Producing Territory, Resisting the State: Embodiment, Discourse, and Symbolism in Street Demonstrations in Iranian Kurdistan

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the Iranian Kurds’ production of territory during two rounds of street demonstrations in October 2014 and September 2017. Findings from semi-structured interviews and qualitative online data indicate that Kurdish demonstrators produced imagined territory by employing embodied discourses and symbolic practices. Situating the demonstrations within the context of the Iranian state’s securitisation of the Kurdish space, the article shows that the demonstrators deployed such discourses and practices as co-constructed tactics of resistance to avoid violent confrontation with security forces. The state’s oppressive power and its securitisation of space, therefore, had the ironically productive effect of prompting demonstrators to articulate and produce imagined territory through embodied, discursive, and symbolic tactics. Expanding on research that has focused on the territorial struggles of minoritized populations, the article makes a broader point that marginalised yet persistent collective geopolitical imaginations – in this case, Kurdistan – simultaneously inspire and are reproduced by minoritized peoples’ alter-geopolitical resistance.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Ph.D. advisor Alec Murphy for his support and extensive feedback throughout the research and writing process. Thanks to Paul Adams, Jessie Clark, Shaul Cohen, Burke Hendrix, Laura Pulido, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. I am grateful to all the research participants for sharing their thoughts, knowledge, and time. Any shortcoming is solely mine.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is necessary to note that far from a monolith, Kurds in Iran (and elsewhere) are socially, culturally, and politically heterogeneous. Rather than stemming from a homogeneous ‘ethnicity’, Kurdish identity is primarily constructed by the Kurds’ lived resistance to systematic state oppression (Ahmadzadeh and Stansfield 2010; Culcasi 2006; Secor 2004; Vali 1998; van Bruinessen 1992). Therefore, I do not argue for a unitary, (quint)essential Kurdish subject position; nor do I (cl)aim for my research to be representative of the entire Kurdish population in Iran. Rather, I seek to draw on, situate, and analyse subjective experiences and marginalised imaginations of research participants (Culcasi 2016; Jackson 2001).

2. A full explanation of the causes is beyond the scope of this paper. However, Turkey’s proximity and geostrategic importance to Europe and Western involvement in the conflicts in Iraq – and more recently in Syria – partly explain the disproportionately higher attention towards the Kurds in those countries.

3. In the region, the terror group is commonly known as Daesh, drawn from its Arabic acronym. For consistency, I use Islamic State or IS throughout.

4. By securitisation, I refer to a range of practices and institutions, including the military and police, that seek to control the society, materially and discursively (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009).

5. Until 1935, Persia was the official name for Iran.

6. Like all political-territorial constructs, the Kurdistan Republic was the result of multiple geopolitical forces and processes. The state’s firm grip over Kurdistan meant that establishing meaningful Kurdish control was only possible after the de facto fall of the state’s authority, triggered by the war-time occupation of Iran by the Soviet and British forces.

7. Literally meaning ‘Four Lights’.

8. The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, is the ideological army of the Islamic Republic that operates parallel to Iran’s conventional army.

9. Since the Islamic Republic considers itself the rightful heir of the 1979 revolution, it labels the opposition as ‘anti-revolutionary’.

10. As the slogans are translated, they lose not only their rhythm and poetics, but also much of their rhetorical power and efficacy – although I have tried to compensate by providing sufficient context.

11. e.g., Bijî berxwedana YPG/YPJ, meaning ‘Long-live the resistance of YPG/YPJ’. The acronyms refer to the main Kurdish militia units in Rojava, Syria.

12. The annual Shi’a mourning ritual that commemorates the ‘martyrdom’ of Shi’a Imams. The Islamic Republic uses the commemoration to impose sadness on the society and prohibit expressions of happiness.