The decade of war and violence culminating in the Conference of Lausanne was formative for the modern state of Turkey, as it was for interwar Europe's diplomacy and appeasement. Yet the currents that gave rise to the defining events of the period – ultranationalism, imperial proto-fascism, and pan-Islamism – have yet to be definitively integrated into historiography. The case studies in this book reappraise key events, concepts, and individuals in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey. Divided into four parts, the book first examines squandered opportunities for democratic reform of the multi-ethnic empire, as well as the emergence of extreme politico-religious ideology in the late Ottoman period. It then examines the continuity of these currents in Kemalist Turkey in case studies including anti-Kurdish campaigns and biographical studies of key actors, insiders, and ideologues such as Ziya Gökalp, Cavid Bey, Riza Nur, and Mahmut Bozkurt. The final part of the book explores the legacy of Turkey's violent formation vis-à-vis its relations with wartime ally Germany in the context particularly of the Armenian genocide. Together, the chapters in this book emphasise the legacy of foundational violence which marked the formation of authoritarian modern Turkey, while highlighting the need for new, inclusive democratic social contracts.

The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey examines political violence, the politics of fear and the Kurdish experience of pain through an analysis of life stories, personal narratives and testimonies of Kurdish subjects in contemporary Turkey. It traces the physical and psychological impacts of the war between the state security forces and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas in the last three decades, in Kurdish populated areas in the south-eastern part of Turkey. Focusing on the instrumentalization of violence, the ensuing and manufactured culture of fear, gendered experiences of state violence, pain, incarceration, and corporeal punishment, Ramazan Aras argues that these phenomena have shaped contemporary Kurdish history and memory. Analysing occurrences of various forms of protracted state violence and fear not only as personal and differential markers experienced by individuals, but also as communally-felt phenomena which have engendered collective suffering, this book asserts that these traumatic experiences have marked the social body and produced a prevailing narrative of Kurdishness. Providing an anthropological study of political violence, fear, and pain amongst the Kurdish community in Turkey, this book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Kurdish Studies, Middle East Studies and Anthropology.

The Kurdish conflict is an acknowledged long-standing issue in the Middle East, and the emergence of radical Kurdish nationalist movements in the 20th century played a decisive role in the evolution of political violence. Political Violence and Kurds in Turkey examines how this political violence impacts Kurds in contemporary Turkey, and explores the circumstances that move human beings to violent acts. It looks at the forms political violence takes and in which times and spaces it occurs, as well as the roles played by micro and macro factors. It takes a theoretical approach to violence, as both producer and product of interrelations between many actors, and contextualises this with studies of violence in Kurdish villages and towns. The book evaluates the three levels at which political violence operates; between the state and Kurdish movements, among Kurdish groups and between Kurdish political organizations and Kurdish society, and divides it into its different aspects and processes; fragmentation-segmentation (signifying intra-ethnic struggles between Kurdish actors), mobilization (the course leading the Kurdish movement to armed conflict), participation (the use of violence by individuals) and repertoires (the forms taken by political violence). Offering an in-depth analysis of the dynamics behind political violence and its use amongst Kurds in Turkey, this book will be a key resource for students and scholars of Middle Eastern, Kurdish Studies and Conflict Studies, and offers new understanding and approaches to the study of political violence.

Ethnic and religious identity-markers compete with class and gender as principles shaping the organization and classification of everyday life. But how are an individual's identity-based conflicts transformed and redefined? Identity is a specific form of social capital, hence contexts where multiple identities obtain necessarily come with a hierarchy, with differences, and hence with a certain degree of hostility. The contributors to this book examine the rapid transformation of identity hierarchies affecting Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, a symptom of political fractures, social-economic transformation, and new regimes of subjectification. They focus on the state's role in organizing access to resources, with its institutions often being the main target of demands, rather than competing social groups. Such con- texts enable entrepreneurs of collective action to exploit identity differences, which in turn help them to expand the scale of their mobilization and to align local and national conflicts. The authors also examine how identity-based violence may be autonomous in certain contexts, and serve to prime collective action and transform the relations between communities.

"Confronting the past" has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims. Regardless of how critical such appraisals may be, they tend to share a fundamental assumption: commemoration, as a symbol of democratization, is ontologically distinct from violence. The pitfalls of this assumption have been nowhere more evident than in Turkey whose mainstream image on the world stage has rapidly descended from a regional beacon of democracy to a hotbed of violence within the space of a few recent years. In Victims of Commemoration, Eray Çayli draws upon extensive fieldwork he conducted in the prelude to the mid-2010s when Turkey’s global image fell from grace. This ethnography—the first of its kind—explores both activist and official commemorations at sites of state-endorsed violence in Turkey that have become the subject of campaigns for memorial museums. Reversing the methodological trajectory of existing accounts, Çayli works from the politics of urban and architectural space to grasp ethnic, religious, and ideological marginalization. Victims of Commemoration reveals that, whether campaigns for memorial museums bear fruit or not, architecture helps communities concentrate their political work against systemic problems. Sites significant to Kurdish, Alevi, and revolutionary-leftist struggles for memory and justice prompt activists to file petitions and lawsuits, organize protests, and build new political communities. In doing so, activists not only uphold the legacy of victims but also reject the identity of a passive victimhood being imposed on them. They challenge not only the ways specific violent pasts and their victims are represented, but also the structural violence which underpins deep-seated approaches to nationhood, publicness and truth, and which itself is a source of victimhood. Victims of Commemoration complicates our tendency to presume that violence ends where commemoration begins and that architecture’s role in both is reducible to a question of symbolism.

In Police, Provocation, Politics, Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones. Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations.