The “Life” of the State: Social Reproduction and Geopolitics in Turkey's Kurdish Question

Abstract

At the heart of geopolitical concerns today are questions about life: the sustainability of life, the quality of life, and the biological capacity and resilience of life. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than in the contemporary partnership between security and socioeconomic development and aid. In Kurdish southeast Turkey, increased governmental investment in gendered development highlights the role of household, neighborhood, and community production and reproduction in processes of securitization and nation building. These events suggest a deeply corporeal geopolitics at play in Turkey's Kurdish question, one that rests on the intimate relationship between social reproduction and geopolitics. This article draws on interview and participatory observation data in Diyarbakır, Turkey, to explain how specific practices and ideas around motherhood, marriage, and mobility and rights in the city create and challenge ethno-national identities. In doing so, I contend that the Kurdish question—and understandings of Turkishness and Kurdishness—are embodied, reified, and contested in the spatial constitutions of “life's work.”

今日地缘政治的核心考量，便是有关生命的质问：生命的可持续发展，生命的质量，以及生命的生物能力与恢復力。上述的问题，在安全与社会经济发展和援助之间的当代伙伴关係最显而易见。在土耳其东南部的库尔德族居住之处，政府对于性别化发展所增加的投资，凸显出安全化和国族建构过程中，家户、邻里与社区所扮演的角色。这些事件显示出，土耳其的库尔德族问题中上演着深刻的肉体地缘政治，并且以社会再生产和地缘政治之间的亲密关係为基础。本文运用在土耳其迪亚巴克尔所进行的访谈和参与式观察之数据，解释有关母职、婚姻与城市中的能动性及权力的特定实践与概念，如何创造并挑战族裔—国族认同。我藉由这麽做，主张库尔德族的问题——以及对于土耳其性和库尔德族性的理解——是在 “生命工程” 的空间构造中进行身体化、具体化，并受到竞逐的。

En el corazón de las preocupaciones geopolíticas actuales hay cuestiones relacionadas con vida: la sustentabilidad de la vida, la calidad de la vida y la capacidad biológica y resiliencia de la vida. En ninguna otra parte puede demostrarse esto que en la colaboración contemporánea entre seguridad y desarrollo socioeconómico y ayuda. En el sudeste kurdo de Turquía, la creciente inversión gubernamental en desarrollo de género sobresale el papel de la producción y reproducción familiar, vecinal y comunitaria en los procesos de titularización y construcción de nación. Estos eventos sugieren el juego de una geopolítica profundamente corpórea en el problema kurdo de Turquía, aquella que descansa en la íntima relación que existe entre la reproducción social y la geopolítica. Este artículo está fundamentado en datos de entrevistas y observación participativa en Diyarbakır, Turquía, para explicar cómo prácticas específicas e ideas sobre maternidad, matrimonio y movilidad y derechos en la ciudad crean y retan identidades étnico-nacionales. Haciendo esto, sostengo que el problema kurdo—y lo que se entienda por turquidad y kurdinidad—están personificados, reificados y disputados en las constituciones espaciales del “trabajo de la vida.”

Key words:

• development
• geopolitics
• Kurdish Turkey
• social reproduction
• women

关键词：:

• 发展，地缘政治，土耳其的库尔德族，社会再生产，女性。

Palabras clave:

• desarrollo
• geopolítica
• la Turquía kurda
• reproducción social
• mujeres

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the women and men, family, and friends in Amed who trusted me with their stories and my friend and collaborator, Saadet. This work is as much hers as mine. Thank you to Anne Ranek and Kate Berry, the editors, and anonymous reviewers for graciously giving their time to share insightful comments and suggestions. Thank you to Justin White for lending this article his cartographic skills. Finally, thank you to Victoria Randlett, Katie Meehan, and Sallie Marston, a few of the incredible feminist geographers who have served as mentors throughout the research and writing. All errors and omissions are mine alone.

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (DDRI-GSS 0926558) and the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon.

Notes

1 Interviewee names are often cited alongside an honorific that connotes age and professional status. These include teyze (aunt), abla (sister), hanım (Mrs.), and hoca (teacher).

2 As discussed in the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center report, estimates on total number of displaced persons vary. A Turkish government commissioned report cites between 953,680 and 1,201,200 (Hacettepe Üniversitesi Nüfus Etütleri Enstitüsü 2006), whereas Turkish and Kurdish NGOs cite a number as high as 4.5 million (Barut 2002).

3 I refer to the pro-Kurdish municipality as the Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi [BDP]) throughout this article, as this was the name of the party during the period of fieldwork. The BDP re-formed under a new party, the People's Democratic Party (Halk Demokrat Partisi [HDP]) in June 2014.

4 The limited participation of men in the development process is something noticed and critiqued by women, administrators, and teachers but as yet unaddressed significantly in the curriculum. To date, most of the literacy and family education programs are targeted toward women, echoing the same discourses and policy of early nation-building efforts.

5 On 29 May 2015, Turkey's Constitutional Court overturned a mandate that marriage unions must be civil, not religious, to be legally recognized. This decision, spearheaded by the ruling AKP, signifies the growing role of religion in family–state relations that is changing the nature, not degree, of geopolitical intervention in social reproductive practice.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessie Hanna Clark

JESSIE HANNA CLARK is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Nevada–Reno, Reno, NV 89557. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests are in areas of feminist and political geography. She examines how households and family practices are politicized toward state and nation builiding, particularly in the context of ethnonational conflict.