Rethinking Kurdish geopolitical space: the politics of image, insecurity and gender

Abstract

Global publics and local actors are increasingly saturated with variegated still and moving images. The important role played by images in world politics, however, remains understudied in the International Relations (IR) discipline. This article argues that the Kurdish geopolitical space is increasingly tied to a new regional and global imagination, which emanates from verbal–visual meaning-making strategies such as narrative reconstructions and pictorial representations (for example illustrations, pictograms, or photographs). The article’s investigation illustrates how the construction of new Kurdish geopolitical imagination became increasingly regionalized and internationalized during the war against the so-called Islamic State (IS), particularly after the Kobane siege in Syria in late 2014. It shows how the war between the Syrian Kurdish forces and the IS involved gendered and aesthetic signification for the global and regional audiences. Such strategies of meaning-making served as vital venues for gendering and making the threat of the IS and its “distant war” proximate, familiar and urgent for otherwise disinterested western audiences. These verbal–visual strategies vitally acted as a transmission belt between individual, state and systemic levels, turning the struggle against the IS into a globalized cultural-symbolic war. The article employs critical visual semiotics and critical discourse analysis to investigate the regional and global politics of image and offers three empirical cases to illustrate its argument: the narratives of the Kobane siege; the cartoon depicting a “Kurdish homeland” and globally circulated Kurdish female fighter photographs.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu provided generous academic support during Tuncay Kardaş’s research in Tartu, Estonia. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

¹ The PYD’s new “governance” model does not mean the PYD has ceased to employ violence as a strategical tool to attain goals. Likewise, the rise of the PKK as a hegemonic nationalist terrorist organization is a result of a combination of recruitment and strategic use of violence as well as a successful politics of representation and global politics (Balcı 2013; 2017; Öğür 2014; 2015; Tezcür 2015).

² The IS has acted as a proto-state. It commanded hundreds of millions of dollars some of which were believed to be stolen currency and others from daily sales in the black-market oil revenues exceeding $3 million, it raised taxes, provided governmental services including security, its army was well equipped with light and heavy weapons such as fleets of tanks and armoured Humvees with ammunition supplies mostly looted from Iraqi and Syrian military bases after attacks (McCants 2015). It should be noted that such a disciplined organizational posture went hand in hand with brutality and bloodshed (Stern and Berger, 2015, 233–256). Observers who spent time with IS members at the heart of its strongholds provide grim details of the atrocities pointing to regular beheadings, enslavement, torture and child fighters. Vitally, it is often such atrocities rather than the IS’s strategic and organizational stance that attract global audience (for its strategic posture, see Kadercan, 2017). For a recent journalistic account see Todenhoefer’s notes, <http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/22/world/meast/inside-IS-juergen-todenhoefer/>, accessed 15 September 2015.

³ Yezidis are a Kurdish speaking community with a worldwide population of 620,000 having distinct roots and culture linked to but independent of Mesopotamian religions, living primarily in northern Iraq in Sheikhan, Sinjar, Behzane and Duhok (Açıkyıldız 2014, 33–34). For a recent, insightful fieldwork that dissects the origins and differences of the Yezidi culture in Iraqi Kurdistan and beyond, see Açıkyıldız (2014).

⁴ See the full joint statement issued by partners at the counter-IS Ministerial Meeting, <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2014/12/234627.htm>, accessed 8 September 2015.

⁵ The Turkish state’s decision to take active part in the “Global Coalition to Counter the IS” and its later efforts to carve up a “Free Zone” in northern Syria can be seen as an attempt by Turkey to deny the PYD a continuous geostrategic zone in northern Syria. The USA meanwhile has grown particularly concerned with the implications for the Syrian Kurds of its cooperation with Turkey, reiterating its support for the PYD in the fight against the IS to such a degree that the former State Department spokesman Mark Toner once had to declare that ‘the US would not allow Turkey to attack PYD forces’ (Rudaw, 11 August 2015).

⁶ In social theory the meaning and production of space was long taken as a side-issue or a by-product of time; social relations of power were mainly understood in temporal terms, which tended to reify actors’ given identities and interests (Soja 1989; Lefebvre 1991). Kurdish studies suffer similar shortcomings as spatial analyses are still scarce mainly because of sequential explanations of Kurdish struggle in different nations-states from origins to present (Gambetti and Jongerden 2011, 375; Ünver 2016). Studying Kurdish spatial relations is not simply about geographical or aesthetic signification either. It has a security logic of its own (Kardaş and Balcı 2016), that is, “life and death struggles” relating to “destruction and neglect of the other’s heritage” (Gambetti and Jongerden 2011, 376; Öktem 2004). The foci of the present study are on the spatial and security signs in power relations in order to understand how people experience places and transform them by giving new meanings to certain spaces such as “homeland”.

⁷ As such, meaning-construction is undoubtedly related to vicissitudes of power, which cannot be reduced to a set of liberal or orthodox Marxist conceptions such as “rational decision making” or “false consciousness”, respectively. Popular print/visual media platforms or cultural artefacts do not simply serve instrumental or aesthetic consumption, but perform political tasks. As Hale (1998, 8) concurs ‘a picture, a representation, could convey contradictions and evoke oppositions like white racial supremacy, white racial innocence, and white racial dependency more easily and persuasively than a carefully plotted story’.

⁸ As Campbell argues (2007, 358) ‘Visual imagery is of particular importance for geopolitics because it is one of the principal ways in which news from distant places is brought home, constructing the notion of “home” in this process …. Much like cartography, these images contributed to the development of an ‘‘imagined geography’’ in which the dichotomies of West/East, civilized/barbaric, North/South and developed/underdeveloped have been prominent.’ Hence, it is helpful to understand visual images as ‘pedagogical tools’ since they ‘communicate to the viewer, in the language of photography or painting or illustration or commemoration, the qualities, the pleasures or pain, the duties, the kind of past, present, and/or future that is or that is desired’ (Hale 1998, 8). It is through visual representations of the ‘other’ that the viewer more often ‘engages feelings, attitudes and emotions and it mobilizes fears and anxieties in the viewer, at deeper levels than we can explain in a simple, common-sense way’ (Hall 1997, 226).

⁹ Since ‘most political and military threats travel more easily over short distances than over long ones, [and thus] insecurity is often associated with proximity’ (Buzan et al. 1998, 11).

¹⁰ The Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned the BBC for its “visual propaganda”. For the full statement, see its Press Release Regarding the Overt Support of a BBC Broadcast to Terrorism: <http://www.mfa.gov.tr/no_-235_-21-august-2015_-press-release-regarding-the-overt-support-of-a-bbc-broadcast-to-terrorism.en.mfa>, accessed 28 September 2015. See also the said BBC’s coverage of PKK fighters (BBC, 20 August 2015).

¹¹ This is not to downplay long-standing differences, divisions and political bickering between Kurdish regional forces and regional states due to the ideological and political differences, as evinced in crashing the KRG rule by Iran and its allies/proxies to punish the KDP’s decision to carry out the independence referendum in northern Iraq. It is, rather, to stress how the Kobane defence and war against the IS became a symbol, a new marker of Kurdish nationalism and an external/international factor impacting and pushing the military-political positions of the regional Kurdish forces as well as the global coalition. It both enabled and limited the exigencies and interests in the context of regional and international factors such as the “Global Coalition to Counter IS”. For instance, the USA has been actively involved asking the PYD and the KRG to work together, at least when pushing for a common front against the IS. In one of such efforts, the US Deputy Special Presidential Envoy for the “Global Coalition to Counter IS” Brett McGurk brought together Barzani and PYD leader Muslim in joint meetings in Erbil to settle differences and cooperate, see <http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/150920151> (Rudaw, 16 September, 2015).

¹² The interviews were conducted with the political elites and leading figures from different political parties in Erbil, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq between 25 and 31 December 2014.

¹³ Interview with Deputy Secretary General of PUK Mulla Bakhtiar, September 2015.

¹⁴ While some aspects of Kurdish politics are decidedly secular-Marxist, importantly there are also Kurdish Islamist movements working within the same geopolitical space as leftists and nationalists (Gunter and Yavuz 2007; Tolunay 2014). For an insightful historical-discursive genesis of the Kurdish problem in Turkey, see Yeğen (1996; 1999).

¹⁵ It should be noted that the Kobane is not the only experience where the PKK-PYD experienced secularism in its ideology and redefined its world vision. Nor is it the place it discovered “secularism” as a merit following the IS offensive. In other words, secularism is not simply a lip service or a simple political manoeuvre. It also reflects an historical backdrop that needs to be couched in ideological and political processes and changes (Somer and Liaras 2010; Akkaya and Jongerden 2011, 157).

¹⁶ ‘Female PKK fighters greet male counterparts before attending a meeting at the operations base on Iraq’s Sinjar Mountain’. Photo credit: Erin Trieb for the Wall Street Journal. Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-marxist-allies-against-isis-1437747949 accessed 25 October 2017.