legacy Kırmızıtoprak left behind.2 In this work, we aim to trace the ways in which the boundaries between friend-enemy, victim-murderer, and hero-criminal conceptions become blurred in the political biography of Kırmızıtoprak and the narratives surrounding his death. We investigate in what ways the contesting political and moral investments of the Kurdish groups as well as the lack of mnemonic devices foreclose Kırmızıtoprak’s emergence as an icon of ’68. As we are inevitably dealing with a puzzling mnemonic repertoire, it is not our goal to adopt a historical revisionist perspective in which one may try to contribute to the endless whodunits with regard to the “Two Saits Incident.” On the contrary, our goal is to set a conversation between competing truth claims and acknowledge the analytical value of the discrepancies, voids, and displacements in the following analysis, for they serve as 2  In 1975, a small group attempted to rejuvenate Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s political vision by forming a political party called “Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan” (Kurdish Workers’ Party), which bore the same name as Öcalan’s party (PKK) that would start its activities in 1978 and soon become an influential organization. Due to the mix-up of the names in the documents ̇ while and punitive trials, the former organization switched to the Turkish acronym (KIP) Öcalan’s organization sticks to the Kurdish name (PKK). Arık, S.  A. (2015), Dr. Şıvan, ̇ remained mostly an esoteric organization, Öcalan’s PKK, a party once p. 258. While KIP indistinguishable from Şıvan’s successors, created huge excitement among the Kurdish actors (see Joost Jongerden & Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, 2011), “Born from the Left: The Making of the PKK,” in Nationalism and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, pp.  123–142). It is also worth noting that according to Dara Kırmızıtoprak (Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s son), the establishment of Öcalan’s PKK on November 26 was a conscious choice as it corresponded to the date of Dr Şıvan’s execution. The symbolic appropriation of memorable dates during the making of fresh political enterprises has long been a pattern in Kurdish politics as Şıvan’s party T-KDP was founded on the day that Seyid Rıza was executed. However, although the formation of the PKK had initially associated itself with Şıvan’s death and his political legacy, in its upcoming years Kırmızıtoprak’s influence dramatically subsided to the point of annihilation. Kırmızıtoprak, D. Interview, April 10, 2022, by Bülent Küçük, Zeynep Küçük, and Deniz Çağtay Yılmaz.

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interacting fields where the symbolization of a collective loss is interrupted. By taking a deep dive into the written and audio-visual works thematizing Kırmızıtoprak’s political pursuits and the interviews we conducted with his acquaintances, we attempt to explore the complex political ecology that precluded Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s remembrance as an iconic leader.

Origins of a Forgotten Revolutionary Kazım Arık (76, forest engineer, Kırmızıtoprak’s cousin, personal communication, September 21, 2021) contends that any attempt to explore Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s political legacy should start by asking one specific question: “Into what sort of conditions, geography, social tension, and trauma has he been born that eventually Seyit became Sait, Sait became Dr. Şıvan?” Seyit Kırmızıtoprak was born in 1935 in a mountainous village of Dersim called Civarik, which is located in the Kurdish region of Turkey. Arık states that due to bureaucratic impediments his official name was registered as “Sait.” While the name “Seyit” corresponds to a rank that marks the lineage of the prophets in Dersim Alevi Qizilbash cosmology, Kazım Arık reminds us that we should consider the registration of Seyit as Sait by the Turkish state an example of the assimilation, Turkification, and Sunnisation of Dersim’s population. Kırmızıtoprak was only three years old when more than 50 people of his maternal kin were killed in the Dersim Genocide of 1938, which later turned into a bitter oral history that vividly circulates among the members of his family. Dersim’s historical baggage had a paramount influence on Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s political vision since it has long been a geography that is subjected to sustained violence and assimilation. Largely inhabited by the Kurdish-Alevi minorities, Dersim’s demographics were also at odds with that of Turkish modernity, which predominantly privileged a synthesis of Turkishness and Sunni Islam. Marked by the Turkish state as a space of an irreconcilable ethnic and religious difference, the region was renamed Tunceli, a Turkish name, through a special law implemented in 1933. This habitual experience of Turkification and assimilation rendered the youth from Dersim more susceptible to the widely circulating leftist ideas in the 1960s, which aimed to be the voice of the oppressed. However, the youth from Dersim were also well aware of the fragility of class universality when it came to other forms of difference that went beyond class inequalities, as the racial blindness of the Turkish left had demonstrated. Not all

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politicized young groups from Dersim developed these innate and embodied critiques into a well-formulated systematic body of thought, but Sait Kırmızıtoprak, as an engaged intellectual, had the ability to do so. Sait was a medical student in his early 20s when the two decades of political withdrawal of Kurdish groups in Turkey, a paralyzed state to which the Dersim Genocide contributed greatly, was coming to an end. Mustafa Barzani’s return to Iraq in 1958, after his 11-years-long exile in the Soviet Union, caused tremendous excitement across all Kurdish geographies. As Barzani became a source of attraction for many Kurds, the Turkish state grew more cautious about the activities of Kurdish students in Turkey. This gave way to the infamous “Trial of the 49” in 1959, which refers to the overnight imprisonment of 49 Kurdish activists and intellectuals.3 Among those arrested were Sait Elçi and Sait Kırmızıtoprak, whose lives would later come to a tragic end in the Two Saits Incident. They followed each other’s trials closely and stood in solidarity during their ̇ defenses. In prison, Sait Kırmızıtoprak got engaged to his girlfriend Ismet Özevcek and later married her in 1961 (Fig. 1). At the turn of the 1960s, it was already clear that the relatively liberating political promises of the 1961 Constitution would exclude the Kurdish people and the authoritarian pressure of the Turkish government would still persist. Meanwhile, the worldwide circulation of leftist ideas, the struggle for decolonization, and the movements for independence were inspiring the Kurdish activists (Demir, 2019). Besides, the vocabulary of the Left was fruitful in putting a new emphasis on inter-regional material inequalities, implying the status of the east as an “underdeveloped region” (Demir, 2019, p. 365). Most of the urban Kurdish intelligentsia thus pursued their political agenda under 3  Tr. 49’lar Davası. CHP (Republican People’s Party) representative Asım Eren tabled a motion to the Turkish parliament concerning the killing of numerous Turkmens during the political turmoil in Kirkuk, Iraq. Asım Eren asks President Adnan Menderes whether the Turkish government will pull a tit-for-tat in Turkey, to avenge the violence that the Turkmen were undergoing under Iraqi Kurds. This statement implying a desire to cause direct harm to Kurdish people in Turkey sparked a huge reaction among Kurdish students and intellectuals. To protest this statement, 102 Kurdish students and intellectuals signed a petition which would later be used as a pretext for the Turkish government to initiate the Trial of the 49, on grounds of committing Kurdish propaganda. Although initially 50 people were imprisoned in alignment with the number of the available prison cells in Harbiye Open Military Prison, one of the imprisoned students, Mehmet Emin Batu, died in his cell from stomach bleeding, as he was denied medical care. Ruşen Arslan (2020) Ömrü Kısa Etkisi Büyük Kürt Örgütlenmesi: DDKO, pp. 75–83. Also see Yavuz Çamlıbel (2007), 49’lar Davası: Bir Garip ̇ Ülkenin Idamlık Kürtleri, Algı Yayın.

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̇ Fig. 1  Ismet Özevcek and Sait Kırmızıtoprak, before their wedding ceremony (1961). (Image source: http:// www.drsivan.info/tr/ (retrieved in 2022))

the umbrella of TIṖ (Workers’ Party of Turkey), founded in 1962, and formed a sub-group called “Easterners” within the party. Sait Kırmızıtoprak ̇ although he was was highly involved in the political processes within TIP, not an official member (Burkay, 2001, p. 279). He also disseminated his written analyses and engaged in heated political debates via the major journals of the Turkish left, such as Yön,4 and his intellectual position, to some extent, remained influenced by the Turkish left during this period (Şur, 2018b, p. 253). 4 ̇ Çan Çalıyorlar?”  For some examples, see “Bir Tartışma Üzerine” [1962], “Kimler Için [1962], “Doğu’yu Sosyalizm Kurtarır” [1962] (org.) Sait Kırmızıtoprak, in Dr. Şıvan, Arık, S.A. (2015), pp. 409–422.

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Later in the 1960s, the Kurdish political mobilization gained a new momentum in Turkey thanks to the “Eastern Meetings” (Demir, 2019, p. 374). “The Eastern Meetings” refers to a series of mass public gatherings in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, organized by the Easterners group in TIṖ but not limited to their efforts. The Eastern Meetings displayed a memorable cooperation between conservative-nationalist Kurdish actors such as Sait Elçi and those that embraced Kurdish socialism such as Sait Kırmızıtoprak. Some common themes, such as the underdevelopment of the eastern regions of Turkey, security forces’ mistreatment of the Kurdish villagers, the poisonous effects of feudal relations within the region, and how Kurdish people were robbed of their basic human rights in Turkey, were assertively emphasized throughout the meetings. Respectively, some of the slogans were We don’t want police stations, we want schools, Petroleum is our blood, No for the exploitation and tyranny, and Stop treating us like your stepchild (Gündoğan, 2005, pp.  120–124). The meetings showed that it was impossible to explain what Kurdish regions are experiencing only through the lexicon of class inequalities and exploitation. The strong commitment of the Turkish left to class universalism could no longer address the ethno-national resentments of the Kurdish people. This position, therefore, entailed a rigorous critical engagement with the Turkish left. For many Kurdish actors, the Turkish left reduced the content of the Kurdish issue to a “residue of feudalism,” one which they would eventually be liberated from when the class inequalities were abolished (Demir, 2019, p. 382). During that period, the Turkish left still held strong adherence to Kemalism, the founding principles of the Turkish state, which systematically excluded Kurdish people as threats to a unified national identity. Therefore, it was not a surprise that toward the end of the decade the rupture between the Turkish and Kurdish left started to crystallize. With a renewed confidence harvested from the Eastern Meetings and a growing suspicion toward the commitments of the Turkish left, the Kurdish actors started to form their own self-contained political organizations and programs.5 In such political atmosphere, Sait Kırmızıtoprak not only offered his own theoretically refined criticism against the Turkish left, but also postulated a new revolutionary praxis that put an exclusive 5  Particularly the founding of Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearts in 1969 can be considered as the institutionalization of the separation of the Kurdish left from the Turkish left. See Mustafa Doğanoğlu (2016), “Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları ve Siyasi Ayrışma,” Ankara University SBF, pp. 941–959.

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emphasis on the Kurdish struggle for independence. For some, his insistence on a revolution that exclusively prioritized Kurdish national consciousness was one of the reasons why the Kurdish socialist movements following him did not own up his legacy as they associated Dr Şıvan less with socialism than a narrow form of nationalism (D. Kırmızıtoprak, personal communication, April 11, 2022). Sait Kırmızıtoprak was actively engaging with a plethora of sources, ranging from his predecessors to his contemporaries. While he keenly investigated the Marxist corpus, he also closely followed the anti-colonial movements of independence in Africa and Latin America. At some point, Kırmızıtoprak indulged himself with the works of anti-colonialist intellectuals such as Franz Fanon and Regis Debray, reading them in their original form thanks to his self-made skills in the French language. He had a particular interest in the anti-colonial war in Algeria and Vietnam, from which he could make comparative statements concerning the Kurdish national struggle. According to Kırmızıtoprak, Turkey’s road to independence hardly relied on the mass mobilization of peasants and workers unlike Vietnam and Algeria. Indeed, a small bureaucratic-military elite steered the politics of liberation during the establishment of the Republic as self-ordained victors of an anti-imperialist struggle. They were able to present themselves as positioned in the Left, which was nothing but a false conviction, due to their facilitating role in the struggle for independence, although they remained oppressive toward subaltern groups such as the Kurdish people (Kırmızıtoprak, 1997, pp.  64–73). Here, Kırmızıtoprak was formulating a dual criticism. It was simultaneously an explicit attack against Kemalism and a critique of the Turkish left, who falsely attributed a progressive identity to the Kemalist military elite (Şur, 2018a, p. 25). He also remained at a distance from the Kurdish right on grounds of their indifference toward social inequalities and social transformation. Arguably one of the most important contributions of Kırmızıtoprak to the discussions revolving around the Kurdish issue lies in his assertion that Kurdistan is a colony (Demir, 2019, p. 393), a statement that calls for a liberation struggle that is primarily based on the Kurdish national consciousness. Although the naming of Kurdistan as a colony was a preexisting idea, Kırmızıtoprak was the first one to develop the theoretical basis of this claim and to go beyond mere similes to other colonized geographies (Şur, 2018a, p.  33). Disillusioned with the Turkish left and heated up in the turmoil of the international ’68, the revolutionary action he envisaged could no longer stay in the realm of legal politics. Thus, his revolutionary

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praxis consisted of armed guerilla conflict and formation of an illegal small party with strong party discipline. To pursue this goal, he joined the guerilla movement at Mustafa Barzani’s camp in 1969, in the hope of initiating a similar Kurdish guerilla mobilization in Turkey, as the establishment of such an organization was of the utmost importance in his agenda. One output of this trajectory was the formation of T-KDP (Türkiye’de Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi, En: Kurdistan Democratic Party in Turkey) in 1970. While Kırmızıtoprak’s T-KDP was adopting a rather left-wing course, especially compared to Sait Elçi’s TKDP (Türkiye Kürdistan Demokrat Partisi, En: Kurdistan Democratic Party of Turkey),6 which was established in 1965, it still drew from the constitutions of other KDPs, prioritizing the struggle for the rights of the Kurdish people (Arık, 2015). Yet, shortly after reinventing himself as Dr Şıvan at Barzani’s camp, Kırmızıtoprak’s personal and political trajectory came to a controversial end in 1971.

Oath to Death Many actors of the Kurdish ’68 movement in Turkey paid the price for their avid politicization, first during the Trial of the 49 which resulted in their arrest and years-long probation that followed. As mentioned, Sait Kırmızıtoprak was one of the imprisoned activists and his court file consisted of his personal letters to acquaintances, brochures, and notes that involved strong ties to Kurdish politics in the eyes of the prosecution. A specific poem by Sait Kırmızıtoprak particularly attracted their attention as it allegedly displayed his true and hidden political intentions: ̇ ÖLÜME YEMIN Yeminimiz ölümdür, senin yolunda Kefenim gömleğimdir, ferman süs hediyemdir. Çalışma olmazsa kanımız yedi Fırat’tır. Daima Kürdistan diye inler. Annem süt yerine bizi kanla emzirmiştir. 6  En. Turkey/Turkish Kurdistan Democratic Party. Notice the nuance between the two parties, in terms of both their abbreviations and full names (and indeed political trajectories). “When you look at it, the party program of T-KDP was not that different from TKDP’s. The last party declaration that Kırmızıtoprak wrote, and that created some internal conflicts in T-KDP, was closer to Kurdish nationalism rather than socialism” (Osman Aydın, personal communication, February 21, 2022).

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OATH TO DEATH Our oath is death, on your way My jacket is my shroud, the edict is my ornamental gift. Without work, our blood is seven Fırat. Groaning Kurdistan, eternally. My mother nursed me not with milk, but with blood. (Arık, 2015, p. 70, translated by authors)

His born-to-die persona, which was galvanized by the Dersim Genocide, was well-known within his family. His sister Fatma recalls him repeatedly saying, “I wrapped my shroud around my head” (Tr: “Kefenimi başıma dolamışım”; Demirel, 2013). The haunting images of the deceased from his maternal kin reemerged as the primary source of motivation that stoked up his political appetite. Perceiving death as a sacred entity, however, was not particular to Sait Kırmızıtoprak, especially at the turn of the ’68, in which the youth movement in Turkey was substantially radicalized. While Kırmızıtoprak was planning to go to Iraq to join Barzani’s guerilla camp, the leaders of the Turkish left were on the brink of forming their own armed organizations. That is the reason why it is more than an interesting anecdote that Deniz Gezmiş and Sait Kırmızıtoprak tried to convince Hikmet Bozçalı (then law student, a Kurdish socialist) to join armed conflict around the same time. Sait Kırmızıtoprak was already ahead of Gezmiş in planning for departure and cautioned Bozçalı about keeping his offer a secret. Deniz left the Bursa Prison and came to the Diyarbakır dormitory (in ̇ Istanbul). He told me ‘Hikmet, we will leave for the mountains.’ Deniz was constantly pushing me, saying that we should go to the mountains, and let them kill us. He was saying ‘We will kindle a fire, just like Che Guevara, then that fire will burn.’ However, Deniz did not know that we had that thing (with Şıvan), and I couldn’t tell him anyways. It wasn’t something legal, you couldn’t simply explain. Then, Deniz called me ‘'Asshole!’, and I called back ‘You are the asshole.’ Then I fought with Deniz at the Diyarbakır dormitory. (H. Bozçalı, personal communication, October 11, 2020)

In any case, Turkish and Kurdish socialist leaders were ready to adopt riskier means to pursue their political goals. For Sait Kırmızıtoprak, this meant maintaining a double life, as he was under probation in Isparta, a city in Central Anatolia, while he was making plans for his departure from 1965 onwards. At the same time, he was living with his family and

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working in his medical clinic as an appreciated local doctor. Although his friendliness, medical expertise, and work ethic captivated the locals, many conspirative opinion columns problematizing his political endeavors were circulating in the local newspapers (Arık, 2015, pp.  469–477). Sait Kırmızıtoprak was defending himself against the allegations by accentuating his identity as a medical professional (Fig. 2). Similarly, his cover-up for the departure was based on the same idea, as he told many that he was leaving for Canada to receive education in medical specialization. In October 1969, Sait Kırmızıtoprak made his way to Southern Kurdistan with a small group of his fellow companions. Under Barzani’s rule, they were assigned to perform diverse tasks in accordance with their professions. Sait Kırmızıtoprak, from then on Dr Şıvan, worked as a

Fig. 2  Sait Kırmızıtoprak with a cadaver. (Image source: http://www.drsivan. info/tr/ (retrieved in 2022))

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Fig. 3  Dr Şıvan in guerilla clothing. (Image source: http://www.drsivan.info/ tr/ (retrieved in 2022))

doctor in Esat Xoshewi’s camp, closely observed guerilla training, and accelerated the activities of T-KDP (Fig. 3). In the meantime, he developed his previously non-existent language skills in Kurmanji and finalized his most significant written work, titled “Kurdish National Movements and Kurdistan Revolution in Iraq.”7 The Kurdish mobilization under Barzani’s rule not only informed Kırmızıtoprak’s political agenda but also appealed to a wide Kurdish audience from different political backgrounds, resurfacing the possibilities of igniting a Kurdish liberation movement in other Kurdish geographies. In 1970, Barzani’s committee managed to 7

̇  Tr: Kürt Millet Hareketleri ve Irak’ta Kürdistan Ihtilali.

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sign an autonomy agreement with the Iraqi government. Barzani needed to rely on a balanced diplomatic relationship with the Turkish state to maintain the positive outcomes of this agreement. According to Selahattin Ali Arık, that is the reason why Barzani advised Kırmızıtoprak to refrain from getting involved in a similar guerilla action in Turkey (2015, p. 138). Sait Elçi, a renowned Kurdish nationalist, on the other hand, was among those inspired by Barzani’s movement, although he believed that the circumstances at that time in Turkey were not in place to start a guerilla struggle. Even though Sait Elçi and Sait Kırmızıtoprak had years of acquaintance and found grounds for solidarity, especially regarding the urgency of Kurdish liberation, their political differences went beyond a mere tactical disagreement on whether or when to start a Kurdish armed mobilization in Turkey. Sait Elçi came from a more conservative background in which religious or traditional figures serve as a buffer that connects their party program with the larger Kurdish public, predominantly villagers. As a socialist leader, Kırmızıtoprak initially remained at a distance from such figures, as for him they were among the perpetrators of the feudal oppression that the Kurdish villagers were suffering. Although in his latest statements Kırmızıtoprak acknowledged the need for solidarity between all Kurdish social forces regardless of their political positions, thus to some extent closing the distance between his and Elçi’s political ideas, their relationship was already tainted when Kırmızıtoprak founded his political party as a spin-off of Elçi’s TKDP and convinced many figures who once worked with Elçi to join T-KDP. That is the reason why when Sait Elçi notified Barzani about his desire to visit his camp in 1971, Kırmızıtoprak’s group in the region grew very cautious as to why Sait Elçi was visiting Southern Kurdistan and concerned about whether Sait Elçi would put them in a vulnerable position against Mustafa Barzani (Fig. 4). What followed is a matter of endless speculation that is marked in Kurdish political history as the Two Saits Incident, referring to a semi-­ conspirative chain of events that are yet to be resolved due to the multicausal processes that are problematized in the upcoming sections. But to make such a problematization possible, we have to rely on the residues of factuality to form a comprehensible narrative. Sait Elçi arrived at Disesh Camp in Iraqi Kurdistan in May 1971 with his companions. Shortly after, the news about Elçi’s possible visit to Kırmızıtoprak’s camp was broken to Kırmızıtoprak’s group. Following an intense deliberation on whether they would welcome Sait Elçi in their camp, Kırmızıtoprak had the rooms prepared for Sait Elçi and his

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Fig. 4  Sait Elçi (first from the left) and Sait Kırmızıtoprak (fourth from the left) in Harbiye Open Military Prison following the Trials of 49. (Image source: http:// www.drsivan.info/tr/ (retrieved in 2022))

companions. A couple of days later, Sait Elçi had a face-to-face encounter with Sait Kırmızıtoprak, Çeko, and Brusk—whose official names were respectively Hikmet Buluttekin and Hasan Yıkmış—but no other person in the camp had seen him. Then Kırmızıtoprak’s group went back to the camp without Sait Elçi and to those who asked, they said that Elçi had decided to make his return to Turkey, as they could not come to an agreement. Months later, Sait Elçi’s body was found, and Kırmızıtoprak’s group was detained by the Barzani’s government for killing Sait Elçi and his companions. After suffering in dire conditions in total isolation, Dr Şıvan, Çeko, and Brusk were executed by the Barzani administration in November 1971. In a matter of months, two notable figures of the Kurdish mobilization in Turkey were dead, leaving a violent mark on Kurdish political history.

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For some, Sait Kırmızıtoprak committed a bloody “Brakuji” (En: fratricide) which had devastating consequences for the Kurdish nationalists; for others, he was the victim of a greater conspiracy that is believed to be a collaborative effort of the Barzani government and the Turkish intelligence whose aim was to halt the Kurdish political mobilization in Turkey. It was no surprise that it ruptured the Kurdish discursive space since it was simultaneously considered to be a betrayal and a plot (Şur, 2018b, p. 260). For many, the killing of two Saits had to do with the cooperation between the Barzani administration and the Turkish government to sabotage Kurdish mobilization in Turkey, since neither of them wanted a rival political organization around them. To those who were closer to Elçi’s political program, the incident was reflective of the immorality, unreliability, and adventurousness of the leftist actors as they proved to pursue their goals with whatever means available, even if this meant committing a Brakuji (Miroğlu, 2009). Surely the tragic death of the two high-potential figures created immense disappointment among the Kurdish people, but neither Kırmızıtoprak nor Elçi could emerge as an unequivocal martyr from this incident.

Two Saits Incident as a Failed Cataclysmic Event As expected, Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s legacy could not sit comfortably with ’68 martyrdom, for his political persona was first and foremost subjected to the disciplinary gaze of both the Turkish official history (see also Ünlü, 2018) and the Turkish left (Yaşar, 2015). Nevertheless, the reasons why Sait Kırmızıtoprak was forgotten go beyond the impact of Turkishness upon the Kurdish memory scene. For instance, the epithet of “Kurdish Che” seldom appears as an unequivocal representation of Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s position within the Kurdish social memory (Güçlü, 2021; Saymadi, 2013), for he is also perceived as a suspect of Brakuji. In a way, the contesting truth claims regarding his controversial death reveal the limits and vulnerabilities of the idea of Kurdish brotherhood. The “Two Saits Incident,” thus, is a founding trauma that shatters the Kurdish memoryscape, a loss that still remains unrepresentable since it was hard to compose a unifying narrative that could create a meaningful continuity out of this historical shock. Moreover, the apparent lack of mnemonic devices and archival evidence regarding the incident further destabilized the grounds to claim validity. Recognizing the multiplicity of truth claims that navigate Kırmızıtoprak’s memory and political legacy, we suggest

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considering the Two Saits Incident a failed “cataclysmic event” that could not overcome its crisis of representation and create a common commemorative ground. Cataclysmic events are a limit condition: the annihilation of history and the destruction of personality. Like all strokes of fortune and personal loss they invoke languages of sacredness surrounding death and discontinuity between the dead and the living. Languages and commemorations try to cross that discontinuity between historical and eternal time, across lives ended and beginning, but here across a massive discontinuity (Feuchtwang, 2000, p. 59). The analytical potential of cataclysmic events lies in their ability to resurface the gaps and the links between social memory, life history, and nation formation (Feuchtwang, 2000). Therefore, the “totalness” of the cataclysmic event in the sense of its expected culmination into a collective being requires the overcoming of its crisis of representation through a wide range of practices such as rumors, demonization, ceremonies, and archival work. To understand the ways in which this symbolic crisis is transcended, Feuchtwang (2000) initiates a comparative project that scrutinizes the interpersonal transmission of memory primarily in Asia and Europe in the context of nation formation, and makes an open call for new cases that suit the framework of this research to enrich its comparative edge. We would like to make our humble contribution to this academic project and to the larger literature that it sets a dialogue with, taking inspiration from Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s death that was absorbed in the conundrum that the Two Saits controversies have mobilized. It would be a good effort to expand the scope of Feuchtwang’s (2000) work, which prioritizes unified nation-states as its analytical unit, and to articulate his conceptual and argumentative contributions to a geography that is still dominated by colonial relations of power and yet has not emerged as a unified nation-state. Our case presents the breach of one of the central properties of nation-states, that is, territorial integrity, as its geographical space is forcefully fragmented and so, too, its systems of meaning where everyday life becomes replete with death itself. How, then, do the social ties, objects, and individual life histories shape the performative and discursive space in a geography where death appears in utmost mundaneness? [such traditions] will always contain conventions and ideas of what a good death is and of how a bad death should therefore be treated. But cataclysmic

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events test such ideas and conventions beyond endurance. Recovery from them and commemoration of them are likely to be improvised, and to run the danger of denial and of unfinished or unassimilable grief and shame. (Feuchtwang, 2000, p. 63)

According to Certeau, the quest for historical meaning “aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present by offering them scriptural tombs” and in doing so, it invokes an exchange among the living (1988, p. 2). When it comes to Kırmızıtoprak, the efforts to find where his body was buried were unsuccessful and the request to build a memorial for him (or to name a park after him) was refused. That Kırmızıtoprak does not have any grave/memorial puts his family and those who were close to him in a state of perpetual mourning. This situation should be read together with the experience of the Kurdish people in Dersim in 1938, where this experience was suppressed by the state and the call for justice remained unanswered: The politics that revolve around the idea of death, which is observable in Kırmızıtoprak’s case when one takes into consideration the death of his grandfather and approximately 50 of his relatives, persists in his own death, for it was similarly disregarded. In fact, an essentially political death was turned into a criminalized one and was treated as a public secret, talk of which is deemed to prove fruitless or provocative. Then we are compelled to ask: What happens when the social and physical tools fail to perform their recollective functions that could alleviate the symbolic crisis inherent in the cataclysmic events, or if those tools are denied in the first place? We believe that the ambiguous mnemonic repertoire, or the lack thereof, concerning Kırmızıtoprak’s death and its failure to crystallize in a collectively acknowledged common narrative is symptomatic of this ongoing crisis of representation. Therefore, we contend that it is invaluable to look at the ways in which those who lament over his death try to make their loss communicable.

Brakuji, Family, and Guilt When Sait Kırmızıtoprak was executed by Barzani’s regime in 1971, his ̇ nuclear family was residing in Istanbul. Before moving to Northern Iraq, Kırmızıtoprak had secured the finances and accommodation of his wife and two small children but lost all his contact with them in his last months due to the strict isolation that Barzani enforced. In the decades following Kırmızıtoprak’s execution, his family had no public appearance addressing

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his political program, death, and legacy. But his son, Dara Kırmızıtoprak, who was just nine years old when Sait Kırmızıtoprak was killed, has been actively involved in the realization of many substantive projects that thematize Kırmızıtoprak’s life and political legacy. Indeed, two of the guiding works that inform this particular chapter, namely an extended biography from Selahattin Ali Arık and a documentary from Çayan Demirel, both titled Dr. Şıvan, acknowledge the active contribution of Dara Kırmızıtoprak in their prologue. Now a high-end architect, Dara Kırmızıtoprak is a part of an attempt to construct a grave/memorial at the alleged site where Sait Kırmızıtoprak was killed, even though his body has never been discovered either on that or any other site. We managed to conduct an interview with him, and he disclosed his main goal as redeeming the reputation of his father who had been slandered with an accusation of murder. He insists that his father was never a criminal and has been a victim of a bigger plot that poisoned the Kurdish mobilization in Turkey, an idea shared by many of Kırmızıtoprak’s contemporaries (Arık, 2015, pp. 241–242; Büyükkaya, 2008, p. 386; A. Z. Okçuoğlu, personal communication, September 13, 2021). Yet, Dara Kırmızıtoprak was dismissive of the idea of us conducṫ ing a further interview with his mother Ismet and his sister Ruken. He keenly insisted that they would remain outside of any public discussion concerning Sait Kırmızıtoprak’s political ventures, including this particular work. According to Fuat Önen, Dara’s motivation has more to do with a humane effort to recover an injured familial bond than a full-blown political redemption. I mean, I understand Dara. Fathers are idols to their children. It was something troubling him all the time, I mean, who is my father, am I the son of a murderer? In fact, according to Dara, he was the son of a Kurdish Che Guevara. That’s what Dara thinks, that’s how he perceives Sait Kırmızıtoprak. It is pretty normal for him to see the issue this way, I mean, who wouldn’t think like that if they were in his shoes? (F. Önen, personal communication, April 20, 2021). We argue that the symbolic violence that Kırmızıtoprak’s family has suffered isolates them within this painful course, making this loss a prohibited topic in public spaces and begetting a reticence. Nevertheless, the political conditions in the 2010s, in which the Kurdish issue has been spoken aloud, witnessed (or maybe even allowed) a documentary about Kırmızıtoprak, to which Kırmızıtoprak’s son has contributed, that made Kırmızıtoprak somewhat known. The documentary is based on the

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witness accounts of Kırmızıtoprak’s step-siblings and friends, and does not convey any witness accounts from his family, including his wife and children. To clear Kırmızıtoprak’s name, and to demystify the cloud surrounding his story, in fact, appears as a soft spot within the documentary regarding its artistic and political value. The iconized images of the ’68 revolutionaries executed by the Turkish state do not call for such a vindication that the martyr could also be the murderer. Although anti-communist sentiments have long been ingrained in the Turkish political scene and the radical means that student activists adopt to pursue their political goals are questioned, they were never considered as a fundamental threat to the founding principles of the Turkish state and its ethno-national and racial organization. At the height of the student movement in Turkey, one of the most influential groups of the Turkish left, named Milli Demokratik Devrim (National Democratic Revolution), indeed, embraced the slogan “Army and nation hand in hand,” and called for active cooperation between Turkish intelligentsia and army on the path to revolution. Most of the Turkish left did not directly confront the processes leading up to and principles inscribed in the Kemalist Revolution, but rather considered the status of the Turkish state a deviation from its authentic form, as it was assumed to be, at that time, appropriated by groups who were hostile to the interests of the working class. Kırmızıtoprak, on the other hand, was a natural outsider of the political space that the Turkish state enables, less because he was a socialist but rather due to his Kurdish identity, a founding othering practice that enabled the formation of the Turkish state. Nevertheless, he was not its direct victim as he was executed by Barzani’s regime, another Kurdish organization, which already limits the possibilities of a counter-hegemonic group formation that points fingers at the Turkish state as the perpetrator of this offense. Moreover, the allegation that Dr Şıvan killed Sait Elçi, another renowned Kurdish political actor, further blurred the perceptions regarding Kırmızıtoprak’s death and his political ventures. Two major wrongs were done to Şıvan, the first one is that they have remembered him with a murder charge even though he had nothing to do with that, and the second one is that they attempted to wash away his political identity. (A Z. Okçuoğlu, personal communication, September 13, 2021)

The accusatory atmosphere revolving around a possible Brakuji articulates the discussion regarding Kırmızıtoprak’s death into another familial

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scale that destabilizes the boundaries of the so-called Kurdish brotherhood. In other words, Brakuji here functions as a metaphor through which a political-ideological issue is tabooed through a familial discourse. Önen describes a memorable interaction that took place between Dara Kırmızıtoprak and Fuat Elçi, Sait Elçi’s son. The dialogue between the two was not in any way confrontational, although Fuat Elçi was speaking to the son of the man who allegedly killed his father. When Dara asked Fuat Elçi whether he thinks Sait Kırmızıtoprak was the one who killed Sait Elçi, Fuat Elçi says: “Dear Dara, this is not a personal issue, this is an affair that belongs to the Kurdish political history; we have thousands of people who have been murdered in internal conflicts, this [case] is one of them” (Fuat Önen, personal communication, April 20, 2021). He articulated the incident into a larger context that goes well beyond their immediate familial circles, framing it as a critical moment reflecting the disintegration of Kurdish solidarity. This line of thinking is by no means a rare one, as one can observe a similar trajectory in Musa Anter’s memoir, in which he contends that the Two Saits Incident should be considered an “intra-familial mistake,” and it should not be turned into a source of grudge (1990, p. 216). This attitude also had prescriptive implications for Kurdish politics to move on from this trauma, not to “open a scabbed over wound” (Çamlıbel, 2007, p. 164) and to heal the broken trust. However, this task entrusted to the successors of the two Saits was troublesome since the kind of injury that they were dealing with was obscured by the sheer lack of evidence and testimony.

Death of the Witness If one can find a rare consensual ground in the apparent cacophony concerning the Two Saits Incident, it is the lack of testimony and archival evidence that can illuminate the event (Büyükkaya, 2008, p.  18). Sait Elçi’s body was discovered months after his death. Sait Kırmızıtoprak, along with Çeko and Brusk, was subjected to strict isolation during the process that resulted in his execution. In that period, the only person who contacted him was Barzani’s personal doctor Hızni Haco, who visited Sait Kırmızıtoprak when he fell ill in his cell. Haco narrates that Kırmızıtoprak was not allowed to talk about anything but his health condition. He was very moved to see the insufferable conditions under which Kırmızıtoprak was trying to survive (Arık, 2015, p. 206). Shortly after Haco visited them, Dr Şıvan, Çeko, and Brusk were executed, without

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leaving any reliable document that could help one to track down the progression of their trial and the final verdict of the Barzani government, apart from a few handwritten notes from the archive of T-KDP that were collected in a book by Şerwan Büyükkaya, titled İlk Anlatım (Eng: “First Narration”; Miroğlu, 2009, p. 585). One polemical piece of evidence is a handwritten confession of Sait Kırmızıtoprak that was presented to Barzani. The letter was sent for forensic examination and the results showed that it was most probably written by Çeko and signed by Sait Kırmızıtoprak. There is still strong suspicion about whether the confession was extracted by force or not (Arık, 2015, p. 238). Kazım Arık finds this lack of archival evidence understandable to some extent; for him, Barzani’s newly founded administration obviously lacked the sophisticated apparatuses of the modern nation-states. But what is harder to comprehend is the fact that Kırmızıtoprak’s body was never found and his relatives’ collective attempts to build a grave/memorial were constantly hampered. According to Arık, this is not an occasional condition, but rather a systematic approach whose intention is to efface the memory of a prominent figure, or even to hinder its formation from the very beginning, by delimiting the physical space that would be capable of acting as a referential mnemonic epicenter. This line of thinking strongly resonates with what is called “the genocidal will,” that is, “the will to destroy the capacity to bear witness” (Üstündağ, 2013, p. 606). Now that all the graves of the executed are lost in Turkey, how they want to blot out the memory of the people, they employ the same method, just like all the sovereigns, all the hegemons. They destroy the graves so that no trace can be found as to all the torture, cruelty, executions, massacres. (K. Arık, personal communication, September 21, 2021)

One can notice the role of such mnemonic elements in memory-­making especially in the commemorative ceremonies, which are a great way to restore a collective meaning system that disintegrates when faced with the death of a renowned figure. The cold hard materiality of a dead body is one of the main mnemonic elements that translates the historical shock communicated by a cataclysmic event into the continuum of memory. For instance, Connerton focuses on the events of the French Revolution to understand how such a colossal historical shift is articulated into the social memory. Scrutinizing the public execution of King Louis XVI, Connerton argues that the significance of this death lies in its “ceremonial publicity,” and this collective testimony of the dead body of the king is what makes

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the collapse of the ancien regime intelligible (1989, p. 8). In other cases, one can observe commemorative rituals that take the form of grief-stricken funerals where people touch the casket of the deceased, give eulogies, and cry or sing in agony, all facing the lifeless body that gathered the crowd. First, one can observe that such ceremonies reproduce the political agendas of the organizations, for they are employed as physical spaces in which political slogans are chanted and promises are given. Second, the figures for whom these funeral ceremonies are held make their way into the mnemonic repertoire of the organizations through laments shouted after them. All in all, one can argue that a death that is “properly commemorated” has a double function: it turns the dead (and death itself as well) into a functional mnemonic element for the political imagination for which the dead had sacrificed themselves, and as a result of this process, the commemoration ceremony functions as a referential point for the dead within the mnemonic repertoire of the organization. The case of Sait Kırmızıtoprak, however, lacked the possibility of such a commemoration; although his death had a quite potent presence, anybody that could realize the cataclysmic potential of this death was nowhere to be found. His death was far from being public and his body has never reached his family, friends, and relatives, let alone those who were inspired by his political program. Without any commemorative ceremony, his death hardly evolved into a referential point for the formation of his memory, eventually failing to constitute a cataclysmic event. As his death is also related to the infamous Two Saits Incident, which taints even the possibility of a memory formation, the lack of any proper commemorative ceremony can be counted among the elements that further complicated the crisis of representation concerning his memory. Feuchtwang contends that the crisis of representation inherent in the cataclysmic events requires “an empathetic third person” (2000, p. 62), who is generally a historian or an anthropologist, to account for the ongoing and to establish a new reality. Here, the term does not endow the so-­ called historian, anthropologist, or sociologist with an omnipotent gaze and a gift of objectivity but it is descriptive of their function in creating a collectively acknowledged narrative that becomes a new reality. Therefore, before problematizing the existing evidence or the lack thereof regarding the Two Saits Incident, one should take a step back and ask whether there is that empathetic third person to recollect the shattered discursive space. In this respect, what Fuat Önen (personal communication, April 20, 2021) conveys speaks volumes: “The Kurdish people are not only left

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without a history but also they are left without a historian.” Like in many colonized geographies that are poisoned by a memory crisis, here the challenge is not merely to decide on what is to be publicly remembered or not but to access “the very means and modes of remembrance” (Werbner, 1998, p. 1). In colonized geographies, murders are mundane, repetitive, and often committed on a massive scale. As those atrocities have no legal consequences, the perpetrators are left unpunished. Those who lost their lives in the massacres are either piled in mass graves, thrown into wells and streams, or buried in unknown places without their relatives knowing (de Boeck, 1998, p.  23; Werbner, 1998, pp.  3–4). Thus, the disasters that have been experienced are left to be forgotten and pushed out of the realm of visibility by erasing their traces from the archive, space, and memory. This is why, historically, in the context of the Kurdish issue, similar disasters befell leaders such as Şeyh Said and Seyid Rıza during the founding years of the Republic. The fact that Kırmızıtoprak, who embodied the knowledge of these disasters, was similarly subjected to physical and political murder situates him on the historical continuum of colonial violence.

Concluding Remarks What makes a death memorable, a political figure iconic, a loss lamentable? Throughout this chapter, we attempted to explore these questions by looking at Sait Krımızıtoprak’s controversial death. While the young Turkish revolutionists that were murdered by the state in and after 1968 were perceived as iconic charismatic figures and inspired the mobilization of the following generations, Kırmızıtoprak was not granted even a grave and his political legacy has largely faded into oblivion, despite his notable influence on the political and ideological climate of his time. In other words, although many revolutionaries were killed or executed during ’68 in Turkey, not all of them were subjected to a “politicide,”here borrowing the concept from Sibel Irzık (2019, p. 424), in that their physical death, life stories, and political endeavors could still circulate among upcoming generations as relevant and legitimate sources of inspiration. Problematizing this discrepancy and drawing from Feuchtwang’s account (2000) that investigates the interpersonal transmission of memories in the context of nation formation, we argued that Kırmızıtoprak’s death failed to form a cataclysmic event since Kurdish groups in Turkey lacked the modes and means to alleviate the crisis of representation that is immanent to cataclysmic events.

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That Kırmızıtoprak was killed by a Kurdish organization, not being a direct victim of the violence of the constitutive enemy, and that he transgressed a Kurdish social virtue by allegedly committing a fratricide resulted in a compelling interplay between morality and politics in making sense of his death by his successors. Some tried to focus on the overall political climate that characterized those years and considered Kırmızıtopak’s death as a bigger plot to halt Kurdish mobilization in Turkey on the grounds that Kırmızıtoprak’s trustworthy personality and revolutionary investments would never allow such a disgrace to happen. Others took the Two Saits Incident as the epitome of how unreliable and immoral socialist groups can be if their political pursuits are at stake. In both lines of thinking, there is no official political and moral imperative that gives the final verdict or that can be challenged on whether the death of Kırmızıtoprak was a “good” or “bad” one, unlike that of the Turkish ’68 martyrs. Furthermore, the lack of first-hand witnesses and the deliberate effort to destroy the physical space, as a long-standing hegemonic practice, through which Kırmızıtoprak can be memorialized interrupted the circulation of his memory and further diluted the presence of his death. All in all, the absence of the physical and social tools that restore collective meaning systems foreclosed the cataclysmic potential residing in the Two Saits Incident. To put this into a larger frame, we interpret this case as a prolongation of what the Kurdish people have been experiencing, namely that they are deprived of an official canonized history and an integrated physical space that could function as the trigger, effect, or medium through which collective memory is crystallized. While the leaders of the dominant discourse are promoted to a magical-immortal rank, the political and social leaders of the other are stigmatized and discredited. A strategy of defamation is pursued against the iconization of the latter by tainting their names and isolating them from the society they were born into. The sovereign does not want to know and hear about the calamities taking place; consequently, those sufferings do not cause a political and moral crisis in the colonizing regime. The “not-knowingness” in this sense is an active ignorance, a behavioral and affective stance, which is presented as knowledge (Mills, 2007). And the very source of this knowledge is putting the credibility of the memory and testimony of the subjugated people to a persistent test (Owen, 2007). It is this unwillingness to see, hear, and know that perpetuates the colonial violence without interruption.

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References Anter, M. (1990). Hatıralarım. Doz Yayınları. ̇ Arık, S. A. (2015). Dr. Şıvan, Ismail Beşikçi Vakfı. ̇ Arslan, R. (2020). Ömrü Kısa Etkisi Büyük Kürt Örgütlenmesi: DDKO. Ismail Beşikçi Vakfı. Burkay, K. (2001). Anılar, Belgeler Cilt 1. Deng Yayınları. Büyükkaya, N. (2008). Kalemimden Sayfalar. Vate Yayın. Connerton, P. (1989). Social memory. In P.  Connerton (Ed.), How Societies Remember (pp. 6–40). Cambridge University Press. ̇ Çamlıbel, Y. (2007). 49’lar Davası: Bir Garip Ülkenin Idamlık Kürtleri. Algı Yayın. de Certeau, M. (1988). The Writing of History. Columbia University Press. de Boeck, F. (1998). Beyond the Grave: History, Memory and Death in Postcolonial Congo/ Zaïre. In R. Werbner (Ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African anthropology and critique of power (pp. 21-57). Zed Books. Demir, D. C. (2019). 68 Rüzgarında Türkiyeli Kürtler. In Ö. Turan (Ed.), 1968: ̇ Isyan, Devrim, Özgürlük (pp. 357-407). Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları. Doğanoğlu, M. (2016). Devrimci Doğu-Kültür Ocakları: Siyasal ayrışma. Ankara Üniversitesi SBF Dergisi, 71(3), 941-959. https://doi.org/10.1501/ SBFder_0000002417. Feuchtwang, S. (2000). Reinscriptions: Commemoration, restoration and the interpersonal transmission of histories and memories under modern states in Asia and Europe. In S. Radstone (Ed.), Memory and Methodology (pp. 59-79). Bloomsbury Publishing. Gündoğan, A. Z. (2005). The Kurdish political mobilization in the 1960s: The Case of the Eastern Meetings [M.A dissertation]. The Middle East Technical University. Güçlü, I.̇ (2021). “Dostlarınca Katledilen Kürdistan Sevdalısı Lider Sait Elçi (2)” retrieved from https://www.basnews.com/tr/babat/693925. Hartman S.  V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-­century America. Oxford University Press. Irzık, S. (2019). Remembering “possibility”: Postmemory and apocalyptic hope in recent Turkish coup narratives. In A. G. Altınay, M. J. Contreras, M. Hirsch, J.  Howard, B.  Karaca, & A.  Solomon (Ed.), Women Mobilizing Memory (pp. 424-440). Columbia University Press. Jongerden, J., & Akkaya, A. H. (2011). Born from the Left: The Making of the PKK. In M. Casier & J. Jongerden (Ed.), Nationalism and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue (pp. 123-142). Routledge. Kaya, H. (2012). Doğunun Elçisinden Yüce Divan’a Şerafettin Elçi. Fanos Yayınları. Kırmızıtoprak, S. (1997). Kürt Millet Hareketleri ve Irak’ta Kürdistan ̇ Ihtilali. APEC.

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Mills, C. W. (2007). White Ignorance. In S. Sullivan & N. Tauna (Ed.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. (pp. 13-38). SUNY Press. Miroğlu, O. (2009). Sait Kırmızıtoprak. In Ö. Laçiner (Ed.), Modern Türkiye’de ̇ Siyasi Düşünce: Dönemler ve Zihniyetler (pp. 585-606). Iletiş im Yayınları. Owen, D.  S. (2007). Towards a Critical Theory of Whiteness. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 33 (2), 203-222. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914 53707074139. ̇ Saymadi, A. (2013). “Dr. Şıvan Belgeselinden Bugüne Ipuçları” retrieved from https://bianet.org/biamag/siyaset/151883-­d r-­s ivan-­b elgeselinden-­ bugune-­ipuclari. Şen, B. (2020). Önsöz. In R.  Arslan (Ed.), Ömrü Kısa Etkisi Büyük Kürt ̇ Örgütlenmesi: DDKO (pp. 9–13). Ismail Beşikçi Vakfı. Şur, T. (2018a). Kürtlerin 68’i ya da 68 İçinde Kürtler. Kürt Tarihi. İsmail Beşikçi Vakfı Yayınları. vol. 34. pp. 18–35. ̇ Şur, T. (2018b). Sait Kırmızıtoprak (Dr. Şivan): Introspektif Bir Düşünür ve Fikir ̇ Insanı. In T. Şur & Y. Çakmak (Ed.), Kürt tarihi ve Siyasetinden Portreler. ̇ Iletiş im Yayınları. pp. 247–283. Ünlü, B. (2018). Türklük sözleşmesi: Oluşumu, işleyişi, krizleri. Dipnot Yayınları. Üstündağ, N. (2013). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive / The Historiographic Perversion. Rethinking Marxism. vol. 25(4), 606–609. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.842704. Werbner, R. (1998). Beyond oblivion: Confronting memory crisis. In R. Werbner (Ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African anthropology and the critique of power (pp. 1–21). Zed Books. Yaşar, H. (2015). Kürt milli meselesi karşısında Türk sosyalistlerinin tutumu. In E.  Kürkçü (Ed.), Sosyalizm ve Toplumsal Mücadeleler Ansiklopedisi ̇ (pp. 2114–2117). Iletiş im Yayınları.

Audio-Visual Çayan Demirel (2013), Dr. Şivan, Surela Film.

Interviews Ahmet Zeki Okçuoğlu, September 13, 2021, by Bülent Küçük. Dara Kırmızıtoprak, April 10, 2022, by Bülent Küçük & Zeynep Küçük & Deniz Çağtay Yılmaz. Fuat Önen, April 20, 2021, by Bülent Küçük & Zeynep Küçük. Hikmet Bozçalı, October 11, 2020, by Bülent Küçük. Kazım Arık, September 21, 2021, by Bülent Küçük & Zeynep Küçük. Osman Aydın, February 21, 2022, by Bülent Küçük.

The Other of the Other: Syrian Refugees from the Perspective of Kurdish Minority in Turkey Yasin Duman

Introduction Global forced displacement surpassed 100  million in early 2023, and 32.5 million of them are refugees (UNHCR, 20231). The primary reasons behind this number are war and ethnic, religious, and tribal conflicts and protracted violence. Anyone who ‘has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group’ and therefore ‘cannot return home or are 1

 This figure does not include approximately 4.7 million Ukrainian refugees.

Y. Duman (*) KU Leuven, The Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, Leuven, Belgium Queen Margaret University, The Institute of Global Health and Development, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_6

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afraid to do so’ is recognized as a refugee (UNHCR, n.d.). As of December 2022, there are approximately 3.6 million Syrian nationals in Turkey, who started to come after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011. They are regiṡ 2022), and although the Turkish tered under temporary protection (GIB, government does not recognize them as refugees,2 the majority of them cannot return to Syria for the very same reasons. Further, this is the case not only because some Syrians consider Turkey a safe country where they have already started building a life and want to continue living (Duman, 2021, 2022), but also because the conditions on the ground in Syria make it very difficult for many of them, as return may result in re-displacement, human rights violations, torture, imprisonment, violence, and killings (Amnesty International, 2020, 2021; SAWA 2019). Therefore, despite a mainstream disapproval by members of local communities of Syrians’ presence in Turkey, discrimination and violence against them, and the increasingly dehumanizing discourse that is dominant in the media and politics (see Duman, 2022; Güvengez et al., 2020), the majority of Syrians cannot return to Syria due to fear of persecution, ongoing conflict, and lack of infrastructure, or be resettled in a third country due to the deal3 between Turkey and the EU. Similar to Syrians, members of the Kurdish ethnic minority in Turkey also suffered from a protracted conflict and indiscriminate violence by state forces during the last century and were displaced for decades (see Çelik, 2005; Jongerden, 2001; Van Bruinessen, 1992). Although there is no reliable source of data tracking the number of Kurdish internally displaced persons (IDPs), available research estimates that approximately 1.2 million Kurds were displaced as a result of the conflict between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish armed forces between 1986 and 2005 (IDMC, 2020), some 350,000 between July 2015 and December 2016 (OHCHR, 2017), and approximately one million in 2019 as a result of the Turkish invasion and the conflicts between the 2  Although the Republic of Turkey is a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, it maintains the geographical limitation to the Convention. This means that those who arrived due to events that occurred outside of Europe are not granted refugee status but can benefit from ‘conditional refugee status’ or ‘secondary protection status,’ both of which ̇ (2022). allow them to stay in Turkey and apply for resettlement in a third country. See GIB 3  This deal was signed in March 2016 to stop what the parties called ‘irregular migration’ from Turkey to European countries and return those ‘irregular migrants’ to Turkey. For every refugee who managed to get to Greece after the deal, another refugee in Turkey was resettled in one of the EU countries. See European Commission (2016).

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Kurdish-led People’s Protection Units in Rojava/northeast Syria and the Turkish armed forces along the border. In addition to displacement, outcomes of these periods of conflicts and violence include socioeconomic instability, assimilation, discrimination, violation of human rights, and repeated mob attacks and lynching against Kurdish IDPs and immigrants by the majority Turkish population and the Turkish security forces across ̇ the country (see Duman, 2020; Korkut, 2008; Protner, 2018; TIHV, 2014, 2021). While an important number of local, national, and international humanitarian, civil society, and non-governmental organizations design and implement protection, livelihood, and integration programs to help Syrians in Turkey, a significant portion of Kurdish IDPs have had no access to such support. The fact that Kurdish organizations and local, national, and international humanitarian, civil society, and non-governmental organizations that support Kurdish rights have long been criminalized by the state institutions, particularly after the 2016 coup attempt (see Amnesty International, 2020; Bianet, 2022), further complicates Kurdish IDPs’ vulnerabilities. Therefore, although the experiences of conflict and displacement are similar for both groups, there are different mechanisms that influence the socioeconomic and political circumstances that surround them. A growing body of literature examines the socioeconomic and political outcomes of conflicts in Syria and Turkey, challenges in the integration process, and local communities’ perceptions of Syrian refugees and their rights (Duman, 2021). However, a relatively small body of literature investigates the intergroup relations between Syrian refugees and citizens. Research finds that the citizens tend to have negative perceptions of the refugees on the ground that they pose a threat to the economy, cultural values, and societal peace (Duman, 2021; Erdoğan & Uyan Semerci, 2018), have stronger national identification, have more negative attitudes toward refugees (Yitmen & Verkuyten, 2018), avoid contact with the refugees, and want them to either return to Syria or resettle in a third country (Duman, 2021; Erdoğan, 2020; Şar & Kuru, 2020). The majority of the existing studies have several shortages. First, they approach both the refugees and citizens as homogenous groups while in fact both Syria and Turkey have cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity; therefore, members of refugee and local communities have different backgrounds. This approach, for example, does not help to understand how the minorities who have gone through similar experiences perceive and respond to Syrian refugees’ displacement, needs, and current situation in Turkey. Second,

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researchers tend to understand and examine integration as a one-way process in which refugees are expected to adapt to mainstream social norms, but research shows that this is neither realistic nor practical (see Berry, 2011). The underlying reasons are that not all refugees receive the same support that will help them ‘integrate,’ not all refugees want to ‘integrate’ but intentionally reject being part of integration policies and programs, and regardless of how well the ‘integration’ policies are designed and implemented and how actively refugees participate in them, racism and discrimination by local community members significantly reduces the chance of ‘integration’ (Duman, 2021). Therefore, these negative inter-­ communal tensions, particularly from a minority perspective, are understudied by the existing scholarship. Third, while a significant portion of community members resist the accommodation of Syrian refugees, others tend to support them; however, the motivations behind the two are not explored enough. This chapter aims to fill these gaps by discussing the way that members of the Kurdish minority perceive forced migration of Syrian refugees, support for rights granted to them under temporary protection, and their belongingness and stay in Turkey. By doing this the chapter demonstrates that identity-related perceptions of rights and freedoms among a marginalized minority group may change fundamentally in the presence of refugees as an outsider community. The rest of the chapter is divided into five parts. The next part presents the theoretical background which provides an overview of current knowledge in the field, allowing us to identify relevant theories in the existing research. This is followed by the method, which introduces the strategy, process, and techniques utilized in the collection of data for analysis in order to uncover new information or create better understanding of the topic. Then the results of the research are presented and discussed. Finally, the conclusion provides a short summary of the chapter and highlights the contribution it makes to the literature.

Literature Review Social psychological factors such as social identity, real or symbolic threat perceptions, social dominance orientation (SDO), and collective psychological ownership help explain local community members’ perceptions of displacement due to conflict and their attitudes toward refugees. More specifically, the social identity perspective suggests that group identification plays a critical role in influencing intergroup relations (Tajfel &

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Turner, 1979; Turner & Reynolds, 2001). Individuals often develop more positive feelings toward ingroup members (people from the same identity), and less positive or even negative attitudes for outgroup members (people from other identity) (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), and once they become aware of the group differences, they can easily practice discrimination against outgroup members (Tajfel, 1978). In order to maintain a positive social identity, they tend to compare ingroup members with outgroup members, develop a favorable bias toward ingroup members, and adopt certain coping strategies that lead to internalizing and/or externalizing attributions for group failures (Brewer et al., 1993; Hewstone, 1990). Evaluating the world from a social identity perspective can lead to intergroup hostility and prejudice toward outgroups (Makashvili et al., 2018). Previous studies show that individuals who make a clear distinction between ingroup and outgroup also tend to perceive outgroup members as a source of threat and fear (Myers et al., 2013; Stephan et al., 2009). The perceptions of threat do not necessarily have to be accurate to produce real, negative consequences in intergroup relations (Stephan et al., 2009), and in contexts where economic hardship and socio-political issues are experienced, threats are perceived to have been induced by outgroup members such as immigrants and minorities (Riek et al., 2006). Negative attitudes toward immigrants are fostered in particular when it is believed that immigrant gains come at the expense of the local community (Esses et al., 1998, 2001). Similarly, in symbolic threat, the ingroup’s culture is believed to be threatened by the outgroup when cultural values and traits of the latter are different (see Zárate et al., 2004). Individuals with a high SDO tend to have a general anti-egalitarianism perspective, ‘a view of human existence as zero-sum and relentless competition between groups, the desire for generalized, hierarchical relationships between social groups, and in-group dominance over out-groups’ (Sidanius et al., 1994a, p. 999; see also Sidanius et al., 1994b; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), and see the world as a competitive place (Altemeyer, 1998). Legitimizing myths reproducing inequality or difference in power, privilege, and social status regardless of groups’ racial, ethnic, religious, class, and gender identifications are defined and used to justify and maintain this hierarchical relationship. These myths suggest that ‘certain groups are “better” than others and as such should receive a more favourable share of social resources’ (Sidanius et al., 1994a, p. 999). Studies show there is a high level of correlation between SDO and anti-immigrant attitudes in

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countries where immigrants are economically disadvantaged and have a lower socioeconomic status (Cohrs & Stelzl, 2010). Lastly, collective psychological ownership ‘involves a particular group or community that has the perceived entitlement or right to determine how the target of ownership is to be used and who can use it’ (Verkuyten & Martinovic, 2017, p. 1021). Further, this sense of ownership encompasses ‘the legitimate right to exclude others from unwanted invasions and intrusion’; therefore, ‘it is up to the gatekeeper (“us”) to exercise the power of exclusion and inclusion and defend or restore this power when it is perceived to be threatened’ (Verkuyten & Martinovic, 2017, p. 1031). Research findings demonstrate that immigrants in particular are excluded from the claims of ownership of resources, land, and occupancy (Ceuppens & Geschiere, 2005; Due & Riggs, 2008; Noor & Leong, 2013).

Method I interviewed 50 members (50% female, Mage  =  27.33) of the Kurdish minority community living in the provinces of Mardin, Hatay, and Bursa in 2018. The majority of them (61%) have been studying or have university degrees. There are several reasons for selecting these provinces. First, Mardin is a Kurdish-majority multicultural city located at the border between Syria and Turkey and where the armed conflicts on both sides of the border have the biggest impact on local communities, including displacement and protracted human rights violations. Mardin has a significant Arab population and a minority Christian (mainly Assyrian) population as well. As of May 2022, the percentage of refugee population to local ̇ 2022). population is 10.65% in Mardin (GIB, Hatay is also located along the Syria–Turkey border where the impacts of historical sectarian and ethnic conflicts (Arab Alewites vs. Turkish Sunnis) and political and ideological contestations (seculars vs. conservatives) result in limited intergroup contact and marriage (see Kineşçi, 2010), and security concerns among the local population (Duman, 2021). In 2019, around 230,000 internal migrants and IDPs, including members ̇ 2019). As of May of the Kurdish minority, were living in Hatay (TÜIK, 2022, the percentage of refugee population to local population is 25.68% ̇ 2022). in Hatay (GIB,

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Located in northwest Turkey, Bursa has a Turkish-majority local population and an advanced industry that has been attractive to both Syrian refugees and internal Kurdish migrants and IDPs. Members of both Kurdish and Syrian communities have been targets of discrimination and mob attacks in Bursa.4 In 2019, around 1.5 million internal migrants and ̇ 2019). As of May 2022, the IDPs were living in the province (TÜIK, percentage of refugee population to local population is 5.86% in Bursa ̇ 2022). (GIB, Interviews with the participants were designed to reflect their perceptions of Syrian refugees’ integration in their local contexts. More specifically, interviews reflected on refugees’ access to rights, intergroup relations, government support for refugees, and whether refugees should stay in Turkey. All interviews were conducted either in Kurdish or Turkish based on the choice of the participants, and it took around one hour to complete each interview. The sample of the research was reached through convenience sampling (see Battaglia, 2008). Consent to collect and use data was taken verbally as the participants did not want to sign a consent form in which their names would be noted. Further, the data is completely anonymized to mitigate the participants’ security concerns. In addition to the first-hand data collected through the interviews, secondary resources (i.e., civil society and state reports, polls, and reports of research centers and think-tanks) have been used in this study. The interviews were analyzed based on both thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and content analysis (Sparker, 2005). Some themes were identified prior to the interviews (i.e., support for rights) and asked about during the interviews, while the participants’ elaboration on certain answers allowed a detailed content analysis to be conducted.

Results Perceptions of Syrians’ Forced Migration The majority (78%) of the interviewees reported to have migrated to different districts and provinces in Turkey for various reasons including the armed conflicts (between the Kurdish armed groups and the Turkish state forces), economic hardship, socioeconomic challenges they experience, family unification, and educational purposes. The Syrian refugees were 4

 See Bianet (2010), Cumhruiyet (2022), and Sosyo Politik (2022).

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forced to leave Syria for very similar reasons. As the following quote exemplifies, some participants were aware that the refugees’ migration to Turkey, in fact, was an involuntary and coerced movement and that Syrian refugees have been suffering from significant socioeconomic challenges and barriers. We need to empathize with Syrian refugees. Whenever I see a Syrian refugee, I recall what happened to Kurds in the 1990s. I think about what they do, how they live, whether and how they access education and health services. They do not speak the language [Turkish] and they do not know how to access these services. I believe 90% of the Kurds would share my concerns (37-year-old female, Bursa).

The emphasis on understanding the experiences of Syrian refugees both in Syria and Turkey was highlighted by more interviewees as well. Observing difficult and similar experiences of the refugees seems to have played a key role in establishing a connection between the members of the two groups. More specifically, perceptions of similarity related to discrimination, stigma, and contextual factors can generate intra-minority solidarity and/or coalition between the members of marginalized groups (Burson & Godfrey, 2020; Chaney & Forbes, 2022; Craig & Richeson, 2016). However, the existing research findings show that the interviewee’s perceptions and feelings are not shared by the larger Kurdish community (see Ruhavioğlu et al., 2021). This was incomprehensible for one of the participants. What I do not understand is discrimination by Kurds against Syrian refugees. I grew up as a Kurd in Istanbul and was excluded. I had the same feelings with Syrian refugees. I understand why Turks discriminate against them. They already do not like Arabs and Kurds…. But why are Kurds so much against Syrian refugees. I do not get it because we [Kurds] experienced the same things. How can I say that Syrian refugees must return to their country? There is no need to go so far in the past. It just happened in Sur, Nusaybin, and Cizre [in 2015 and 2016].5 Thousands of people migrated from these districts to neighbouring cities. Did these people

5  Sur is a district of Diyarbakir, Nusaybin of Mardin, and Cizre of Şırnak. The armed conflict between the PKK and Turkish state forces happened mainly in these districts in 2015 and 2016. See OHCHR (2017) for further details.

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[Kurdish IDPs] need to stay and fight? They [Kurds] ask why Syrian refugees did not stay in Syria and fight (26-year-old female, Mardin).

However, studies on intra-minority solidarity reveal that perceived discrimination can also lead to derogation, particularly in contexts where it is solely experienced as a threat to social identity (Craig & Richeson, 2016). In other words, when perceived discrimination is stigmatized along the same or similar identity dimensions (i.e., being IDP or refugee or minority), it is likely that an intra-minority coalition will emerge, but if it is stigmatized along different identity dimensions (i.e., citizens vs asylum seekers), then the outcome is likely to be derogation (Craig & Richeson, 2016). A similar attitude is observed in cases of competitive victimhood (see Noor et al., 2012; Young & Sullivan, 2016; Uluğ et al., 2021), which is further explained under the section on support for rights. As illustrated in the following quote, while framing the displacement of Syrian refugees partly from an empathic way that elaborates on racism and discrimination against Syrian refugees, another interviewee associates ‘socially undesirable and unexpected’ behaviors with Syrians as a homogenized group and dehumanizes them by making a distinction between us and them as citizens and refugees, respectively. Empathy should be established with Syrians. Yet, they are also very comfortable.6 They have gone through challenging times. There is war in their country, and they have been deprived of basic rights. They are subject to persecution in Turkey, not treated as humans. They work too much but earn less, and subject to hate speech and lynching on social media. They are very comfortable. They do not consider if someone else lives in the apartment and if they disturb other residents. I was not living in the same apartment with Syrian refugees, but they were living in the one across us. They always tend to take advantage of other people. Some of them are involved in crimes and violence. We need to talk about these issues as well. They need to adapt themselves. They should maintain their culture and wherever they are they should be living it freely. But they are passive in working. The local people [Turks, Kurds, Arabs] do more to earn their living. Here I am talking about individual differences. Maybe it is about the ones who came to Turkey, they

6  Comfortable here has a negative connotation and refers to the common perception that Syrian refugees, as a community who experienced a civil war, do not care about existing social norms and expectations of the dominant community. 

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brought the dirty ones to Turkey. Mawlana7 says ‘love the created for the creator’s sake’. Therefore, there should not be so much hatred and we need to sit together and talk with those who create problems (21-year-old male, Hatay).

It is interesting and such a strong cognitive dissonance (see Festinger, 1957) to see that the interviewee is aware of the inhumane attitudes toward Syrian refugees in different settings and stresses that this needs to change but also simply repeats in the same conversation what he is against by dehumanizing them (see Haslam, 2006; Kteily et al., 2015) and calling the refugees ‘dirty’ and framing them as people who create issues and do not adopt to social norms of the society he lives in. Dehumanization, which the interviewee constructs based on the denial of human identity, agency, and individual differences of Syrian refugees, strengthens his distinctive social identity perspective. His observation regarding refugees being targets of hatred in everyday life, media, and politics and his own attitudes toward them have been evidenced also by the existing research (see Güvengez et al., 2020). This means that the way that traditional and social media disseminate news about the refugees (not only Syrians) and their use of various narratives of symbolic threat pose serious challenges for inter-minority relations and attitudes. This indicates that including the interviewee himself, for the larger community in Turkey the dehumanization of Syrian refugees ‘becomes an everyday social phenomenon, rooted in ordinary social-cognitive processes’ (Haslam, 2006, p. 252). By making a comparison between citizens and Syrian refugees, the interviewee develops a negative bias toward the outgroup and internalizes attributions for the refugees’ behaviors that are not in compliance with what he perceives to be his society’s norms that he thinks are respected and followed by fellow citizens. The us vs. them distinction and the hatred, prejudice, and hostility it includes can also be explained by the Five-Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate (Reicher et al., 2008). In line with this model, participants identify an ingroup (i.e., Kurds), exclude the outgroup (i.e., Syrian refugees), represent the outgroup as a threat to the ingroup (i.e., being passive receivers, problem makers, dirty, etc.), champion the ingroup as uniquely good (i.e., Kurds did not create such 7  The interviewee is mistaken as this expression belongs to Yunus Emre, a Turkish folk poet and Islamic Sufi mystic who lived in the thirteenth century, not Mawlana, who is Persian and lived in the same century.

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problems; it was Syrians who brought them to the community—see below), and eradicate or put an end to the outgroup’s presence in the country (i.e., repatriating Syrians or sending them to another country). As mentioned earlier, members of the Kurdish community living in the districts of Mardin were displaced many times due to the protracted armed conflicts since the early 1990s, including the most recent ones that erupted in 2015 and 2016. Referring to those times, one of the interviewees combined his views by elaborating also on the local community’s perceptions of Syrians’ displacement and how the displaced Kurds’ approach to Syrian refugees is misleading. In the local community in Mardin, there have been some cases of hate speech against the refugees, but it never turned into a mob attack or lynch campaign. I hear sometimes my neighbours complain about Syrian refugees and say how our hometown has been experiencing serious social, economic, and security problems due to Syrian refugees. I cannot confront them and tell them “No, our hometown was not a perfect place before Syrian refugees came”. I know what they do is a kind of accusation and that they blamed and said the same for internally displaced Kurds in the 1990s. They scapegoat a specific group and express their discomfort by blaming them. Kurds are more acceptable now compared to Syrian refugees. A few people told me “All right. We accepted you [Kurdish IDPs], but what are we going to do with Syrians?” (35-year-old male, Mardin).

As illustrated in the above quote, Syrian refugees are one of the most unwanted refugee groups in Turkey and this anti-refugee sentiment is common among the Kurdish community as well (see Ruhavioğlu et al., 2021). Also, it is not only the Kurds who perceive Syrian refugees as people who cause harm to the community by undermining safety, destabilizing the economy, and endangering social values (Şar & Kuru, 2020). Given that Kurds are recognized by the larger community at least as fellow citizens who share more characteristics of the dominant social identity than Syrian refugees do (Duman, 2021), Syrian refugees come at the top of the hierarchical discrimination for many. This makes the refugees the target of prejudice as they are perceived as a source of both realistic and symbolic threat and fear. As the interviewee account confirms, too, this perception does not necessarily have to be accurate, but it creates negative consequences in intergroup relations in everyday life. This is discussed further in the following section.

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Support for Syrian Refugees’ Rights and Stay in Turkey Members of the Kurdish community interviewed in this research reported a high level of support for Syrian refugees’ rights in Turkey. More specifically, the participants agree, to a large extent, that Syrian refugees should be able to access rights and public services including health services, education and language courses, and employment. Similarly, they also support the idea that the government should help Syrian refugees with finding a job and offer more programs that will facilitate social cohesion between the refugees and the local community. This is reflected in some of the interviews as follows. Neither the war nor the displacement was the refugees’ choice. They came here because they had to. They need to access basic rights and public services just like us, the citizens. They have families to look after. The community’s perception gets increasingly negative. The government should design and implement more social cohesion programs. We [Syrian refugees and Kurdish community] are not very different from each other. There are many social and cultural similarities between the two communities, particularly between Syrian Arabs and Arabs living in Mardin. It is the same for Kurds from Rojava and Kurds in Mardin. Some of them are even members of the same family separated years ago due to the border [between Syria and Turkey]. (37-year-old female, Mardin)

There are several reasons that help explain the support elaborated by this interviewee. Kurds in Turkey have been one of the main minority groups that have initiated and maintained their struggle for ethnic rights, including education in native language, sociocultural rights, and political organization and representation. As mentioned previously in the account of one of the interviewees, the Kurdish community had similar experiences and suffered significantly from the suppressive and assimilationist policies of the Turkish state, including human rights violations, imprisonment, mass killings, party closures, and displacement, while being accused of threatening ‘national unity’ in Turkey (see Protner, 2018; Yeğen, 2004; Zeydanlıoğlu, 2012). Therefore, they can relate to what Syrian refugees have gone through before, during, and after the war. Also, there are Kurds among the Syrian refugees in Turkey and a significant percentage of them were settled in Kurdish-majority provinces, including Mardin, where both the Kurdish political movements have been very active and the local community share kinship with the Kurdish refugees from northern Syria (also

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known as Rojava) as well as sociocultural background. The comprehensiveness of a shared (Kurdish or Arab) social identity, inclusive victimhood, and inter-minority solidarity that are associated with positive, prosocial intergroup attitudes (see Vollhardt & Bilali, 2015) seem to have played a positive role in recognizing the refugees’ needs and proximity to the ingroup. This perspective undermines the salience of possible differences and helps to establish empathy with the refugee community. However, despite the overall consensus among the participants, some participants expressed their discontent with Syrian refugees’ migration to Turkey and access to rights and public services. I do not want any of them [Syrian refugees] here. The government provides them with some privileges. We are now second-class citizens. We cannot get as much support as they get. They do not pay rents or water and power bills. It is all paid by the government and international donors. They regularly save money, but we cannot. They lower salaries in the job market. We do the same job, tiling floors and walls, but they do it for less. We cannot find a job because of them. They are privileged when they go to hospitals. The doctors serve them first. All evil comes from them. They brought all this theft and prostitution to our community. There were no such things before they came. Let them go (33-year-old male, Mardin).

The interviewee’s anti-Syrian racist expressions clearly indicate that he perceives them as a homogenous source of realistic and symbolic threat (i.e., source of unemployment and ‘all evil comes from them,’ respectively), semi-passive people who work to earn money but are unwilling to pay taxes and bills, and competitors in the labor market who ‘intentionally’ lower the salaries. It has been evidenced that contrary to what the interviewee argues, the majority of Syrian refugees in fact pay rent and bills but not tax unless they are not in the formal labor market8 (see Refugees Association, 2022a). This hostility and prejudice toward Syrian refugees is reproduced and reinforced through a clear distinction between ‘us and them’. In other words, for the interviewee, unemployment, theft, and

8  Only those refugees who are employed and registered with the social security system are required to pay income tax. Similar to the refugees, a significant portion of citizens (approx. 30%) are not registered in the social security system and therefore do not pay this tax either. ̇ (2020) and t24 (2022) for further details. See TÜIK

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prostitution, which he defines as ‘evil,’ did not exist in the city of Mardin,9 and it was Syrian refugees who brought them. In addition to the armed conflicts, socioeconomic challenges have been one of the primary reasons for internal migration from this province to other locations in Turkey, including Hatay and Bursa, which are the other two research areas. However, it is the negative perceptions of and intergroup hostility toward Syrian refugees that represents the refugees as a source of realistic and symbolic threat and fear (see Riek et al., 2006). This is reinforced in particular when the local community members believe that Syrian refugees’ gains come at the expense of the local community (see Esses et al., 1998, 2001). This can also be explained by the perceptions of competitive victimhood. More specifically, the participants who expressed discontent with Syrian refugees believe that the refugees’ access to the services and participation in the informal labor force contribute to their adversity as result of the socio-political discrimination and marginalization they have been suffering from (see Young & Sullivan, 2016). An internal migrant Kurd who lived in Hatay had a similar understanding but established his arguments by magnifying the actual Syrian refugee population and complaining about Syrian refugees for not having ‘quality’ but being ‘idle and useless.’ It is certain that refugees’ presence in Turkey upsets the balance. We are not talking about 100-200 thousand people but millions of people. Although the official figures show 4 million, we can say that this figure easily reaches 7 million. In my opinion, the number of immigrants from Syria in Turkey exceeds 6  million. Frankly, I don’t think that most of the people who migrated here are actually very beneficial people. It comes out very rarely, just infrequently. Exceptional. But in general, I can say that people who are unemployed, idle and useless, come here mostly. That is the quality of the people I see in the majority among the immigrants, so they are not very professional people. Useless, empty… They need to be returned or resettled in another country (38-year-old male, Hatay).

Exaggerating the Syrian refugee population in Turkey and undermining refugees’ agency, the account of this interviewee in fact reflects the 9  It is worth mentioning that Mardin has been one of the socioeconomically least developed provinces with low figures of individual welfare (Acar, Meydan, Kazancık, & Işık, 2019). That is to say, members of the local community were already experiencing socioeconomic challenges, structural inequalities, and deprivations in Mardin.

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mainstream perception that the qualified Syrian refugees were settled in European countries and the remaining ones are a ‘burden’ and pose ‘risks’ (see Erdoğan, 2020). The last sentence reveals the interviewee’s motivation behind framing Syrian refugees as a nearly homogenous group of people who, in his opinion, do not contribute to the society in any way. Although he does not associate them with any sort of realistic or symbolic threat directly, his dehumanizing expressions and demand for their return or resettlement show that he does not think Syrian refugees can or should be part of this community and develop a sense of belonging. Belonging and Collective Ownership The government’s plan to respond to the Syrian conflict and refugees was based on the anticipation that the Assad regime would be overthrown and the refugees who were let in through an ‘open-door policy’ would then be ̇ able to safely return to their homes (Erdogan, 2015; Içduygu, 2015). In reality, the regime was not overthrown and the refugees10 have not been able to safely return to Syria. Therefore, particularly after the EU–Turkey deal to stop ‘irregular migration’ from Turkey to Europe was signed in 2016, the question of whether and how Syrian refugees will stay and integrate in Turkey remained unanswered. The temporariness of refugeehood ended up with long-term ambiguities concerning migration management. Although Syrian refugees reported their intention to stay in Turkey as long as they can (Duman, 2021; Erdoğan, 2020), citizens tend to think the opposite and object to the refugees’ stay for various reasons, including deteriorating economy and insecurity that are associated with Syrian refugees’ presence (see KONDA, 2016). Members of the Kurdish community interviewed in this research, however, presented different views concerning Syrian refugees’ stay. While some of them argued that they have been in Turkey since 2011 and, therefore, should have the right to citizenship, others ruled out the possibility that they may be a part of the nation or local community. Underlying reasons reveal the way they understand and evaluate their historically marginalized identity in the presence of an outgroup.

10  Except for some 500,000 of them according to the Ministry of Interior. See Refugees Association (2022b) for further details.

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I know that a significant part of the community in Turkey does not want Syrian refugees to be here. But I think the opposite. They are refugees. I actually do not like these kinds of categorizations and the borders that separate us. They could stay here or go to European countries. What I see is that the community somehow got used to it. I mean Syrians are everywhere and they speak Arabic. I think the community’s negative perception of refugees is fading away (40-year-old male, Bursa).

The increasing anti-Syrian sentiments and attitudes that are reinforced through media and politicians’ discourse in fact show the opposite of the interviewee’s observations (see Duman, 2022; Ruhavioğlu 2022; Şar & Kuru, 2020). However, his way of understanding the borders and definitions that makes a clear distinction between refugees and citizens or outsiders and insiders represents that he favors the possibility of refugees staying and developing a sense of belonging in the country. This refers to a more egalitarian perspective as well. Similarly, another participant from the same province noted that This country is enough for us all. 100 years ago, we [refugees and local community members] were living together. What was the difference between the two nations? We once were part of the same empire, neighbours, relatives… I think they can stay here and be part of this nation. We have been historically separated from each other. It was not our choice. We can live together (20-year-old male, Bursa).

Bringing the historical connection between the two communities (refugees and local community) into the context reflects a positive understanding of refugees’ belonging for this interviewee. His argument, in fact, represents a reality that citizens of both Syria and Turkey were the Ottoman Empire’s millet, a concept used to define Muslim communities, including Arabs, without differentiating between ethnic identities (Kaya, 2016). Therefore, for the interviewee, there is a legitimate background of Syrian refugees’ belonging and the right to collective ownership as well as their belonging to a comprehensive historical social identity (i.e., millet) which is constructed based on an Islamic identification of nation. However, as mentioned earlier, not all participants felt the same way. The opponents’ main arguments were based on the perception of Syrian refugees’ outsiderness, lack of historical contribution to the country, and temporariness of their presence, which, for the participants, all together does not make

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them eligible for rights and freedoms, belong to the nation, and have a collective ownership of resources. We do not have enough resources to be shared with them. We supported them as long and much as we can, but this is enough. We are now second-­ class citizens even though we fought for the independence of this country. What is given to them has not been given to us. Our ancestors sacrificed their lives [for this country] but they betrayed their country. They are in a much better situation than we are. There is nothing more we can give them. I do not want them to stay here and be citizens. This is our land; their land is there. They should either return to Syria or go wherever they want (26-year-old male, Bursa).

In addition to the above-mentioned perceptions, there are three themes that emerge in this interviewee’s narrative. First, according to the interviewee, local people’s status has been trivialized (i.e., being secondclass citizens) in Syrian refugees’ presence and access to available services and resources, particularly in a context where their ancestors arguably made sacrifices, which is a reference to the war of independence of Turkey. Therefore, having made sacrifices both constructs a social identity component and determines the right to ownership. Second, he argues that it is the citizens who inherited this sacrifice that should have access to limited resources first, which suggests an anti-egalitarian zero-sum understanding. Third, Syrian refugees are reportedly not entitled to claim ownership to what this country can offer them, including the sense of belonging and an identity through citizenship, simply because they ‘betrayed their country’ by not fighting against the (unknown) enemy, but instead became a refugee in Turkey. These indicate a perceived entitlement or right to determine the inability and impossibility of Syrian refugees to claim ownership of the land and its resources (see Due & Riggs, 2008; Noor & Leong, 2013; Verkuyten & Martinovic, 2017). Therefore, the interviewee, as a gatekeeper, restores his power stemming from the perceived collective ownership by excluding Syrian refugees (see Verkuyten & Martinovic, 2017). Physical appearance and style is another factor that significantly influences the local community’s perception of refugees, particularly female refugees. Visible cultural distinctiveness, despite many perceived shared aspects of sociocultural identity and kinship across the border, plays a critical role in determining the way local people perceive the ‘otherness’ of refugees.

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I can recognize Syrian women very easily. I am probably labelling them. Their outfit is very conservative [covering a significant part of their body]. Kurdish and Arab local community members here are a bit more open and comfortable compared to refugees. For example, when I conduct group psychosocial sessions in Kızıltepe,11 local women come in their everyday clothes and slippers, and they seem comfortable. They wear scarf and half of their hair is visible. [Syrian] Arab women are not like this. They wear veils that covers every part of their body. It is like a long coat. I do not think it irritates people here, but they know that they are Syrian from the way they cover their head which is different from what we see in Turkey. This leads to labelling. For the Kurds, however, it is difficult for me to recognize who is a Kurd from Syria and a Kurd from this town [Mardin]. The only thing that helps me with this is that the former sometimes uses Arabic words when speaking Kurdish. That is all (24-year-old female, Mardin).

Although no overt negative prejudices were associated with Syrian women in the above narrative, the interviewee is aware that she has certain covert biases which are framed as ‘labeling.’ Certainly, it is not only their style that makes Syrian refugee women and local Kurdish or Arab women different (or similar), but the way both the interviewee and other members of the community perceive them explains how their distinctive identity is simplified and reduced to a certain type of dressing. The last few points also make it clear that cross-border shared social identity and linguistic similarities put a certain group of refugees (i.e., Kurdish refugees from Syria) in an advantageous position, at least by making them less recognizable. No other participant specifically expressed their perceptions of gender-related issues but that does not obscure the fact that Syrian women do encounter racism in everyday life simply because of their appearance (Duman, 2021) or discrimination in their interactions with local community members (Kanal & Rottmann, 2021). These discriminatory experiences and challenges contribute further to the suppression of Syrian refugee women not only because of the conservative values and attitudes in the Syrian community but also those of the local community that significantly influence how Syrian refugee women are perceived and treated (see Muhanna-Matar, 2021). Further, the interviewee’s understanding of the difference between the style of Syrian and local women also tells us about how the prolonged division of secular vs conservative lifestyle is reproduced in the way some  Kızıltepe is one of Mardin’s districts and the majority of its residents are Kurds.

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Kurds perceive Syrian women. This division has long been a matter of intergroup conflict and polarization in the country (see Aydın-Düzgit, 2019) where religion (Islam) and Arab identity have been associated with ‘backwardness’ since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in the early twentieth century from an orientalist perspective (Bayad & Şen, this volume, chapter “How ‘Turkish’ psychology become the mainstream? A discourse analysis on the trajectory of its colonial legacy”; Zeydanlıoğlu, 2008).

Conclusion This chapter attempted to fill a gap in the literature by discussing the way that members of the Kurdish minority perceive forced migration of Syrian refugees, support for rights granted to them under temporary protection, and their belongingness and stay in Turkey. It did so through analyzing data collected through semi-structured interviews with members of the Kurdish community in Mardin, Hatay, and Bursa. The theoretical framework of the chapter helped to explain how social identity, intergroup threat, social dominance orientation, and psychological collective ownership can explain the participants’ perceptions. Accordingly, the chapter concludes that while some participants stress the need for empathizing with Syrian refugees by comparing with the experiences they had gone through since the 1990s and understanding how similar these experiences are, others seem to focus more on distancing themselves by associating refugees with perceived realistic and symbolic threats. Social identity helps the former group to establish a connection either through these shared experiences or ethnic identity and kinship or historical belongingness to a more comprehensive identity. For the latter group, it is the opposite, as the more distinctive they perceive Syrian refugees’ social identity to themselves, the more they are against refugees’ access to rights, public services, and stay in Turkey. Further, social dominance orientation reinforces hierarchical perceptions and reduces the tendency to support Syrian refugees’ right to access basic rights and services and, therefore, derogates inter-­ minority solidarity. The chapter reveals that experiencing or knowing about the protracted conflicts that their own minority community suffered from that resulted in being displaced, marginalized, discriminated against, and excluded from basic rights and freedoms does not mean that they are able to understand the situation of a refugee community who has had similar challenging experiences. What is more striking is that they may

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even distort the reality, deny human agency of refugees, and reproduce and reinforce dehumanizing racist discourse against refugees. This is not specific to members of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, but what makes the Kurdish minority’s perceptions of and attitudes toward Syrian refugees important is that it shows the boundaries of inter-minority solidarity in a context where both groups face racism and discrimination in similar ways by the Turkish majority. Lastly, this study has certain limitations. The sample is not a representative Kurdish sample as the majority of the participants are relatively young and either have or study a university degree. Also, the research is conducted in urban settings (city or district centers) where it is possible to see refugee–local community interaction. Future studies with a more representative sample may be conducted in rural contexts as well, where this interaction is not much observed to compare and contrast the impact of different forms of contact, threat and identity perceptions, and attitudes toward inter-minority solidarity.

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From Collective Action to Collective Resistance: Working with the Saturday Mothers Orhan Kaya and Yasemin Gülsüm Acar

The Saturday Mothers or Saturday People are made up of the families and supporters of those who have disappeared in the 40 years of Turkish– Kurdish conflict that have been ongoing in Turkey. Although the roots of the conflict in Turkey go back decades, it gained momentum after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) took up arms in 1984. The effects of the armed conflict reverberated not only in rural areas but also in the  social life of cities. The Turkish state, which initially approached the conflict with conventional military tactics and strategies, began to turn to other more unconventional methods in the

O. Kaya (*) Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland Y. G. Acar University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_7

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early 1990s, including the kidnapping, interrogation, torture, and killing of Kurdish activists (Çelik, 2016). Stories of people being abducted and ‘lost’ during arrest or disappearing began to increase in the 1990s. The families of the disappeared began to speak out first by reaching out to authorities and then, when they received no response, taking to the streets and holding sit-ins in various squares in Istanbul, including Kadıköy, Bakırköy, and Galatasaray Square. In time they began to have these sit-ins every week: Saturdays at 12 pm in Galatasaray Square. The Saturday Mothers have now passed their 960th week sitting in the square. It is thanks to the Saturday Mothers that many people have been saved from torture and disappearance, though there are many whose fate is still unknown. The Saturday Mothers have now been in the square for 27 years. In this time, governments have changed, there have been coup attempts, and original family members looking for their children have died, with their relatives and supporters taking their place. There are currently three generations of families represented at the sit-ins, and the action continues, even if many of the original protesters are no longer there. What encourages these new generations of protesters to continue to engage in collective action that they have taken up from their parents and relatives? In this chapter, we will discuss the Saturday Mothers as a piece of, but also apart from, Kurdish resistance. We will discuss their acts of resistance in light of the context of 1990s Turkey and how we came about our own interest in working with them to produce meaningful research about their weekly vigils. We were particularly fascinated by how the Saturday Mothers raised their children in the square. Those children then grow up participating, take up the mantle, and take the person’s space from the previous generation when they get older. The Saturday Mothers have therefore evolved into the Saturday People, with a broader scope than the disappearances of Kurdish activists in the 1990s, though these are still central to who they are, and who have formed a new family among themselves, relying on one another to share their experiences (Şanlı, 2020). Below, we first provide context for the creation of the Saturday Mothers in the escalation of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict, further discuss who the Saturday Mothers are and how they came about, and then turn to a reflection of how we began this research and lessons we hope to share with others.

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The Turkish-Kurdish Conflict—Escalation in the 1990s In many ways, Kurdish resistance as we know it today has been heavily influenced by the aftermath of the 1980 coup. Thousands of people were detained, and more than a million people were the subject of intelligence files. Thousands were deprived of their citizenship, and hundreds were tortured and died in prisons (Göral, Işik, & Kaya, 2013). Though the coup and its immediate aftermath directly impacted many people, it is important to note that the new constitution formed in this period institutionalized Turkish nationalism and militarism in new and lasting ways, the reverberations of which are still felt to this day. The ethnopolitical nature of the Turkish state was resisted by many, including the PKK, which took up arms in 1984. Soon after, the Turkish state declared a state of emergency in 14 provinces in majority Kurdish areas, which included broad powers to evacuate or restrict entry to and from many settlements, restricting the movement of food and access to communication within the borders of the region. The Turkish state’s initial approach was to make the clashes with the PKK seem less severe than they were. At the same time, with the increase of Kurdish activism in the legal and political spheres, the multidimensional Kurdish resistance was going far beyond what the Turkish state had initially expressed. Soon after, the Turkish armed forces began using new tactics to deal with Kurdish resistance. A critical element of this was to turn the PKK from “a few bandits” to a “new enemy” in the public sphere (Göral et al., 2013). This resulted in the reinforcement and restructure of the military, as well as the institutionalization of the temporary village guards (see Acar, 2019; Balta, Yüksel, & Acar, 2022), who were recruited from Kurdish villages and armed by the state to take part in the armed struggle against the PKK. In addition to these actions, the Turkish state engaged in new regional strategies, including enforced disappearances, which reached their highest numbers in the 1990s (Ahıska, 2014). Especially from 1993 onwards, several systematic human rights violations “including enforced disappearances, extrajudicial, summary, and arbitrary executions and cases of death by torture were carried out by certain paramilitary/counter-guerrilla formations, which are not officially, but actually part of the state” (Göral et al., 2013, p. 19). These arms of the state, including the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Organization (Jandarma Istihbarat

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ve Terörle Mücadele Grup Komutanlığı) and Hizbullah,1 held unlimited powers and were protected from prosecution.

Enforced Disappearances There is no real agreement on how a disappeared person can be defined, as many have been labeled as “lost in detention” or “perpetrator unknown.” As a result, there are no exact figures on the number of people who have been forcibly disappeared since the 1980 coup. Various organizations have attempted to track the numbers, and each, using somewhat different criteria and resources, have different figures. A Truth Justice Memory Center report mentions whether a person should be removed from the figures for enforced disappearances if their body is found. According to them, “from the viewpoint of the relatives of the disappeared, the act of disappearance has already taken place throughout the search for the body; and since the disappeared person was abducted by state forces, or in their name, even if the body is found, the way in which he or she died, in other words, his or her fate, is still unclear, and the execution is in fact realized as the enforced disappearance” (Göral et al., 2013, p. 24; see also Alıcı, this volume, chapter “Understanding the Implications of Victimhood Identity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict”). In any case, it should be noted that enforced disappearances were highest from 1993 to 1999, with 1993 to 1996 being the most intense, and almost all of these disappearances took place in the 14 Kurdish provinces that were under the state of emergency, with a few others in Istanbul and Adana. In particular, people with ties to leftwing politics, especially party leaders and administrators who had an important place in the Kurdish resistance, were killed or disappeared one by one, and those who managed to escape were tortured in prisons. Below we will detail the history of the Saturday Mothers, who formed in reaction to these enforced disappearances.

Who Are the Saturday Mothers? The first organized campaign around the issue of enforced disappearances was in 1992, organized by the Human Rights Association, which they then expanded three years later with the Human Rights Foundation of 1  Sunni Islamist organization mobilized against Kurds in Turkey. It has no direct link with the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah.

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Turkey. That same year was the first of the Saturday Mothers vigils, held on May 27, 1995. When the Saturday Mothers started their protests, they were generally made up of families (mothers in particular) of the missing. In the following years, as the action became widespread and expanded, the number of supporters, that is, those who had not been directly impacted by a loss in their family, began to be expressed in the tens of thousands. It was at this point that the Saturday Mothers often began to be called the Saturday People.2 The Saturday Mothers have been engaging in weekly sit-ins since 1995. Their collective action began as a group of nearly 50 people, namely the mothers and family members of forced disappearances, particularly those of Kurdish leftist political activist Hasan Ocak. When Ocak’s body was found in a mass grave, many fears about disappearances appeared to be well founded, as his body carried the signs of having been in police custody after his disappearance and before his murder (Can, 2022). The discovery of his body also led to finding the body of Rıdvan Karakoç and Ayşenur Şimşek, who were also forcibly disappeared in the same period. Inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who worked for their own forced disappearances in Argentina in the mid-1970s, the relatives of the disappeared came together with the human rights defenders as the Saturday Mothers (Alıcı, 2021). Their demands include raising awareness of state-sponsored violence and militarism in Turkey, the release of state document archives so that political murders can be brought to light, changes to the Turkish penal code to remove the statute of limitation on political murders and forced disappearances, and for Turkey to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (Şanlı, 2018; G. Yoleri Personal communication, October 5, 2021). Regarding the action itself, the Saturday Mothers meet in Galatasaray Square in central Istanbul every Saturday for 30 minutes at 12 pm, holding up photographs of the missing people and red carnations. Each week focuses on the story of a different forcibly disappeared person. Family members share their stories and testimony of the disappearance itself, legal updates are provided, and a press statement is issued. There is no applause or slogans; the vigil is held mainly in silence. They have continued to meet on and off since then, with a decade-long break between 1999 and 2009 2  We use the two terms interchangeably throughout the chapter, though we generally prefer to use the original Saturday Mothers.

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after police and state violence escalated and many Mothers were detained for up to 30 weeks. The movement has also gone beyond Istanbul to the Kurdish cities of Diyarbakır, Batman, and Cizre. There have since been many other events and interruptions, until the government closed the square off to the  Saturday Mothers with a police cordon in their 700th week of sit-ins. The Saturday Mothers’ chosen site is also important to note. Galatasaray Square sits at the junction of Istiklal Avenue and Galatasaray High School. It is a space that sees high foot traffic, and many of the Saturday Mothers have noted that many people passing by will stop and engage in conversation with vigil participants (Baydar & Ivegen, 2006). In this way, the time and place chosen for the action have contributed to the popularization and agenda of the Saturday Mothers. In particular, many people contact the activists in the square and participate in their action. This chosen place has become synonymous with the Saturday Mothers over time. Although the square is officially called Galatasaray Square, it is called Saturday Mothers Square by the Saturday Mothers and many in the political opposition. The Saturday Mothers initially consisted of families who were ideologically part of or sympathetic to Kurds or the Kurdish struggle. They were, therefore, stigmatized as Kurdish terrorists or supporters of terrorism. In their early years, the Saturday Mothers were targeted and trivialized by newspapers (Falakacılar, 2003), and several negative articles were written about them (Dağtaş & Dağtaş, 2007). They were subjected to harassment not only by the state but also by nationalist journalists and intellectuals. The state’s attitude to these actions, which have continued through several different governments, has not changed, and still, although it softens from time to time, the aggressive attitude continues. At the same time, the Saturday Mothers have also grown more inclusive. They also speak for families that are politically diametrically opposed to each other, such as the families of missing soldiers and village guards. For the Saturday Mothers, the affiliation, belief, and ideology of the missing individual are not as important as the loss or disappearance of that individual at the hands of the state. As part of the Turkish state’s push to label Kurdish resistance as the new enemy, there was an increased push to assimilate Kurds, to the point that even referring to oneself as Kurdish was considered a courageous act, much less engaging in activism for the Kurdish language or rights. When the Saturday Mothers began their weekly vigils, they were subject to

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violence, detained, or arrested. The action started by a few families has continued to exist through resistance not only against the state or state-­ sponsored attacks but also despite the many years that have gone by and the generational differences that have come about among the children and grandchildren of the original Mothers. They have since become a highly respected source of resistance across the political opposition in Turkey (Şanlı 2020). Below we discuss how we connected with the Saturday Mothers and how we began to work together.

Conducting Research with the Saturday Mothers The project idea came from the first author, who was particularly interested in conducting research about the Saturday Mothers. There were two important reasons why he wanted to conduct this research. First, the movement has been ongoing for so long, and the chance to work with a group that has engaged in regular collective action for 27 years is difficult to find. At the same time, their efforts are largely ignored by academia in Turkey. While there are a few theses and some articles related to their

Saturday Mothers’ 600th week action (Getty Images: https://www.evrensel.net/ fotograf/190/cumartesi-­anneleri-­600-­kez-­bir-­araya-­geldi/s/15)

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collective action, these are few and far between. This may be due to the increased risk of doing research with the Saturday Mothers, as researchers may be targeted or declared terrorists. He found this gap in the literature important to address. His second main motivation is that he personally embraces the demands of the Saturday Mothers and has a vested interest in demanding that human rights violations and enforced disappearances stop. He believes realizing these demands is necessary for peace and reconciliation in Turkey. The second author was contacted, and the topic was discussed and further developed. There is very little work in social psychology that looks at sustained participation in collective action (but see Vestergren et al. 2018 for an exception), and even less that looks at the way that collective action is passed from generation to generation. The theoretical inspiration for this work came from Cornejo et  al.’s (2021) recent research in Chile, where they met with parents and their adult children to determine what elements of protest participation from parents had been passed on to their children. We carried this focus on intergenerational transmission to the action of the Saturday Mothers. The Saturday Mothers had been engaged in a weekly protest for decades, and many of the original Mothers were aging or had passed away, and their children and sometimes grandchildren were now taking their place in Galatasaray Square. We wanted to understand the process of transmission and what factors could influence that process. It is also important to note that the two authors knew each other through shared contacts in the Academics for Peace, who, when we first began discussing this research, had recently been targeted by the Turkish government (see Acar & Coşkan, 2020 for further discussion). Many academics who had been targeted were looking for ways to continue their research and were seeking connections with each other in order to do so. This was the case for the two of us as well. After coming together, we also contacted a colleague at the University of St Andrews, who connected us with his colleague there as well. The four of us began discussing the best way to approach the research  (see Kaya et  al., 2022). Having previous experience working with hard-to-­ reach populations in risky contexts, the second author proposed having a completely transparent process with the Saturday Mothers: to let them know from the beginning the goals of the project and to invite them to participate at every level, giving them the opportunity to make amendments to questions, to help us (rather than hinder us) in reaching participants, and to coordinate with us when it came time for dissemination (see

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Acar, Moss, & Uluğ, 2020; Moss, Uluğ, & Acar, 2019). This approach proved successful, as the Saturday Mothers had a history of being approached by researchers in bad faith and were wary of researchers seeking them out. Bearing all this in mind, we planned a study to address the issue of intergenerational collective action as it relates to the Saturday Mothers. We felt they were an ideal group to work with; we had both independently attended their vigils and had personally felt the mark that attendance had left on us. Ultimately, we felt there was something unique to discover here. We knew that engaging with the Saturday Mothers would require patience and sensitivity. The first author contacted the Saturday Mothers to tell them about our interest in working with them. He made clear to the group that our interests were aligned, and that we would engage in an open and transparent research relationship as partners rather than as the researcher and the researched. They agreed to meet with our research team via Zoom, and the four researchers and representatives of the Saturday Mothers spoke about our goals. Their previous experiences with researchers had been almost wholly negative; they spoke about researchers coming to speak with the Saturday Mothers, asking them how they felt about the disappearance of their child on a Likert-type scale—very bad to very good. They also had experiences with researchers speaking with a roomful of Saturday Mothers, asking who suffered the most and how much they missed their children. Our aim in this study was not to psychologize the stories of the Saturday Mothers or to remind them of their traumatic memories. We were focused on the act of resistance, the process through which transmission occurred, and how it progressed. We explained our case and approach to them, and they felt sufficiently comfortable that we would not engage with the Mothers the same way previous researchers had and that we could work together toward a common goal of understanding their process of intergenerational transmission. We determined there that Saturday Mothers representatives would have a say in our choice of questions as well as in whom we would interview. Rather than a gatekeeping exercise, we saw this as a collaborative one; they knew who would feel comfortable speaking with us and who would likely experience this as a secondary trauma. They also knew what questions would help us reach our goals and how best to frame them.

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The first author conducted interviews with participants from different generations and with different degrees of participation and asked questions related to the intergenerational nature of the protests, the involvement of the younger generations, and their experiences of the vigils. In some cases, interviews were very brief, lasting just a few minutes, but in others, the interview went on for hours. Each interview provided unique insights into how people with varying degrees of attachment to the Saturday Mothers could explain their participation and what role the intergenerational transmission of the norms, experiences, and identities from one generation to the next may play in their continued participation. As we write this, data analysis and writing are still ongoing. The study was planned and implemented from beginning to end in collaboration with two points of contact in the Saturday Mothers. Each step in the process was discussed in detail. During the interviews, the first author had the opportunity to observe not only the participants and their responses to questions but also his own reactions and responses. He knew that interviews with the Saturday Mothers would have to be done carefully, but he did not expect them to impact him as much as they did. Ahead of each interview, he gathered relevant information about each interviewee and their story of disappearance and loss, but even so, he found himself deeply emotionally affected by each interview. This may have been more impactful because he felt he had the same ideological background as the disappeared ones, he is from the same ethnic group, and he even knew some of the people and places they described. He realized he was probably experiencing secondary trauma in these interviews and had to find new ways to prepare himself to avoid this (see van der Merwe & Hunt, 2019 for a discussion).

Who We Are and How It Affects What We Hope to Learn In conducting this research, as with any work in sensitive conflict contexts, it is also important to reflect on one’s own reasons for studying this topic and what one’s own identities and aspects of self may bring to the subject. The first author grew up as a Kurd in Turkey. He completed much of his education in Kurdish-majority cities. Later he completed his Master’s and PhD in the western Turkish city of Bolu. As he was born and raised in one of Turkey’s conflict areas, he participated in or witnessed mass protests,

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which influenced his interest in researching intergroup conflict, collective action, and disadvantaged groups. For the first author, this study is not only a scientific study but also a means of contributing to the struggle of the Saturday Mothers and bringing this struggle to the agenda in a different format. The second author is Turkish-American, who spent her formative years and education in the United States but chose to move back to Turkey during her PhD.  During that time, she focused on researching collective action and intergroup conflict. She had a particular interest in the Turkish– Kurdish conflict and approached it as a Turkish person interested in hearing the voices of the Kurdish people. Her research has included ethnographies and interviews with Kurdish Alevis (Acar, 2020) and village guards and their thoughts on the conflict and the peace process (Acar, 2019). Coming to the Saturday Mothers research, she approached it as both an insider, who had lived in Turkey and was invested in peace as a Turkish researcher, but also as an outsider, as she was not Kurdish and could not know the experience of losing someone at the hands of the Turkish state (see Acar & Uluğ, 2018 for a discussion of the insider–outsider divide). We are both social psychologists interested in collective action, which framed our interest in the Saturday Mothers’ vigils and also how we approached them to do the research. We were particularly interested in how traditional approaches to collective action often fail to address the differences in participation motivations in politically oppressive contexts. We felt that those untouched areas could be further explained by looking at different cases of resistance under oppression and understanding the motivating factors for people who participate and maintain participation for years, and hence our interest in the Saturday Mothers and the idea of intergenerational transmission. How intergenerational participation in collective action can emerge and how it can be a motivating factor in its own right is an understudied area in social psychology. As mentioned above, a study in Chile (Cornejo et al., 2021) tried to bridge this gap by examining how protest was discussed at home, with parents participating in the protests under the Pinochet dictatorship and their children participating in student protests years later. This study tends to examine how norm formation affects children’s participation. However, this study does not examine how identity is shaped around participation in the protest. In the example of the Saturday Mothers, children grow up in a household where families participate in an

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ongoing collective action by participating in the weekly vigils. These children then grow up participating in the actions, gradually taking the previous generation’s place. In this way, as the previous generation ages, the new generation takes its place. One of the main features distinguishing the Saturday Mothers from other studies and groups in the literature is that the existing problem persists. In other words, if we take the work in Chile, for example, the Pinochet protests of the previous generation finished in the 1980s. Parents then speak with their children about their own protest experience years later, with a different aim and a different method. However, there is nothing finished in the Saturday Mothers’ action. New enforced disappearances are added, or there are missing persons. This existing situation brings with it feelings such as hope, anger, and injustice, as well as keeping up-to-date with the memories of loss.

Conclusions The Saturday Mothers have clearly played an important role in the years of Kurdish resistance that have been seen in Turkey. Their humble start in 1995 with a group of about 50 people looking for information about their relatives has become a support network of thousands, with almost national recognition in Turkey. In their years of constant protest, we saw many questions that we wanted to understand and sought out the Saturday Mothers to see if they would be willing to support our research. In our time researching the origins of the Saturday Mothers and speaking with them about their experiences, we find that their motivations to continue their actions are complex and multidimensional, and we do not believe it can be conceptualized as just collective action. According to modern theories, actions taken for the benefit of a particular group are defined as collective action, regardless of the number of participants (Wright & Tropp, 2002). While the Saturday Mothers were an action that only Kurds or leftists participated in initially, they experienced radical changes over time and turned into both a national and an international movement. In fact, it has become an important field of struggle that has gained the respect of many institutions and organizations in Turkey. In addition, although it was initiated under the leadership of the Kurds, over time it has hosted participants from many different groups and ethnicities. This is because the central motivator for the Saturday Mothers is the loss

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itself. When an application is made about a loss, they are not interested in that person’s job, ethnicity, or social or political affiliation. In other words, if a person is lost, it does not matter who they are; it is enough for the Saturday Mothers to be missing, and they struggle to find that person. There are people from many segments of society that the Saturday Mothers are trying to find, including soldiers, village guards, and people who belong to different political structures. The Saturday Mothers are also in solidarity with many international groups, especially the Plaza de Mayo mothers in Argentina; are followed by many foreign media outlets; and hold meetings with diplomats, including Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, who participated in and supported one of the Saturday Mothers protests in 2015. This shows that for these reasons, the Saturday Mothers have become an important structure not only in the national but also in the international arena. When examining the place of the Saturday Mothers in society, their demands, the impact they have created, their impact on the country’s politics, and the change they have created in social life, it can be concluded that this movement is a resistance movement. They have resisted not only against the state, the perpetrators, and the status quo, but also against forgetting and being forgotten over time. This historical resistance movement has turned into a platform for seeking rights in Turkey, which does not concern only a particular group of people, but emphasizes fundamental human rights, defends justice, and has unequivocal demands, and ultimately proves these claims with the practice they put forward. At the same time, the fact that the Saturday Mothers show resistance against time, forgetting, and being forgotten by transforming a disadvantaged situation into identity construction is a hope for all social groups who have been wronged in today’s Turkey. Their actions place them as guides for future generations who continue to seek justice on behalf of others. Even as we write these words, the Saturday Mothers continue to engage in their weekly vigils and continue to be prosecuted for their collective action. We hope this chapter has produced some clarity as to the origins of the Saturday Mothers, as well as our thought process and the approach we used to engage with them sensitively. Our experiences may be helpful for other researchers interested in working with vulnerable populations and illuminate how researchers can consider their own position and experiences impacting the research they conduct.

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Reflexivity and Positionality in Qualitative Research: On Being an Outsider in the Field Gülay Türkmen

Introduction A chilly November night in 2012; I am sitting at a çay bahçesi (tea garden) in Diyarbakır (Amed), a Kurdish-majority city in Southeastern Anatolia, listening to three Kurdish men discuss politics. Due to my presence, they are talking in Turkish rather than their native Kurmancî. The youngest one, visibly more fervent than the others, is talking about the hunger strike initiated in September that year by approximately 700 Kurdish inmates all over prisons in Turkey, with the demand for an end to the solitary confinement of Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and for Kurdish language rights in education and in courts. Heeding Öcalan’s call, the prisoners put an end to the strike in mid-November and the young man is talking passionately about how “that is a terrible decision.” The other two, whom I befriended in my first visit to Diyarbakır earlier that summer, and who have since acted as gatekeepers, are a bit more restrained, listening silently to the

G. Türkmen (*) Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_8

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young man, intervening (often to disagree) with a few words here and there, when he asks them their opinion. At one point the young man looks at me and asks the others: “Is this friend [arkadaş] reliable? I mean, I have been talking about Öcalan and the Kurdish movement1 almost nonstop in the last hour and she has not said a word but sat there in silence. So, I cannot tell what she thinks.” The other two reiterate that I am their friend (as they mentioned when introducing me to the young man) and I can be trusted. The young guy, who now looks a bit more relieved, turns to me and says, “Sorry, but nowadays one can never know whom to trust. You could as well be a secret agent working for the Turkish state. How would I know?” This was not the first time I was hearing this allegation, nor was it going to be the last. During the field research I conducted for my dissertation— on the ambivalent role of Sunni Islam in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict— between June 2012 and June 2013, the question of whether I was a “secret agent,” working either for the Turkish state or for the United States—where I was doing my PhD at the time—came up several times in my interviews with Kurdish religious elites (mostly clerics but also members and/or heads of religious NGOs, religious orders, etc.) In addition to being an “agent,” I was also suspected of being an atheist. The imams/clerics I interviewed probably came to this conclusion based on my outfit, which was usually a combination of loose pants and t-shirts (that I specifically paid attention to not be sleeveless) (see Carling, Erdal, & Ezzati, 2014 on the importance of clothing style in the field). More importantly, I didn’t wear a headscarf and wore my hair quite short (considered to be unusual for a woman by most of my interviewees). All in all, as a young Turkish woman from Western Anatolia who could not speak Kurmancî, was studying in the United States, did not wear a headscarf, but was still conducting research on religion and ethnicity among 1  “Kurdish movement” includes the complex set of legal and illegal Kurdish organizations associated with the Kurdish struggle for greater political and cultural rights and political autonomy. It comprises the illegal PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan/Kürdistan Iş̇ çi Partisi/ Kurdistan Workers’ Party), and TAK (Teyrêbazên Azadiya Kurdistan/Kurdistan Özgürlük Şahinleri/ Kurdistan Freedom Hawks), a PKK offshoot, and the legal HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi/Peoples’ Democratic Party), DBP (Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi/ Democratic Regions Party), DTK (Demokratik Toplum Kongresi/Democratic Society Congress), and HDK (Halkların Demokratik Kongresi/Peoples’ Democratic Congress). The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by the government of Turkey, the USA, EU and NATO.

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Kurdish Muslims, I was deemed way too suspicious. I was literally a walking “red flag.” Qualitative researchers, especially ethnographers, are no strangers to such scenarios. If you are conducting fieldwork as an “outsider,” chances are you will face such allegations. If you are conducting fieldwork as an outsider in conflict zones, where interpersonal and intergroup trust is low, those chances are even higher. I subscribe to the view that positionality is often a fluid zone (Schulz, 2021) encompassing multiple identities, and the researcher’s status is much less static than the insider/outsider dichotomy suggests. That said, in this chapter I will focus on the myriad faces of being an “outsider”—as an ideal-typical category—when conducting ethnographic field research and the implications it has for research findings and knowledge production. Building on my research experience among Kurdish religious elites in Southeastern Anatolia2, where I was an outsider on many levels, I will provide insight into how to navigate the fragile ground of such a position. I will start the chapter with a glance into the literature on reflexivity and positionality in general, and on conflict research in particular. Acknowledging the ambivalence surrounding the insider/outsider dichotomy, I will then scrutinize the fluid boundaries between the two. My primary aim is not to intervene in the theoretical debates about reflexivity but rather to “get personal” (England, 1994). Thus, I will move on to providing examples from my fieldwork, along with a focus on the challenges and the opportunities the “outsider” position brought for me in this particular project. I will conclude the chapter with a call for more focus on reflexivity, so as to reimagine the field as a site of messy power relations (Faria & Mollett, 2016).

Reflexivity and Positionality: A Look into the Literature There is an ever-growing literature on reflexivity in social scientific research (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Bourke, 2014; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Coffey, 1999; Pels, 2000; Reed, 2011). Between 2006 and 2012 110 2 ̇  My field research encompassed three cities in total: Diyarbakır, Batman, and Istanbul. However, for the purposes of this piece, I will be focusing only on my time and experiences in the former two (especially in Diyarbakır), as I did not occupy the same “outsider” position ̇ in Istanbul

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articles were published annually with the term reflexivity in either the title or the abstract (Caron, 2013, p. 1). It is difficult to provide a single working definition of reflexivity, as there are numerous “reflexivities” (Lynch, 2000). Still, for the purposes of this chapter, I define reflexivity as the researchers’ awareness of the impact of their multiple identities on the data collection and knowledge production processes. Defined as such, reflexivity is about the possibilities and limitations of knowledge and the partiality of knowledge claims (Lichterman, 2017). Once one accepts the subjective nature of knowledge (Haraway, 1988; Rose, 1997; Simandan, 2019) and gives up the destined quest for “objective truth” (Harding, 1995) the question then becomes how our different social positions shape our research process and the way we interpret our findings (Shehata, 2006). In such an approach, “we become at once both the subject and the object” (Myerhoff & Ruby, 1982, p. 1) triggering follow-up questions on privilege, power, hierarchy, and emotions (Crapanzano, 2010). Emerging as an important tool to challenge the neutrality of knowledge claims, reflexivity has brought to the fore the unequal power relations between the researcher and research participants, especially in ethnographic research (Frers & Meier, 2022). Early ethnographers, preoccupied with scrutinizing “the exotic other” (Howell, 2018) through “an alien gaze” (Folkes, 2022), were oblivious to the socio-structural hierarchies shaping their knowledge production processes. It was only through a reflexive approach that these hierarchies were made visible. While some scholars drew attention to the impact of ethnic, religious, national, racial, class, and gender identities on research practices (Rose, 2020), some others underlined the ideological positions giving birth to different research agendas (Burr, 2003; see Bayad & Şen, this volume, Chapter How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy, for a further discussion of ideological positioning in psychology research in Turkey) and different types of knowledge, such as “professional, policy, critical, and public” (Burawoy, 2004). As such, reflexivity has played an important role in paving the way to the postcolonial, feminist, and racial struggles that have defined social scientific praxis in recent decades.

Outsider/Insider/In-between? At the heart of these debates stood the insider/outsider dichotomy (Weiner-Levy & Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2012). One can trace the roots of this dichotomy as far back as Georg Simmel, who, in the Stranger

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(1908/1950), deemed the “outsider” as more objective. Yet, its comeback took place in the 1970s through the writings of scholars like Merton (1972), who questioned the representativeness of white scholars’ work on black communities. Similarly, Levi Strauss (1979) proposed either the participant or the observer label for researchers depending on their cultural affinity (or lack thereof) to the groups they are researching. Postcolonial and feminist researchers joined with a focus on who speaks (and does not) on whose behalf and with what motivations, and for whose benefit academic knowledge is produced (Narayan, 1997; Said, 1979; Spivak, 1988). To overcome the problem of representativeness, some researchers wore their “insider” hats and started conducting research among their own communities. Some hired research assistants from among the communities they were conducting research on. Some called for “mixed research teams” (Vogel & Musamba, 2022). Yet, it soon became apparent that this was not the solution either. Echoing Reyes, who underlined the impossibility of a “true insider” position (2020, p. 226), many works highlighted the challenges researchers faced when conducting research at “home” or in their “native” communities (Mcfarlane-Morris, 2020; Narayan, 1993; Parashar, 2019; Zhao, 2017). What followed was a stream of works on the limits of the insider/outsider dichotomy and its essentialism, emphasizing the fluidity of these two states (Başer & Toivanen, 2018; Ergun & Erdemir, 2010; Özkul, 2016), the gray zones of research (Vogel & Musamba, 2022), and the inbetweenness of researchers (Barnes, 2021; Breen, 2007).

Reimagining Positionality and Reflexivity These recent works aim to redefine positionality as contextual and multifaceted (Rose, 2020; Schulz, 2021). Underlining the relational nature of research, they urge researchers to move beyond a descriptive “shopping list positionality statement” (Folkes, 2022) where the researcher lists their identities that are dis/similar to research participants and talks about their possible impact on research. To that aim, Reyes (2020) puts forward the notion of “ethnographic toolkit,” which combines researchers’ visible (ethnicity/race) and invisible (social capital) tools in conducting research. ‘We don’t wear positional identity tags on our backs’ writes Lichterman (2017, p.  39) and suggests ‘interpretive reflexivity’ as a way out of the bucket list positionality statements. Following in Lichterman’s steps and responding to Finlay’s (2002) call to inquire ‘how researchers do reflexivity’ Benson and O’Reilly (2022) suggest three potential strategies that

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inform reflexive practice beyond positionality statements: ‘positioning, navigating, and interpreting’ (p. 178). Relatedly, scholars using an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989) draw attention to researchers’ multiple identities (Carstensen-Egwuom, 2014). They highlight how people cannot be reduced to one category at a time (Brah & Phoenix, 2004) and how racial, gendered, and classed power operates together (Hill Collins 2019), making it difficult to demarcate the power hierarchies between the researcher and the researched. Some warn against the dangers of treating categories as given universals and underline their non-transferability (Oyewumi, 2002). As such, rather than a single “positionality,” it would be more appropriate to talk about “positionalities,” they conclude.

Positionality in Conflict Zones In conflict zones, where distrust and suspicion prevail, the complexity of questions regarding positionality and reflexivity reaches a different magnitude (Acar, Moss, & Uluğ, 2020; Cohen & Arieli, 2011; Moss, Uluğ, & Acar, 2019). In addition to the difficulty of establishing rapport, ensuring an ethical research process also becomes difficult (Reich, 2021; Wood, 2006) in these “dangerous fields” (Kovats-Bernat, 2002). Especially in civil war contexts, where there is a sharper clash of identities, researchers’ multiple identities carry more importance than they do in non-conflict contexts. Turkey’s Kurdish conflict is no exception. Ongoing since 1984 between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish Armed Forces, the conflict has claimed more than 40,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people mainly in the Kurdish-majority Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia. Expectedly, it has had long-lasting ramifications for Turkish–Kurdish relations. As Çelebi, Verkuyten, Köse, and Maliepaard (2014) demonstrate, out-group trust is quite low among both Kurds and Turks, despite the high number of cross-group friendships (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017). Most Turks see the conflict through a terrorism lens (Uluğ & Cohrs, 2016), while for most Kurds it is about the lack of acknowledgment of their political and cultural claims. As such, there is a deep chasm between the two groups. In such an environment, conducting research in Kurdish-majority areas as an ethnically Turkish researcher brings along several challenges (Acar & Uluğ, 2018; Başer, Toivanen, Zorlu, & Duman, 2018; Uluğ, Acar, &

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Kanık, 2021). The risk of being seen as “spies” working for the Turkish state or as “colonizers” or “oppressors” (Başer & Toivanen, 2018) makes it difficult for Turkish researchers to establish trust, considered vital in ethnographic research. Still, considering that “trust and distrust can coexist” (Celestina, 2018) and “partial trust” can also produce rich findings (Chakravarty, 2012), researchers manage to come up with ways of overcoming this problem. Moreover, because ethnic identity is just one of many identities, researchers resort to other markers of difference, such as age, occupation, and cultural competence, in establishing trust (Carling et al., 2014). In what follows, I will be talking about my own experience of conducting research as an ethnically Turkish researcher among Kurds. Before I do that, I will provide a brief history of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict so as to contextualize my research and the particular moment in history in which it took place.

Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict: A Brief History3 The beginning of Turkey’s Kurdish conflict is usually traced back to 1978, when the PKK was established, or to 1984, when it undertook its first deadly attack. Yet, at the root of the current-day conflict lies the repression of Kurdish identity by the Republic of Turkey in an attempt to homogenize an ethnically and religiously diverse population under an overarching Sunni-Turkish identity (Lord, 2018; Ünlü, 2016).4 Non-Muslims were given official minority status in the foundational Lausanne Peace Treaty, signed in 1923 between Turkey and the Allied Powers. However, Sunni Muslim-majority Kurds, who made up almost twenty percent of the population at the time, were deemed as “founding elements (kurucu unsur) of Turkey” that needed no special protection as a minority group (Meray, 1970). Despite this portrayal, they were denied their linguistic and cultural rights and have been subjected to a long-term assimilation campaign. Between 1925 and 1937 several Kurdish revolts that combined Islamist and nationalist motives (Bruinessen, 1984) took place. After the heavyhanded suppression of these revolts, between 1950 and 1980 the Kurdish  This section is largely based on Türkmen, 2021.  Note, however, that there were also Kurdish revolts in the Ottoman Empire, which took place as early as the nineteenth century, mostly against the centralizing reforms of the empire at the time (see Chailand, 1993). 3 4

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movement secularized and the Kurdish question was ethnicized. It was in such an atmosphere that Abdullah Öcalan established the PKK in 1978. As a Marxist- Leninist organization aiming to found an independent Kurdish state (Marcus 2007) the PKK had a small following in its initial years. Öcalan’s insistence on an armed insurgence, the PKK’s opposition to the local landlords and tribal leaders (Romano, 2006), and the oppression that followed the 1980 coup d’état contributed to the PKK’s growing popularity among the Kurdish population. Clashes between the PKK and the Turkish army lasted until 1999, when Öcalan was sentenced to life imprisonment (for a detailed analysis of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict in the 1990s, see Kaya & Acar, this volume). Following Öcalan’s arrest, the PKK declared a ceasefire and entered a period of passivity until 2004. Meanwhile, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide victory in the general elections in 2002 (and has since remained in power). The AKP cadres, envisioning Sunni Islam as an overarching identity, emphasized “Muslim fraternity” as a conflict-­ resolution tool. After two failed peace initiatives in 2005 and 2009, the government and the PKK started a third round of negotiations in 2013. During this period, the role of religion in the conflict became so pronounced that both Öcalan and then prime minister Erdoğan went on to cite the same Qur’anic verses to emphasize “Muslim unity.” In May 2013, the PKK announced its withdrawal outside Turkish borders (though it did not fully withdraw). In February 2015 Öcalan announced a ten-article disarmament draft. Yet, in June 2015, the ceasefire was broken, mostly due to the spillover effects of the establishment of a de facto autonomous Kurdish administration in Rojava (northern Syria) and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party’s decision to not support Erdoğan’s bid for presidency. Since then, clashes have resumed; more than 4500 people have died5 and thousands have been internally displaced.

The Field: The Beginnings It was in 2011, when a group of pro-Kurdish movement imams initiated Civil Friday Prayers (Sivil Cuma Namazları), that I started thinking about going to Diyarbakır. Emerging in the midst of a period when “Muslim fraternity” seemed to be working, Civil Friday Prayers aimed to highlight 5  See details at: https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/turkeys-pkk-conflict-­visualexplainer. Accessed January 10, 2020.

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the ban on Kurdish sermons and the limitations on Kurdish language. They challenged the government’s authority both politically and religiously. Politically, because the Friday sermons were given in Kurdish, which is not allowed;6 religiously, because they were held out in the streets (not in state-run mosques) and the local Kurdish imams (meles) prepared their own sermons rather than reading the text prepared by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). At the time, I was enrolled in the Sociology PhD program at Yale University in the United States. My MA thesis was on religious nationalism, specifically on how “martyrdom” is conceptualized in Turkey and in Palestine (Turkmen-Dervisoglu 2009). I wanted to continue with the theme of religion and nationalism for my dissertation. Thus, when Civil Friday Prayers originated in the spring of 2011, I was truly intrigued by them. As a graduate student interested in the intersection of ethnicity, nationalism, and religion, I wanted to understand why the idea of “Muslim fraternity” did not resonate (or to what extent it resonated) with the Kurdish clerics who initiated the prayers. With these thoughts in mind, I ̇ defended my dissertation proposal and traveled to Istanbul in the spring ̇ of 2012. In Istanbul I first met a well-known journalist, an expert on religion and politics in Turkey. When I told him my plans to travel to Diyarbakır later that summer, he simply said, “Don’t, it’s too dangerous now.” He was referring to the renewed clashes between the PKK and the Turkish military. Confused by this advice I went on to conduct some pilot interviews ̇ with Kurdish and Turkish religious elites in Istanbul. One day, on the shuttle to a university campus, I ended up sitting next to a renowned leftist journalist, completely by chance. After a bit of small talk I told him about my project. In contrast to the first journalist, who had tried to discourage me from traveling to Kurdish-majority provinces, he got quite excited by my research topic. Later that week, over lunch, he went over his phone book to give me the numbers of his contacts in Diyarbakır and Batman. He then made several phone calls to let his contacts know that I 6  There is no official ban on Kurdish language in Turkey but Kurdish has been de facto criminalized since the very early days of the Republic. (The speaking of Kurdish in public was outlawed between 1983 and 1991.) The current constitution, penned in 1980, recognizes only Turkish as the country’s official language and article 42 of the constitution states that no language other than Turkish can be taught as a native tongue to Turkish citizens. Moreover, since the coup attempt in 2016, scores of Kurdish-language TVs, newspapers, and Kurdish-language courses have been closed down by emergency decrees.

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would be arriving shortly and asked them to help me out. Thus started my “journey into the unknown.”

Teaching Moments: Unlearning One’s Biases, Recognizing One’s Privileges My early days in Diyarbakır were characterized by what I would deem as “teaching moments.” As a Turkish woman born and raised in Northwestern Anatolia I had never been to a Kurdish-majority city before. I tried to go to Diyarbakır with a tabula rasa; however, as someone exposed to both the heavily nationalist Turkish education system and the equally nationalist Turkish media for years, I did have my prejudices. Moreover, I was raised in a Turkish family by lower-middle-class parents who see the Kurdish conflict mainly through the “national unity” and “security” lenses. Although I had outgrown my family’s ideological stance and shed myself of the years-long nationalist propaganda (or so I thought), it still took me a while to unlearn my biases. For example, under the influence of those in my social circles who kept asking me “how safe Diyarbakır is” and whether going there alone is not dangerous, I scheduled my first trip to Diyarbakır at the same time as another researcher who already knew the city. I also shared a hotel room with her, so that I would not be staying alone. Similarly, when looking for long-term accommodation in the city, my partner joined me in my search as we thought it would be “safer” this way. Although we believed we had no prejudices, it was clear that we were still not able to go beyond the “security” lens when thinking about “the region.7” Likewise, despite reading extensively on the issue, paying attention to avoid any discriminatory language, or lump each and every Kurd into the same category, it turns out that I still had a flattened, one-dimensional image of “the Kurds” and was oblivious to the internal diversity among them. I remember the exact moment I experienced this revelation: I was attending an informal workshop organized by young Kurdish individuals, who were mostly academics (but also a few non-academics). During one of the panels a dispute broke out between the ultra-nationalist wing and the more liberal, multiculturalist one. Observing them argue loudly among each other, and being quite surprised by this dispute, made me 7  While Kurds call Southeastern Anatolia “Northern Kurdistan” (Bakur), the Turkish media and politicians have, for a long time, called it “the region.”

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realize how my own way of seeing “the Kurds” was shaped by the “Turkish-­ Kurdish” dichotomy I was exposed to my whole life. I knew about the diversity shaping the Turkish political scene, but I was unable to internalize the similar diversity extant in the Kurdish political scene. My informal chats in Diyarbakır and Batman, with Kurds from different political factions, helped me witness firsthand the cleavages that divided (and still divide) Kurdish society, which my Turkish ethnic background blinded me to. Yet another teaching moment was when I realized how Turkishness, or belonging to the majority ethnic group, provided me with the privilege of opting out of nationalism. I was aware of many of the privileges that came with my Turkishness, but had never thought of the option to not be nationalist as a privilege, until my interview with a pious Kurdish politician, an AKP member in Diyarbakır. During our interview, someone visited his office. When introducing me to that person the politician said: “She is Turkish but she is not nationalist; unlike us, she has the option to not have to think about her ethnic identity and strip herself from her nationality. I wonder if a day would come where we Kurds will also have that option.” This is not to say that there are no non-nationalist Kurds (as there are many) but this comment brought to my attention a particular aspect of nationalism I had not thought about before: I had given ample time to thinking about why people become nationalists, but why they stop being so, or refuse to do so in the first place, was a question I had not thought about.

Uneasy Encounters in an Unfamiliar Zone: Defense Mechanisms, Coping Strategies Not all my encounters in the field were as productive. While the above-­ mentioned teaching moments helped me develop a certain amount of self-­ criticism and self-awareness, some other encounters pushed me to develop defense mechanisms and coping strategies. In addition to the spy accusation (which was mostly due to my ethnicity, my lack of Kurmancî, and my pursuing a PhD in the United States), I also experienced other uneasy encounters due to my gender (Kosygina, 2005). As Acar and Uluğ (2018, p.  190) discuss, being a young female researcher puts one at a disadvantage and reproduces paternalistic dynamics, especially when conducting research in male-dominated fields. My main sample comprised religious elites, most of whom were clerics. Only

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two of my 62 interviewees were women and the rest were older men. While I did not get “mansplained” (Solnit 2015) and my expertise was not challenged, I experienced a peculiar problem that had to do with both my gender and my participants’ religiosity. My participants were practicing Muslims, and the Qur’an and the hadith (Prophet Muhammad’s sayings) shaped their view of gender roles and relations. During the course of research I was to discover that some hadith allow a man to meet a non-­ mahram woman (a woman who is not his wife or close relative) only if there is a third person in the room (who is preferably one of the woman’s close relatives). Other hadith ask men to avoid entering a room in which women are uncovered. Though I am agnostic, I was no stranger to Muslim practices. After all, I was raised in a Muslim-majority country by Sunni Muslim parents, who are not too religious but still fast and pray during Ramadan, and avoid alcohol and pork consumption. In fact, despite my agnosticity, I consider myself to be a “cultural Muslim” (in that I still celebrate Eid and use religious phrases like Inshallah or Masallah). Plus, I had educated myself in the Qur’anic teachings on Islam’s take on ethnicity and nationalism. Yet, I was not as well versed in the hadith, let alone in the hadith on gender roles. Thus, when I ran into problems regarding my gender I had to come up with defense mechanisms and coping strategies. The first problem I encountered had to do with access to the Kurdish Hizbullah,8 a Batman-originated, armed, radical Islamist group. Although I tried to talk with members of Mustazaf-Der, the civil branch of Hizbullah, both in Diyarbakır and in Batman, my attempts repeatedly failed. In the end, one of my interviewees, who called Hizbullah members on my behalf, told me: “They don’t want to talk to a woman.” As simple as that sounded, it meant that I had to leave the Hizbullah, one of the most important Islamist organizations in the Kurdish political scene, out of my analysis. What I did, as a coping strategy, was to acknowledge this shortcoming in my book (Türkmen, 2021), explain the reason in the appendix, and refer the reader to sources on the issue, written mainly by men who could get access to the Hizbullah (see Çakır, 2011; Kurt, 2017). 8  Not connected to the Lebanese Hizbullah, the Kurdish Hizbullah was engaged in armed conflict with the PKK throughout the 1990s. In 2000, the leader of the organization, ̇ Hüseyin Velioğlu, was killed in a police raid in Istanbul and hundreds of Hizbullah members were detained. They have managed to survive as an underground organization and in 2013 founded an Islamist political party with the name of Hür Dava Partisi (Free Cause Party).

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My gender also became an issue during my interviews with members of different tariqahs (religious orders). For example, I had an interview with a member of the Sufi Mevlevi order in Diyarbakır, at a café in the old Sur neighborhood. When I went there, he told me that the café only had available seating in one of the rooms facing the courtyard. Although the room had an open entrance with no door (and was thus not completely isolated from the public) he said he still felt uncomfortable. Resultantly, he invited a friend of his over because “if a man and a woman are alone in a room Saitan is the third person in that room and it might deceive them into haram [sinful] acts.” As uncomfortable as I felt in the face of this comment, I managed to put a nervous smile on my face and said, “Alright, let’s wait for your friend then.” We waited in the courtyard, and entered the room only after his friend arrived. A similar encounter, this time with a Menzil member,9 would again push me to use the same forced smile when he said that he could talk to me as an ordinary Muslim, but not in the name of Menzil. “For that, you have to talk with our sheikhs but I am not sure if they would talk to a woman,” he continued, and added: “However, I can direct you to a woman-only sohbet10 gathering.” In the same vein, a Gülenist11 said that he could refer me to other members of the Gülen movement (as I employed snowball sampling) but that it would be “more proper” if I attended 9  The Adıyaman-based Menzil has its roots in the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order and is currently one of the most influential religious orders in Turkish politics, with extensive networks all over the country. 10  Sohbet means conversation in Turkish. In this context, it refers to pious reading circles where informal conversations with religious overtones take place. 11  Established in the 1970s by Fethullah Gülen, a preacher in self-exile in the US since 1999 (due to charges of engaging in anti-secular activities), the Gülen movement used to be the largest religious network in Turkey. Called Hizmet (Service) by its followers, Cemaat (Jamaat) by some journalists and researchers, and Fethullah Terör Örgütü (Fethullah Terrorist Organization), FETÖ, by the government, the movement follows the teachings of Said-i Nursi, a Kurdish Sunni Muslim theologian who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. Between 2002 and 2012 they allied with the AKP to facilitate the latter’s takeover of key political institutions. At the time, the movement was accused of and criticized for using wiretapping, blackmail and fraud in eliminating rivals. The alliance started to crack in 2011 and reached a climax in 2016 when a clique in the Turkish Armed Forces attempted to undertake a coup to topple the government. Accusing Gülen for masterminding the coup the AKP has since started an all-out-war against Gülenists; thousands have been imprisoned and exiled, and the assets of Gülenist companies have been confiscated.

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women’s gatherings. Reaching for my “nervous smile,” I said, “sure, it would be great if I could also meet some women, though I would prefer interviewing both men and women.”

The Repercussions of the Field: When the “Academic” Gets “Personal” Despite all these challenges, the outsider position also brought with it a certain advantage mentioned by several Turkish researchers conducting research among Kurds (Acar & Uluğ, 2018; Başer & Toivanen, 2018): Once researchers manage to earn the participants’ trust they become a “trusted outsider” (Bucerius, 2013). Take, for example, this quote by one of my interviewees: “You came all the way from the United States to listen to us, to give us a voice; they are so close but they don’t want to listen to us, they don’t want to see us, they turn their heads away” (Türkmen, 2021, p. xiii). Yet such “trust” also meant that the participants assumed I was “on their side” (McEvoy, 2006) and expected my support for their “cause” in return. Some participants started seeing me as an “insider” who agreed with them unconditionally, and some as a “trusted outsider,” “a vessel” via which they could convey their thoughts to audiences they would otherwise not be able to reach (Watters & Biernacki, 1989). This was most clearly embodied by two of my interviewees (both Kurdish politicians) asking me if I would be interested in writing pro-Kurdish movement opinion pieces. Though I managed to kindly refuse these requests, they couldn’t make sense of my reluctance. I had to further explain that I do not write pieces “upon request” and that my “support” for the Kurdish movement was not without caveats. Paradoxically, the trust I managed to gain on the side of my participants I lost on the side of some members of my own community. As group members who deviate from group norms are no longer trusted, and are seen as “black sheeps” (Marques, Yzerbyt, & Leyens, 1988), not long after I went to the field I was ostracized by some of my friends and acquaintances due to my pro-peace stance that no longer overlapped with their militarist take (see Karasu & Uluğ, 2020; Mutlu, 2018 for similar stories). For example, in November 2012 I wrote a short piece about the end of the hunger strike (Turkmen-Dervisoglu, 2012), in which I talked about the “violent face of the state” I witnessed during my stay in Diyarbakır.

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Upon reading it, a high-school friend unfriended me on Facebook, accusing me of “disrespecting our martyrs, being a traitor and acting as a mouth-piece for the terrorists.” Another high-school friend sent me a message asking if I was “being brainwashed in Diyarbakır.” Similarly, a neighbor who has known me since childhood apparently told my mother that she couldn’t make sense of my Facebook posts and was wondering if I “shouldn’t have gone to Diyarbakır and Batman at all.” These reactions and the field’s general repercussions for my personal life took me by surprise. Back then I was still naïve enough to believe that I might contribute to bringing change by conveying my observations from the field unfiltered and by “trying to honor marginalized voices through the accurate and truthful representation of voice” (Fenge, Oakley, Taylor, & Beer, 2019, p. 1). It turns out I had clearly underestimated the strength of the widespread nationalist propaganda in Turkey. I am now better prepared for handling the “emotional impact” (Fenge et al., 2019) of research on my personal life but I didn’t know, nor had I read, enough about it ten years ago.

Concluding Remarks: The Afterlife of the Field From Gouldner (1970) to Bourdieu (1990), several social scientists have written on the importance of reflexivity and positionality. Although qualitative researchers dominated the conversation for a long time, quantitative researchers have also joined in with discussions on how, for example, researcher identity affects survey results or the wording of survey questions (Adida et al. 2016). This emphasis on researcher identity has given birth to a vast literature on the insider/outsider dichotomy and the (dis) advantages each position brings. Problematizing this dichotomy, researchers have started drawing attention to the “multifaceted nature of positionality” (Folkes, 2022, p. 15). In dialogue with this literature, in this chapter, I have provided my own reflections and experiences on conducting research as an outsider, based on the field research I undertook in Southeastern Anatolia with Kurdish religious elites between June 2012 and June 2013. Acknowledging the fluidity of positionality and the insider/outsider dichotomy, I have employed “outsider” as an analytical category and discussed the challenges, teaching moments, and repercussions it brought along in the field. Yet, the field also has an afterlife and it accompanies us in numerous ways, even years after we are “done” with fieldwork. For example, due to

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the vulnerability of my interviewees I had paid special attention to ensure the anonymity of my participants. There were two participants who, back in 2012–2013, had given me permission to use their names, suggesting that there was no need for anonymization. Because Turkey has taken an authoritarian turn since I completed my interviews, when I published my findings (Türkmen, 2018, 2021), I felt the need to ask those participants to see if they would still like me to use their real names. Both said “no” and asked to be anonymized. Similarly, I was worried, for years, that I might not have been able to bring justice to the voices of my participants, or that my findings might have been skewed, due to my outsider status. It was not until recently, when discussing my book at an academic event, that I finally stopped worrying when an ethnically Kurdish senior male colleague from Diyarbakır told me that he would have probably obtained the same results as an insider who has extensive networks and knows the region better than I do. I have also come to realize that, as one of my gatekeepers from Diyarbakır highlighted, my outsider status likely provided an opportunity for my analysis to reach a broader audience. I also feel that being an unaffiliated outsider gave me the advantage of being able to talk with participants from diverse political backgrounds. Lastly, when I was conducting interviews in Diyarbakır and Batman, my interviewees complained about how “researchers keep coming [there] to interview the locals, and the locals never hear from them after they leave.” While I tried to stay in touch with some of my participants and informed them about the publication of my book and articles, I am also guilty of not making my research output accessible to my interviewees, as most do not speak English and I have exclusively published on this issue in English. In hindsight, one way to solve this problem would have been to get my English language publications translated into the languages of my research participants (Kurmancî and Turkish) and send them the translated texts. Regardless, keeping this lesson in mind, in my new projects I email my research outputs to research participants, to see if they have any comments/corrections before I send the text for publication. As is clear, the field never really “ends,” and scholars, especially those conducting research on sensitive topics with traumatized, marginalized populations, can only benefit from a reflexive approach to their positionality. This is what I have aimed toward with this chapter and I can only hope that researchers who will venture into the field for the first time will find my reflections useful. In concluding the chapter, I would like to reiterate

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my suggestion for novice researchers to not overlook their biases and be mindful of the influence their background and identities might have on their research and writing processes. In addition, reading other scholars’ writings on reflexivity and positionality might also prepare them for what is to come in the field (though it shall also be noted that everyone’s field experience is unique and no text can prepare one for the field fully enough). Last but not least, I would suggest future research focus more on how changing political context impacts researcher positionality and field experiences. I doubt that I would be able to conduct the interviews in my book if I were to go to Southeastern Anatolia now, after the collapse of the peace process, the resumption of the clashes, the intensified repression in the region, and the overall authoritarian turn in the country.

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How Did ‘Turkish’ Psychology Become the Mainstream? A Discourse Analysis on the Trajectory of Its Colonial Legacy Aydın Bayad and Ercan Şen

We shall raise our country to the level of the most prosperous and civilized nations of the world. (Atatürk, 1933) …since desire needs an independent object to sustain itself; after all, if there is no Other, there is nothing to be desired. (Hudis, 2015)

A. Bayad (*) Biefeld University, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, Biefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected] E. Şen Ankara, Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_9

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Mustafa Kemal  Atatürk’s quoted sentence1 is fiercely dedicated to the newly established republic erected out of a mostly agrarian and illiterate population whose economy was devastated and cities were destroyed during WWI. Yet, the promise of the word is also a crystallised example of the modernisation ideal that was set on the horizon for Turkey during the twentieth century. In this chapter, we will examine how this desire for modernisation was internalised by psychologists and transferred across generations to establish what we call ‘Turkish’ psychology.2 Inasmuch as we find that the contributions to this volume are all products of invaluable efforts eliciting the scope of work about Kurds and Kurdishness, the relatively low volume and skewed distribution of studies across time make it difficult to deduce a political and ideological standpoint beyond remaining ‘silent’ throughout the decades (see Bayad, Şen, Alparslan & Eser, 2022; Uysal, Şen, Sandal-Önal & Acar, 2022). More importantly, instead of aligning ourselves to what Táíwò (2020) calls “epistemic deference” that allows the non-prototypical members of marginalised communities the luck of speaking in front of certain elites, we devoted this chapter to turning our gaze right to those elites and try to describe how their understanding of Turkish society and Turkishness shapes the hegemonic discourse in the name of ‘Turkish’ psychology. We admit that the history of psychology in Turkey is fragmental (Batur, 2003, 2006) and any attempt to cover its entirety would need to bear on a certain level of reductionism. Here, we do not intend to paint all differences with the same brush; rather, we argue that despite the diversity of the psychologies and schools of thought (see Batur & Aslıtürk, 2006), a group of elites with a certain ideological standpoint continue to remain in

1  For the full text of the speech delivered on the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the republic, see http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/Turkiye/ata/onuncuyil.html. 2  Although the concept of Turkish/ness signifies a political-territorial definition for citizens, the ethnic and culturalist idea involved in the definition, as well as legislation of the concept, is contested (see Yeğen, 2004). Throughout this chapter, we use the term in the quotation marks to highlight the racialised aspect of psychological knowledge production that includes denial, ignorance and exclusion of Others or overrepresentation of Turks in research and psychology text to depict a homogenious Turkish nation..

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the centre of psychology,3 and both represent and contribute to the hegemonic discourse of the country. Thus, we restrict ourselves to revealing the trajectory of this colonial mentality that shaped the mainstream ‘Turkish’ psychology. In the following sections, we base our argument on decolonial approaches to denaturalise colonial dichotomies re-produced by pioneering figures of ‘Turkish’ psychology.

Decolonial Approaches in Psychology: A Brief Background The influential article by Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan (2010) sparked a debate about the universality of psychological findings due to the fact that psychological data was predominantly driven by White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) samples. Furthermore, after a decade of debate, many researchers admit that the WEIRDness of psychology goes beyond samples (Meadon & Spurrett, 2010) to theories (Teo, 2005) and methodologies (Maldonado-Torres, 2017). Yet, this critique is not new to psychology. It has already been questioned for being a by-product of Western culture (Gergen, Gulerce, Lock & Misra, 1996), having Western ethnocentrism (Teo & Febbraro, 2003) and exporting psychological knowledge via colonialism (Bhatia, 2018), since the roots of the discipline date back to the emergence of European modernisation with a background of slavery and exploitation. Additionally, many critical thinkers from the “periphery” have already challenged hegemonic psychology (Fanon, 1952/1986; Freire, 1968/2018; Martín-Baró, 1994). Accordingly, colonial occupation has infiltrated into selves (i.e. coloniality of being) and knowledge production systems (i.e. coloniality of knowledge) not only evident among those colonised and marginalised people, but also among people in dominants centres that constitute the WEIRD samples, researchers and institutions of psychology (Adams, Dobles, Gómez, Kurtiş & Molina, 2015). The main aim of decolonial approaches is unearthing the coloniality of Western modernisation and 3  State intervention in universities and freedom of thought has a long history in Turkey that has almost become an academic culture by decennial purges and dismissals of academics who oppose the statist doctrine (see, Günal, 2013), which has highly accelerated recently (Konuk, 2018). Psychology as a discipline took shape under this repressive academic culture (McKinney, 1960) that eventually disconnected from its context (Vassaf, 1982) and became a “poor imitation” of the American mainstream (Göregenli, 2010) under the influence of politically biased figures (Batur, 2006: Kılıç, 2016).

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delinking from it when it comes to ontology, epistemology and methodology (Mignolo, 2013). On the other hand, in practice, decolonial approaches in psychology try (1) to reveal and challenge hegemonic mentality and hidden assumptions underestimating peripheral subjectivities and cases, and (2) to develop new concepts and ways of being that go beyond dualities generated by Western thought (e.g. body–mind, humanity–anthropoid, modern–savage) subsuming a rationale for internalised oppression (Adams, Kurtiş, Gómez, Molina & Dobles, 2018). Based on available works, Adams et al. (2015, 2017) describe three broad approaches to decolonising psychological science that one way or another overlap in practice: Indigenisation seeks to come up with new epistemological perspectives of marginalised groups and positions, Accompaniment brings detached experts back to the field of marginalised settings to make them learn from oppressed communities and Denaturalisation reveals epistemic violence toward marginalised communities and redirects attention to their traditionally ignored problems. Some psychologists have previously engaged in denaturalisation research in places where Western coloniality has left a deep mark on the social fabric, such as South Africa and India (see Bhatia, 2002; Duncan et al., 2001). Although these studies are based on different contexts and theoretical approaches, the mechanism of violence towards Black and Indian communities is the same. Accordingly, misinterpretations of data gathered from marginalised communities, known as epistemic violence, constitute one of the important manifestations of coloniality because they justify the inferiority of others when equally alternative interpretations are available (Teo, 2010). In this chapter, we also follow a denaturalisation approach (1) to reveal the hegemonic relationship between Self as attributed to Turks, Turkish, Turkish people and different categories of Others and (2) to trace epistemic violence against those Others in the history of psychology in Turkey. To date, there has been much scholarly interest in the history of psychology from both outsiders (LeCompte, 1980; McKinney, 1960) and insiders (Acar & Şahin, 1990; Kağıtçıbaşı, 1994), including valuable critical perspectives (Batur, 2006; Gülerce, 2006; Kılıç, 2016; Vassaf, 1982; see Türkmen, this volume, chapter “Reflexivity and Positionality in Qualitative Research: On Being an Outsider in the Field” for a further discussion of insider and outsider roles in research). Yet, we are not aware of any study examining ‘Turkish’ psychology in terms of coloniality across its history.

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The Weird of the Non-WEIRDs: The ‘Turkish’ Republic and Its Psychology Representing a non-Western and predominantly Muslim country, Turkey certainly exemplifies one of those contexts that have been kept away from Western knowledge production, including its psychology. However, together with Iran (see Matin, 2022), it constitutes an interesting example of a non-WEIRD context where colonialism plays a somewhat hidden but crucial role in the emergence of the state as a modern republic. In identifying the characteristics of the case, it is useful to emphasise that our account attempts to apply decolonial critiques to a context outside of historically settler colonies (e.g. Europe, Middle East, Euro-Asia). In her deeply theoretical work, Arneil (2017) carefully examines the historical transformation of imperialism through industrialisation and urbanisation, where the former experience of settler colonialism was determinant to regulating the economic, social and political order across Europe, the heartland of modernism. Accordingly, taking from Jennifer Pitts’ famous depiction of “turn outward to Empire,” Europe made a simultaneous turn inward to colony when the segregation of the mentally ill, disabled, idle, poor as well as indigenous and racialised minorities became a norm via prisons, workhouses, asylums or banishment from the country for the sake of “improvement.” In other words, Arneil (2017) argues that domestic colonialism ideologically differs from imperialism “with a particularly insidious form of infiltrating and internalized power to change others from within” (p. 230). Those varieties of colonial practice based on ethical and economic justification for dispossessing “wasted” land and people within a country are also conceptualised by other researchers as “second colonization” (Bhatia, 2002), “internal cultural imperialism” (Salih, 2021) or “inter-subaltern colonialism” (Matin, 2022). Following the same line, we argue that Turkish modernisation4 can be analysed through the lens of domestic colonialism, even though it was never colonised by Western empires or exposed to settler colonialism. 4  Although the emergence of the Turkish republic set the milestone in the modernisation process of Turkey, its origin goes back to the late Ottoman empire (Karpat, 2002) which goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, we focus on the transformation of progression doctrine that transferred from Ottoman elites to Republican cadres on an ideological level (Mardin, 1971; Zürcher, 2014) in which psychology played a critical role (Kılıç, 2016; Gülerce, 2006). Thereby, we use Turkish modernisation as an umbrella term to cover both late Ottoman attempts and the nation-state formation of Turkish republic.

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There have been some attempts to position the constitutive doctrine of the Turkish Republic (i.e., Kemalism) into a broader Western ideological landscape such as orientalism, especially when it comes to suppression of the Kurds, alongside the works and accounts on the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities and atrocities through nationalism and assimilation (Aydın, 1998; Cagaptay, 2004). Those few studies customarily make reference to Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism when reciting the cultural, political, military and economic dominance of the West that had generated the ever-existed hegemonic patterns of representation of Eastern cultures and societies fashioning the contrast of Europe, and Modern. Zeydanlıoğlu (2008) postulates that Turkish elites, stationed geographically in the East, had to turn the orientalist gaze to their “internal orient,” namely, Kurds. The phenomenon of what he called “Turkish orientalism” corresponds to the Turkification of the lands, customs and people in the light of a full-scale civilising mission of the newly emerged secular republic. Ateş (2007), on the other hand, approaches the Turkish version of orientalism more carefully and provides a deeper historical analysis starting from the late Ottoman modernist movement. According to him, the category of Orient has changed over time depending on power dynamics among ruling elites, since Turkish modernisation was a long and fragmented process. Thereby, Ateş (2007) postulates that Turkish elites have implemented a “strategic orientalism” where nearly all non-Turkish/ modern/urban groups from Ottomans to religious fractions, Arabs to Kurds, peasants to nomads, get their oriental derogation and suppression throughout Turkish modernisation. Many critical historians also highlight the fragmented nature of Turkish modernisation, but still admit ideological continuity via modernist elites like the Young Turks Movement (Mardin, 1971; Zürcher, 2014), some of whose principal motive was the progress of the empire at all costs, including resettlement, ethnic cleansing and even genocide (Akçam, 2012). Another point to add to the domestic colonialist character of Turkish modernisation is the ethos of Turkishness that arguably acts as a metaphoric dominance as in the case of Whiteness in Europe and beyond. Taking from Charles Wills, Ünlü (2018) approaches Turkishness as a socio-political “contract” that emerged and consolidated during the rise of the Turkish Republic. According to Ünlü, inter-ethnic relations and conflicts during Turkish modernisation led to a social contract prioritising

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Turks over non-Turks. Similarly, the domination of Turkishness was also documented by Salih’s (2021) historical review of juridical and political practices in cultural domains. Relying on Cultural Imperialism, Salih (2021) showed how a homogeneous, Western and modern nation, as the core and high Turkish culture, “has necessitated the dilution of the Kurds” (p. 8). Finally, Acar, Sandal-Önal and Şen (2022) showed that instead of being a common identity across different groups that are supposed to unify the nation under the banner of citizenship, the concept of national identity in Turkey acts as a master narrative reflecting the superiority of Turks that various groups perceive and understand very differently. Revisited evidence through historical, cultural and political analysis shows that the westernisation ideal adopted by the Turkish Republic as a part of broader Turkish modernisation corresponds to an internalised notion of progress as expected by domestic colonialist governance (Arneil, 2017). Even though the abovementioned evidence was mostly gathered relative to the Kurds, colonial practices were not limited to them (see Gültekin & Suvari, 2021; Pinguet, 2009; Turkyilmaz, 2016). The superiority of the colonial agent was also evident in the Turkish case through scientific racism documented in various disciplines such as anthropology (Maksudyan, 2005), history (Sivrioğlu, 2015) and linguistics (Cagaptay, 2002). Nonetheless, a decolonial investigation of ‘Turkish’ psychology is a rather disregarded topic, despite its critical insights (see Batur, 2006; Batur & Aslıtürk, 2006; Gülerce, 2006; Kılıç, 2016; Vassaf, 1982). The psychology texts may not be the primary source for Kemalist progressivism, but they may have contributed to the reproduction and legitimisation of social hierarchies justifying social inequalities, given that most authors-­academics were either elites or linked to the dominant group (Bhatia, 2002; Duncan, 2001). Therefore, it is important to reveal the hegemonic ideology behind the psychology texts that one way or another serve to sustain colonial hierarchies. On the one hand, the in-group (i.e. Self) is depicted as superior to the out-group (i.e. the Others); on the other hand, others and information about others are instrumentalised or abused for the sake of progress/westernisation/modernisation (Adams,  Estrada-Villalta & Gómez, 2018; Teo, 2010). Following a similar rationale derived from previous research (Bhatia, 2002; Duncan, 2001), here we have selected

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certain psychology texts for discourse analysis in order to (1) unearth the way in which the Turkish Self is constructed and (2) document epistemic violence towards the category of the Others in ‘Turkish’ psychology.5

Method and Data Our use of discourse analysis aims to identify elements of the power-­ knowledge mechanism embedded in speech and text (Jäger, 2001), a method that gained popularity among social psychologists thanks to the seminal work of Potter and Wetherell (1987). They proposed Interpretative Repertoires (IR) as an analytical unit to detect internally consistent and bonded language units across inconsistencies and differences in discourse (Wetherell & Potter, 1988). Following this method, we have selected, organised and analysed materials in line with our research question and inferred IRs until new ones were not evident from the material. The data corpus for the analysis was generated by scanning the published work of Turkish psychologists via offline bibliographies covering 1878–1988 (i.e. Türkçe Psikoloji Eserleri Bibliyografyası, Psikoloji Bölümü ve Tecrübi Psikoloji Enstitüsü Çalışmaları Bibliyografyası, and Başlangıcından Günümüze Türk Psikoloji Bibliyografyası) and online archives of psychology journals covering 1978 onward (i.e. Psikoloji Çalışmaları Dergisi, Türk Psikoloji Bülteni, Türk Psikoloji Yazıları and Türk Psikoloji Dergisi). Combining online and offline archives, we managed to cover a good ratio of the twentieth-­century psychology studies in Turkey. We followed a systematic approach in material selection that enabled us to narrow down our focus to studies in which appearances of a Self and an Other are more explicit. First, we excluded studies preceding alphabet reform (i.e., 1928) because those studies attracted little attention both from psychologists and the public (Batur, 2003, 2005). Likewise, psychological studies after 2000 were also excluded for two interconnected reasons: (1) the post-2000 era is thought to be characterised by the post-Kemalist paradigm (Aytürk, 2015) and (2) ‘Turkish’ psychology was challenged during this period (Batur & Aslıtürk, 2006), which has already been examined elsewhere (see Bayad et  al., 2022; Uysal et  al., 2022).  It is important to note that given the space constraints and our focus on the trajectory of dominant ideology lying behind the representation of Self and Others, we rely only on a handful of publications that correspond to the prominent studies of their era (see Appendix). Yet, material selection is a part of our analysis that is explained more elaborately in the following sections in relation with historical background of the texts and the authors. 5

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Second, we divided the last century into three broad timeframes (i.e. 1930–60; 1960–80; 1980–2000) in which both the quality and quantity of psychology studies varied extensively (see  Bilgin, 1988). Finally, throughout the material selection, we paid special attention to the impact of the text and the authors across the field that led us to prioritise influential authors and texts due to their contribution to hegemonic discourse (see Appendix). Material Selection The birth of modern psychology in Turkey does not have a dialectic relationship between society and the discipline, but rather an import of knowledge from Western Europe (Batur, 2005; Boratav, 2005; Kağıtçıbaşı, 1994; Kılıç, 2016). Official doctrine conveyed by late Ottoman modernism with a Turkist agenda led to a deliberate exclusion of alternative psychologies (see Odabaşi, 2016). This era was characterised by Mustafa Şekip Tunç as he bridged late Ottoman and Kemalist modernism thanks to his close contact with Ziya Gökalp (see Yıldız, 2010), which eventually earned him a critical position at Istanbul University. His text on the psychology of women was chosen for the analysis since it represents this early period when coloniality was more explicit (i.e. Tunç, 1938/1998). Still, there was diversity among initial cadres until the 1950s, when the first academic purges silenced critical voices such as Muzafer Sherif (Batur, 2006; Kayaoğlu, Batur & Aslıtürk, 2014). The academic purges overlapped with scholarly attention on cultural change and modernisation pioneered by Mümtaz Turhan, whose work sophisticated domestic colonialism into assimilationism under the supervision of Sir Frederick Bartlett, known for his involvement in British Colonial Governance (Linstrum, 2012). As an exemplar of his broader works, his text on various migrant groups is selected for the analysis (i.e. Turhan, 1956). Following rural depopulation in the 1960s (Kutlay, 2012), the production of psychology texts tripled in volume, and sub-fields of the discipline started to emerge with mentioning of social problems seen more frequently by the use of terms like society, social, Turks and Turkey (Bilgin, 1988; Boratav, 2005). To provide a characterising example of field research in this era and—to the best of our knowledge—the first study on the Kurdish minority, we selected Fatma Başaran’s study on the “modern attitudes” of villagers from Diyarbakır (i.e. Başaran, 1969). Towards and during the 1970s, however, social movements and political mobilisation of

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workers and students in cities started to dominate political culture (Natali, 2009), leading to an interest in masses and cultural confrontation. Yet, different from emulating modernisation, this era is marked by the start of comparative cultural studies dominated by Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı, who was truly influential both in Turkey and abroad with her extensive work in cross-cultural psychology (Rubin, 1994). Her text on personality types is chosen for the analyses due to the modern vs traditional dichotomy that laid the foundation of her research in the subsequent years (i.e. Kağıtçıbaşı, 1973). Following the 1980 coup d’état, Turkey experienced a substantive transformation (Günal, 2013; Kutlay, 2012; Tachau & Heper, 1983; Yeğen, 2004; Zeydanlıoğlu, 2009) when a statist neoliberalisation directly influenced psychology through the privatisation of higher education and an increased number of students and staff (Er & Duman, 2001; Namer, Hünler & Düzen, 2015). During this period, Beğlan Birand Toğrol was the head of the psychology department at Istanbul University, then the largest psychology department in the country. We selected her outputs presented in a symposium hosted by the same department for the analysis because of their unique role in psychology representing the official discourse of the post-coup era. Finally, during the 1990s we witness a diversification as a reaction to the mainstream psychology institutionalised around American pragmatism and scholarly exchange with North America (Batur & Aslıtürk, 2006). In this period, Middle East Technical University was at the forefront of American influence, chaired by Emine Olcay I ̇ mamoğlu (Güler ce, 2012). We selected one of her ar ticles ̇ on political identities (i.e., Dalmış & Imamoğ lu, 2000; see Appendix for a complete list of selected materials).

Analysis From Superior to Normative: A Modern State with a Modern Self Throughout the analysis, we identify three IRs for the construction of Self, namely Dominant, Progressive and Modern, which iterate across selected material to depict Turks, Turkish Culture or the Turkish State (see Fig. 1). The authors consistently positively demarked the Turkish Self from a relevant Other via the abuse of methodology or interpretation of data to align with hegemonic doctrine.

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Fig. 1  Interpretative repertoires utilised to refer to Self throughout the selected texts

Tunç’s ideological alignment with statist reformism was evident in the selected article through the overt justification of Kemalist reforms by the superiority of—what he called—“New” woman over the others without any empirical support. In reality, Kemalist reforms rather instrumentalised women by regulating their lives in a top-down manner instead of admitting their rights as a social group. For instance, the feminist/suffragette movement was depicted as a dangerous ideology for Turkish women and was not supported (Kandiyoti, 1991). Tunç explicitly aligns with this statist approach: Quote-1, IR-Progressive: Our republic, which is advancing with revolutionary and statist moves, has given the women’s movement … a speed that surprises the ideologies in this regard. What would the Turkish suffragettes and their political delusions be like? (Tunç, 1938/1998, p. 293)

This extract not only shows Tunç’s ideological alignment but also crystallises the way in which he discursively reconstructs the category of woman. For Tunç (1938/1998), neither women as a social category nor women’s rights as a social problem are a matter per se but rather progression of the “new/modern,” “rare,” “national,” “idealist,” “urban” woman as an extension of republican values is more vital for ‘Turkish’ society. And not surprisingly, according to his “objective,” “scientific” examination, those features of the “new” woman are more suitable to the physiology and psychology of women that “naturally” need protection and love from men. This early stage of ‘Turkish’ psychology represented by Tunç employed a colonial logic of progression pierced into the category of woman via a new vs passé dichotomy. Soon after, however, cultural diversity drew scholarly attention, especially by Mümtaz Turhan who published

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extensively on westernisation and cultural change. Throughout his text focusing on 12 “migrant groups,” some of whose migration history goes back to the seventeenth century, Turhan (1956) depicts ethnic Turks and Turkish culture as the high culture that other ethnocultural groups are supposed to assimilate. Although all groups under his investigation live in villages, cultural elements of urban lifestyle or higher socio-economic status such as cuisine gadgets and household items were associated with ‘Turks’ and ‘Turkish culture.’ Likewise, Turkish language proficiency among non-­Turkish groups was treated as a desired cultural change in line with republican ideals. Turkish culture that has become the ‘dominant’ culture with the emergence of the republic remains as the hidden assumption for the source and direction towards westernisation: Quote-2, IR-Dominant: Customs in these areas was either completely abandoned or modified and preserved until the Republican era. After this period … was revived in accordance with the changes in the Turkish lifestyle. (Turhan, 1956, p. 11)

In this extract, Turhan associates the resurgence of a cultural element (i.e. dancing) with the “Turkish lifestyle” as a symbol of secularisation conveyed by the emergence of the republic. Turkification of those cultural groups via speaking Turkish or aligning their customs with neighbouring—what Turhan called “Turkish race”’—Turkish groups is always praised as a sign of westernisation and civilisation. With Turhan (1956), we see that the “reformist” and “modern/new” Turkish Self transforms into cultural superiority whereby “Turkish lifestyle” and customs are depicted as Western. Following the urbanisation boom in the 1960s, the problem of modernisation still constituted one of the main topics, but this time ‘within’ individuals via attitudes. Başaran (1969) compares Turkish (i.e. Türkmen) and Kurdish villagers from Diyarbakır regarding attitudes and—what she called—“social norms” towards urban lifestyle, polygamy, an equal share of the inheritance, schooling of girls and vendetta, which is rooted in the semi-feudal, traditional, agricultural economy of many regions in Turkey ̇ that still remains an unsolved problem of the modernisation project (Ince, Yarali & Özsel, 2009). Yet despite admitting the socio-economic conditions of the region, Başaran (1969) hid her political agenda by psychologising the social change phenomenon. For instance, she selectively excluded the agricultural economy, religion and ethnicity as demographic

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variables, which led her to reduce all of the differences between villages to “isolation.” In this way, she follows Turhan’s approach to find soft elements—in this case, attitudes—that are more prone to change, in line with Kemalist reforms: Quote-3, IR-Modern: … changes in laws as part of Atatürk reforms are effective in attitude changes. This effectiveness is more pronouncer in villages that have lost their isolated nature. (Başaran, 1969, p. 171)

Here, isolation is conceptualised through physical distance from the central government, such as transportation capacity, Turkish language proficiency and access to public schooling, as well as symbolic and cultural distance, such as being Turkish vs Kurdish or being Alevi vs Sunni. On the other hand, social change conceptualised as modernisation is mostly based on legal changes that are not always equally materialised in people’s everyday lives. For instance, the only school open in Kurdish villages was one year before the field research, while schools were established right after the establishment of the republic in 1923 in Turkish villages. Yet she prefers to compare Kurdish and Sunni villagers with Turkish and Alevi ones. In this way, Başaran equalises ‘normative’ legal regulations as being ‘Modern’ (i.e. proximity to Kemalist doctrine) and any kind of physical and symbolic distance from those regulations as ‘Traditional’ even in completely rural settings where Kemalist reforms barely reached or materialised. With Başaran (1969), we see a shift in the Turkish Self from being Western to having modern attitudes. The dichotomy of modern vs traditional attitudes has advanced in the following years. Kağıtçıbaşı (1973) psychologises the same colonial dichotomy by proposing modern vs traditional as “personality types” that interact with social structural variables. However, Kağıtçıbaşı also represents a rupture from previous scholars due to her education being heavily influenced by American liberalism and her cross-cultural perspective going beyond emulating westernisation (see Kağıtçıbaşı, 1984). Thereby, her language and writing style is different from previous texts by giving more weight to theory and method as well as less explicit ideological wording. Still, Kağıtçıbaşı, with her important role in prestigious institutions and nationwide projects, represents mainstream psychology in contemporary Turkey (see Kağıtçıbaşı et al., 2009). An important indication of mainstreaming psychology in Kağıtçıbaşı’s text is the shift from superior to normative to define the Turkish Self. Different from previous

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psychologists, Kağıtçıbaşı takes a Kemalist political stand for granted as a “normative” feature and as a dimension of modernisation via patriotism. For instance, contrary to Adorno, Kağıtçıbaşı (1973) argues that respect for authority and patriotism is part of Turkish culture—what she calls “Turkish syndrome”—that must be excluded from the psychological examination of authoritarian personality: Quote-4, IR-Dominant: As a modern social norm and a desirable characteristic, patriotism seems to be more fully adopted by the ‘normal’ people than by the rigid and dogmatic core-authoritarians. (Kağıtçıbaşı, 1973, p. 160)

Interestingly, the argument on patriotism and respect for authority stands on her personal observation and only on one local study with an all-male student sample (cf. Hyman, Payaslioglu & Frey, 1958). Still, according to Kağıtçıbaşı, “national betterment” and the “nationalistic stage” of Turkey has great relevance for the modernisation of all society, which requires flexibility and openness. However, neither flexibility nor openness was directly measured. Rather, indicators of wealth, such as upward and urban mobility, and psychological well-being, such as optimism and achievement orientation, were inferred as modern attitudinal orientation. In this way, Kağıtçıbaşı (1973) takes the modern vs traditional dichotomy further by establishing a normative Turkish Self with a patriotic and modern personality. Together with socio-political changes following the coup d’état in 1980, the normativity of the Turkish Self has been consolidated. Toğrol (1987) depicts a homogeneous and historically coherent Turkish society consisting of only Turks, which is in line with the monist policies of putschists (Zeydanlıoğlu, 2009). A manifestation of this view is the conceptual switch from Turkish culture or Turks as an ethnic group to Turkish people or Turks as a whole society. Similar to Kağıtçıbaşı (1973), she also takes modernism as normative, but this time she uses European as the equivalent of progression and westernisation: Quote-5, IR-Dominant: Turks’ invaluable contribution to the European society they belong to, … profound tolerant mentality and the like behaviour towards minorities living within their [Turks’] borders and all humanity, will be understood over time. (Toğrol, 1987, p. 68)

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Instead of modern or Western, the preference for European is not a coincidence since, in the very same year, Turkey started full membership negotiation with the European Union (EU). Interestingly though, being European is not a political or organisational membership for Toğrol; rather, it represents a mentality or attitude that is inherited by Turks. Besides, Toğrol’s (1987) text differentiates from previous texts with a sharp distinction from the modernisation process to a modernised nation. She tries to prove that a “modern Turkish Type” appeared through Kemalist reforms, secular education and urbanisation as a sign of accomplished modernisation. Furthermore, for the first time, she defines Kemalist reforms as “democratic order.” In this way, Toğrol (1987) brings the Turkish Self up to date via a more democratic and secular outlook without giving up its dominance and normativity. When it comes to millennia, the importance of democracy and secularism increased regarding the EU negotiations as well as the popularisation of political Islam (Yılmaz, 2016). Simultaneously, mainstream psychology institutionalised around American pragmatism has been challenged (Batur & Aslıtürk, 2006). A classic example of mainstream psychology studies of ̇ that era is Dalmış and Imamoğ lu’s (2000) text as a data-driven quantitative research. However, both the sampling and generation of—what they call—“identity fields” (i.e. socio-political identity categories) is problematic, since they influenced and intervened in their generation. For instance, the socio-demographics of the adult sample slightly differ from the student sample in which minorities are not represented. Besides, participants are coming from a highly educated, relatively rich background that is far from being representative of the country. On the other hand, identity categories that are supposed to represent the socio-political landscape are biased towards secularism, which was measured only at a nominal level. For instance, they provide different levels of secularism such as “secular” and “secular-religious,” and religiosity such as “faithful,” “religious” and “anti-secular religious,” while poorly covering the right and left spectrum. This overrepresentation of secularism can be seen as a discursive renovation of the modern vs traditional dichotomy that was also mentioned in the quote as a historical continuation of modern Turkey: Quote-6, IR-Modern: It can be argued that secular-leftist and nationalist-­ conservative identity fields are the reflections of two socio-political formations, that have been active since the formation of modern Turkey. (Dalmış ̇ & Imamoğ lu, 2000, p. 10)

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And not surprisingly, all demographic variables that were associated with being modern in previous texts, such as being educated, urban and having a high socio-economic status, were also associated with the overrepresented “Secular-Leftist” cluster. Besides, similar to Toğrol (1987), the authors use Turks and Turkish people interchangeably with the country and society, which can be seen as a sign of banal nationalism (Billig, ̇ 1995). Therefore, Dalmış and Imamoğ lu (2000) contribute to keeping the ‘progressive’ character associated with the Turkish Self via overrepresentation of the secular-religious spectrum and abusing a non-­ representative sample. From Ignorable to Reformable: A Primitive Vassal and a Traditional Other When it comes to the construction of Others, we have identified two IRs, namely Masses and Outdated, that are used to justify the superiority of the Turkish Self (see Fig. 2). The authors problematise the existence of different categories of Others and employ various ways of epistemic violence without any will of understanding. The first Other we come across is Passé Woman as an antithesis of the modern woman heralded by the new republic. The instrumentalisation of women in the rhetoric, legal documents and administrative policies to change ‘woman’ from within (Arat, 1994) is a classic example of domestic colonialism (Arneil, 2017), necessitating a discursive category of Others. Throughout his piece, Tunç (1938/1998) employs such dichotomy to derogate the traditional, non-Western, Muslim women that constituted the “majority” in the population. According to him, woman passé that is “sensitive,” “bigoted,” “melancholic” and “non-national” are condemned to be wiped away and need to be replaced by the “New” woman:

Fig. 2  Interpretative repertoires utilised to refer to Others throughout the selected texts

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Quote-7, IR-Outdated: Until the new time culture conquers them, the old women and their world will continue to live, at least, in their mother’s bosom. (Tunç, 1938/1998, p. 289)

Tunç uses the metaphor of “conquest” for the modernisation of woman Passé as a unidirectional process starting from urban centres. In his understanding, there is no place for interaction or even a wish to understand the “old” women. Rather, he naturalises modernisation—as a grace from the republic—with a top-down process that will spread around the country due to its superiority. As a privileged male chairing the only psychology faculty in the country, Tunç’s epistemic violence against Others (i.e. traditional and Muslim women) is explicit, since he does not even need to justify his ideas with data that make his interpretation and ideology more obvious. On the other hand, Turhan (1956) collected data and relied on field research to justify his ideological standpoint. Still, similar to Tunç’s naturalisation, Turhan (1956) uses cultural change interchangeably with westernisation as an inevitable social process. And when he examines features of the Others, he applies an assimilationist approach to describe, understand and resolve the problems that obstruct westernisation (cf., Turhan, 2020): Quote-8, IR-Masses: Reformation that is desired to apply in various cultures succeeds and delivers good results; On the other hand, … it [change] has encountered resistance despite repeated attempts… especially in illiterate and economically backward communities, … the close bonds between material culture and spiritual culture .. turn their emotional tendencies into a complex [for reformation]. (Turhan, 1956, p. 6)

Colonial progressivism conveyed by Turhan’s westernisation is at play even before he enters the field. For instance, ethnocultural minorities analysed in his text are named as “elements” resisting reformation (see Appendix). According to him, local features of the ethnocultural groups such as belonging to another religion/sect or using their local dialect are an indication of isolation and underdevelopment. Besides, the groups that he compares as superior to the locals are mostly urban communities that he calls “Turkish.” Thus, in his text epistemic violence occurs when he abuses the level of comparison between incomparable groups.

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Abusing the level of comparison is also evident in Başaran’s (1969) text. She compares villages as a common residential unit across the groups, yet the villages have different socio-economic, religious and educational backgrounds. Besides, religion and ethnicity are consciously excluded from her analysis. The abuse of the methodology is justified by her assumption of progression: Quotation-9, IR-Outdated: In primitive societies population has a high growth potential… In modern societies, the rate of population increase and the number of children are less. (Başaran, 1969, p. 167)

All the variables used to manifest social change are interpreted as deficiency from modernism, which is always better performed by Turkish villagers, due to the abuse of comparison. Furthermore, those deficiencies were attributed to culture, family structure and customs for Kurdish villagers, while they were attributed to the socio-structural problems or a delay in technologies for Turkish ones. Most strikingly, the Kurdish language that was reported to be spoken by the majority of the villagers was depicted as a “language handicap” for the children that prevented them from attending school. This word choice reveals another aspect of epistemic violence committed by Başaran (1969), that she explicitly ignored the spoken language and imposed the Turkish language for data collection while only very few can speak Turkish. Abusing data during interpretation was also a common practice in Kağıtçıbaşı’s (1973) text. Here, the modern vs traditional dichotomy appeared as personality types, but the Others are depicted as antithetical to the modern without properly measuring modernism. Instead, she interpreted low optimism, internal control and achievement orientation as traditional features, which was related to the socio-structural background of the sample. In this way, she instrumentalises those depicted as traditional to prove the existence of the modern that she finds “superior”: Quote-10, IR-Outdated: Core (personal) authoritarianism, meaning a general rigid, dogmatic, intolerant suspicious and negativistic outlook on life, is expected here to relate to anomia and pessimism about one’s future. (Kağıtçıbaşı, 1973, p. 163)

Yet, clustering those “personalities” is only based on very low correlations between some of these characteristics. For instance, religious

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orientation was only correlated with family control and respect for parents. Still, it was depicted as a feature of traditional personality. On the other hand, family control had a higher correlation with patriotism, which is depicted as the novelty of “Turkish syndrome” in contrast to authoritarian personality, but was still depicted as an antecedent of traditional personality. In this way, Kağıtçıbaşı (1973) psychologised class-related phenomenon via the concept of personality types without suggesting any solution. In other words, Kağıtçıbaşı (1973) problematises the very existence of “traditional personality” as a category of Others. The idea of replacement of the Others is a matter of success and pride in Toğrol’s (1987) text, because Turks have accomplished modernisation in the best possible way, as she described, “without bloody revolutions and bloody civil wars” (p. 67). In her text, the Others are only mentioned as minorities who live peacefully within the borders of Turks. Thereby, the Others are a rather disregarded and denied subject in Toğrol’s writing. The level of denial is so high in the text that she depicts Turkey as an exceptional or antihistorical case: Quote-11, IR-Masses: The contribution of the independence and equality mentality in the Turkish character to the absence of racial discrimination and class in Turkish society and the process of Westernization is discussed. (Toğrol 1987, p. 16)

̇ Dalmış and Imamoğ lu (2000) share very little with Toğrol’s (1987) text regarding the style and language. But on a discursive level, one can detect the continuity of banal nationalism evident from the interchangeable usage of “Turkish people” and “Turks” when discussing society as a whole. Likewise, the Others are rather latent in the text via research practices such as not including ethnic minorities in the sample and generating biased identity clusters. For instance, the category of “anti-secular religious” (i.e. Laikliğe karşı olan Dindar) was highly but negatively loaded to the “secular-left” identity but not any other identity clusters. This implies that certain religious identities are instrumentalised to confirm and consolidate the secular-leftist identity cluster. Similarly, favouring a secular worldview over others was visible throughout the text by downplaying religious communities as “symbols”:

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Quote-12, IR-Masses: Apart from symbols such as country, nation [millet], ummah, folk and jamaat … very few communities have existed in which one ̇ can be identified. (Dalmış & Imamoğ lu, 2000, p. 3)

In this extract, the authors list all religious-sounding communities as state-related symbols, but not the official name for the nation (i.e. Ulus), which has a secular connotation in Turkish. In this way, secularism and left-wing identity fields are depicted as a grass-roots, civic alternative for those religious, state-related communities which are derogated to be a sign of a non-democratic society.

Conclusion Many marginalised groups, and possibly most prominently Kurds, have been systematically excluded from psychological studies in Turkey (Acar et  al., 2022; Bayad et  al., 2022; Göregenli, 2010; Uysal et  al., 2022). Except for a few studies after 2000, the level of neglect is so vast and common that it makes it challenging for researchers to examine the hegemonic ideology behind scientific practices compared to other disciplines (Cagaptay, 2002; Maksudyan, 2005; Sivrioğlu, 2015). In this chapter, relying on the concept of domestic colonialism (Arneil, 2017) and using a denaturalisation approach (Adams et al., 2017), we examined the historical trajectory of hegemonic discourse in psychology, which is eventually banalised in the shape of ‘Turkish’ psychology. As a first attempt, by tracing influential figures and publications in psychology dealing with the social problem of their eras, we documented that Turkish modernisation doctrine (i.e. Kemalism) was pierced into psychological knowledge practices by a colonial mentality that manifested itself through interpretative repertoires based on (1) domination, (2) progression and (3) modernity of a Turkish Self (Salih, 2021; Ünlü, 2018; Zeydanlıoğlu, 2008). On the other hand, we found two major interpretative repertoires for the reconstruction of Others: (1) Masses corresponds to those that could be handled and organised in a top-down manner and (2) Outdated represents those that could be replaced and renewed for the sake of progress (Akçam, 2012; Bhatia, 2002; Duncan, 2001; Zürcher, 2014). Finally, as expected, those repertoires were employed at various stages of research, from conceptualisation to interpretation (Adams et al., 2015, 2017, 2018), and applied to many marginalised groups going

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beyond a single category of Other (e.g. Kurds), which is in line with the strategic orientalism utilised by Turkish modernisation (Ateş, 2007). Kemalism, with its strategic character, has been strengthened since the emergence of the republic and turned into an official paradigm (Tachau & Heper, 1983; Zürcher, 2014). Despite rising critiques against this paradigm popularised in the time known as “post-Kemalism” (Aytürk 2015), and interest in marginalised groups in psychology (Batur & Aslıtürk, 2006; Bayad, et al., 2022; Göregenli, 2010; Uysal et al., 2022), both the politicians and academia are far from turning this exceptional era into an opportunity for facing the truth and settling with history (Aytürk, 2020). For instance, we witness that (auto)censorship mechanisms are being again activated in psychology (Eser, Bayad, Alparslan & Şen, 2023). Psychologists have to face the past and the official paradigm to go beyond the academic interest resulting from the everchanging political atmosphere. Otherwise, selective interest and indifference known as the “Turkishness contract” (Ünlü, 2018) will continue to be a social norm, and psychology will continue to be an “imitation” (Göregenli, 2010; Vassaf, 1982) for the sake of the colonial mentality of progression. Nevertheless, our analysis is limited to a certain number of selected texts that may not represent the fragmented history of psychology in Turkey (Batur, 2006; Gülerce, 2006; Kılıç, 2016). Rather, our selection may exemplify the works of the influential figures who tackled social change phenomena, reflecting their ideological alignment with Kemalism. Further research is needed to investigate these figures and their academic influence on psychological knowledge production as well as the scope of coloniality across the field.

Appendix Tunç, M. Ş. (1998). Yeni Türk Kadını ve Ruhi Münasebetleri Meselesi [The new Turkish woman and the issue of her psychological relationships]. Cogito, 15, 287–298. (Original work published 1938) https:// docplayer.biz.tr/176445732-­Cogito-­uc-­aylik-­dusunce-­dergisi-­sayi-­is-­ yil-­i998-­issn-­ij.html. Turhan, M. (1956). Kültürde değişen ve değişmeye mukavemet eden unsurlar [Elements that change and show resistance to change in culture]. Psikoloji Çalışmaları, 1, 6–21. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/ download/article-­file/100056.

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Başaran, F. (1969). A Psycho-sociological research about the attitude changes in Diyarbakır villages. Araştırma, 7, 153–171. Retrieved from: https://dspace.ankara.edu.tr/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.12575/60326/11913.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Kag˘ıtçıbas¸ı, C. (1973). Psychological aspects of modernization in Turkey. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 4(2), 157–174. https://doi. org/10.1177/002202217300400202. Toğrol, B. (1987). Tarih boyunca değişen Türk kültürü ve Türk tipi [Everchanging Turkish culture and Turkish type throughout history]. Psikoloji Çalışmaları, 15, 15–16. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-­file/100166. Yeni Türk tipi. Psikoloji Çalışmaları, 15, 67–68. https://dergipark.org.tr/ en/download/article-­file/100174. ̇ Dalmış, I.,̇ & Imamoğ lu, E.  O. (2000). Yetişkinlerin ve üniversite öğrencilerinin sosyo-politik kimlik algıları [The perceived sociopolitical identity domains of Turkish adults and university students]. Turkish Journal of Psychology, 15, 1–14. https://www.psikolog.org.tr/tr/yayinlar/dergiler/1031828/tpd1300443320000000m000225.pdf.

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Conclusion Ercan Şen, Elif Sandal-Önal, Mete Sefa Uysal, and Yasemin Gülsüm Acar

This volume has brought together different lessons and perspectives on studying Kurdishness in Turkey. Authors have described the way the Turkish-Kurdish conflict is framed and understood by people in Turkey, and the way that the conflict has imbued itself in Kurdish identity. They have discussed the way that the history of the Kurdish experience influences interactions with other minorities, and how it creates the energy and E. Şen (*) Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] E. Sandal-Önal Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Sefa Uysal Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Y. G. Acar University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3_10

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motivation to maintain protest for decades. They have also described the way that psychology as a field has dealt with identity and addressed—or not addressed—Kurdishness, and how researchers’ experiences have shaped their approach to studying Kurdishness, and the lessons that we may learn from their experiences. The additional views highlighting the formation of collective memory within a conflict and the importance of reflexivity in research demonstrated how crucial interdisciplinarity is for studying political psychology within a conflictual context. Studying Kurdishness in Turkey is a political challenge especially within the current rise of nationalist populism, an autocratic regime, persistent political violence, and societal polarization. Yet detaching the issue from its political and historical context while focusing on highly contested issues of identities, conflict, and contact with the motives of objectivity or impartiality would not have a positive influence on scientific knowledge production nor on the constructive policy-making actions that benefit from this literature. By providing a critical lens to the different aspects of Kurdishness and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, contributions in this volume have illustrated different ways to grasp the multidimensionality of the issue by presenting contextual, longue durée elements of the conflict from different aspects. Considering the intricate political history of the different identities in Turkey, we hope this framework will be beneficial for students of political psychology who strive to understand intergroup dynamics in conflict areas. This volume came about as a means to bring together political psychological research that explored new aspects of Kurdishness, brought new perspectives or methodologies to the fore, or allowed for the voices of Kurds to come through. Kurdishness has so often been a catch-all for all that is difficult or dangerous in Turkey. It became taboo to discuss and definitely to research. We felt, though, that there were many lessons to be learned from research into Kurdishness, and that by bringing valuable research together, we could speak to many other important issues across social and political psychology. We hope you will take the lessons you have learned here and use this volume as a useful guide for you in your own research on identities in conflict zones.

Index

A Academics for Peace, 136 Agency, 31 Ally identity, 13–14 Allyship, 12 Arab Alewites, 108 B Brakuji, 91 C çapulcu, 14 Cataclysmic event, 92 Civil Friday Prayers, 152 Cognitive dissonance, 112 Collective action, 54 Collective identification, 55 Collective identity, 54 Collective psychological ownership, 106 Collective trauma, 55

Competitive victimhood, 16–17 Conflict narratives, 8 Conflict zones, 147 Crisis of representation, 92 D Decolonial approaches, 169–170 Dehumanization, 112 Democracy, 10 Disadvantaged group members, 12 Discourse analysis, 174 Disempowerment, 41–46 Domestic colonialism, 175 Dominant, 176 Dominant conflict narratives, 18 E Economic narrative, 9, 10 Enforced disappearances, 30 Ethnic identification, 12–13 Ethnographic research, 148

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Şen et al. (eds.), The Political Psychology of Kurds in Turkey, Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33291-3

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INDEX

F Fatma Başaran, 175 Fieldwork, 147 Five-Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate, 112 Forcibly displaced, 2

Kurdish issue, 2 Kurdishness, 3 Kurdish resistance, 130 Kurdish rights, 13 Kurdish ’68, 77 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 7 Kurmancî, 145

G Galatasaray Square, 130 Gülenist, 157 Gülen movement, 157

M Majority-status, 15 Masses, 182 Menzil, 157 Minority group members, 15 Minority rights, 19 Modern, 176 Modernisation, 175

H Hasankeyf, 1 Hizbullah, 156 Human rights, 63–64 I Ilısu Dam, 2 ̇ Imamoğ lu, Olcay, 176 Independence narrative, 10 In-depth interviews, 30 Insider, 139 Interdisciplinarity, 196 Intergroup contact, 15–16 Internally displaced persons, 104 Interpretative Repertoires, 174 Islam, 10 ̇ Istiklal Avenue, 134 K Kağıtçıbaşı, Çiğdem, 176 Kemalism, 7 Kırmızıtoprak, Sait, 78 Kurdish activists, 130 Kurdish identity, 7

N Nationalist populism, 196 O Ocak, Hasan, 133 Öcalan, Abdullah, 145 Outdated, 182 P Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK), 7 Perceived Discrimination, 62–63 PKK, see Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan Plaza de Mayo mothers, 141 Politicized collective identity, 54 Positionality, 147 Progressive, 176 Q Q methodology, 9

 INDEX 

R Reconciliation, 17–18 Reflexivity, 147 Resistance, 34 Rights-based collective behavior, 53 Rights consciousness, 56 Rights violations, 55 S Saturday Mothers, 30, 129 Saturday People, 129 Şıvan, Dr., 78 Social dominance orientation, 106 Social identity, 54 Social memory, 92 Solidarity, 19 State violence, 2 Sustainable peace, 30 Syrian civil war, 104 System Justifying Ideologies, 63–64

T Temporary protection, 104 Terrorism narrative, 9, 10 Toğrul, Beğlan Birand, 176 Transitional justice, 30 Tunç, Mustafa Şekip, 175 Turhan, Mümtaz, 175 Turkish allies, 13 Turkish-Kurdish conflict, 3, 8 ‘Turkish’ psychology, 169 Turkish Self, 176 Two Saits Incident, 79 V Victimhood, 29 Victimisation, 30 Victim status, 29

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