No Justice for Kurds: Turkish Supremacy and Kurdophobia

Kurt, Mehmet

doi:10.1353/sor.2021.0052

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…As anthropologist Stanley Thangaraj (2022) has demonstrated, the practice of ethnolinguistic othering in the Middle East has given birth to a form of “racialization” similar to what African Americans and Indigenous communities have historically experienced under colonial rule. Fatma Göçek (2015), Barış Ünlü (2016), Mahsuq Kurt (2021), and Mohammed Salih (2021) have also examined how the interplay of nationhood, language, and ethnicity in Turkey has generated an internal cultural imperialism centered on Turkish supremacy and the othering of non‐Turks.…”

Section: Kurds Statelessness and The Impossible Citizenrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Blood for bread: Necro‐labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat

Mohammadpour

2023

American Anthropologist

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As members of a stateless nation that is geopolitically divided across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, Kurds are known mainly in the West as excellent fighters and political revolutionaries. Amid the devastation of war and political unrest, most Kurds struggle for economic survival. This is especially true for Eastern Kurds living under Iranian rule. They have seen their lands confiscated, their resources plundered, and their access to capital and educational mobility severely restricted. Moreover, under the rule of the Iranian Persian‐Shi'i necropolitics, Kurds have been culturally and economically subjected to a regime of internal colonialism that has eroded their capacity for economic survival. Building on the literature on sovereignty and violence, this article investigates the nexus between precarity, spatiality, and necropolitics as embodied in the practice of Kurdish cross‐border labor, or kolberi. I argue that the Iranian state deploys the discourse of a securitized borderland as a weapon to inflict a permanent state of exception on Rojhelat, condemning Kurds to the status of living dead through the imposition of precarious necro‐labor practice. Furthermore, this study articulates the border as an archive where registers of state necropolitics are deposited, preserved, and revealed in the lives of kolbers.

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Section: Kurds Statelessness and The Impossible Citizenrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Blood for bread: Necro‐labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat

Mohammadpour

2023

American Anthropologist

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“…In my attempt to critique the ethnic supremacist character of Iranian-Persian feminism 8 (see Kurt, 2021), I focus on the Kurdish case and Kurdish women’s critiques of mainstream Iranian feminism, 9 with the acknowledgment that further research and multiple articles would be required to account for all non-Persian-speaking marginalized communities in Iran.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 8. Kurt (2021), a Kurdish scholar from Bakur, has also employed the concept of white supremacy in the context of the Middle East to characterize the Turkish state’s ‘singularization of systemic racism’ and its ethnolinguistic policies against Kurds in Turkey Kurdistan (Bakur), which he argues has generated a sense of ‘Kurdphobia towards the Kurdish people’. Similarly, Ünlü’s (2016) work on the ‘Turkishness contract’ provides another example in the Turkish context, illustrating the implicit agreement between the state and the sovereign community (Turks) to prioritize national unity over individual rights and the undisputable privileged position of the dominant ethnic group over the non-Turkish communities such as Kurds. …”

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confidence: 99%

Decolonizing Voices From Rojhelat: Gender-Othering, Ethnic Erasure, and the Politics of Intersectionality in Iran

Mohammadpour

2023

Critical Sociology

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The state murder of Jîna Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in Tehran on 16 September 2022, while in custody of the Islamic Republic’s morality police, prompted a widespread uprising across Iran unprecedented in scale since the popular 1979 revolution. Adopting the Kurdish catchphrase ‘Jin, Jîyan, Azadî’ (Woman, Life, Freedom), this movement was largely centered in Kurdistan (known as Rojhelat) and Balochistan, two ethnically minoritized and economically de-developed regions, where the state deployed deadly violence and brutality to crush the protests. This article juxtaposes two competing narratives of this uprising. The first insists on branding the movement as a singular ‘national’ uprising of ‘Iranian women’. The second recognizes a plurality of women, particularly those from marginalized nations, such as Kurdish and Balochi women, and underlines the structural national, ethnoreligious, and linguistic oppression elided in the narrative of undifferentiated Iranian womanhood. Drawing on the notion of intersectionality, I argue that the elite nationalist discourse of Iranian womanhood reproduces the state’s ethnoreligious and linguistic suppression of non-Persian-speaking marginalized communities. Moreover, such a selective reading of gender inequality in Iran is unable and/or unwilling to embrace the intersectionality and multiplicity of women’s life experiences in Iran, particularly in its ethnic peripheries. This article offers a critical reassessment of Iranian feminism and its methodology of privilege, proposing instead a decolonized approach that invites nationalist Persian/Iranian activists to interrogate Persianness as a marker of official national identity and institutionalized supremacy.

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Allah, Bread, Freedom: Turkey’s Muslim others and transnational mosques in Europe

Kurt

2023

Cont Islam

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Scholarship on political Islam has often addressed settings where Islamist movements and political parties operate as anti-colonial and oppositional entities. On the other hand, this article focuses on a less explored aspect of Islamist governmentalities in a case when Islamism becomes a part of the governing canon and rules over its Muslim others. I investigate situations where Islamist politics incorporates neo-imperial, nationalist, and colonial practices in creating a desired Muslim ummah at home and abroad. I explore marginalized critical discourses and praxes within this imagined Muslim ummah in Turkey and examine its transnational reverberations among the Kurdish and Turkish communities and mosques in Europe. In other words, I examine the dialectical relation between the formation of the Turkish Islamist canon and its non-Western critiques that comes from within and the margins through protests and critiques of Anti-capitalist Muslims in Turkey; examples of Civil Friday prayers (Sivil Cuma namazları) of the Kurdish imams; and the reconfiguration of Kurdish mosques of liberation in Europe. In doing so, I present how religious practices and discourses are instrumentalized for Islamist colonial governmentalities on the one hand but also serve as a decolonial critique to deconstruct contemporary Muslimness and open room for a plurality of Muslim perspectives excluded from the overly militarized and nationalist rhetoric espoused in Turkish Islamist discourses and practices.

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No Justice for Kurds: Turkish Supremacy and Kurdophobia

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

Blood for bread: Necro‐labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat

Blood for bread: Necro‐labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat

Decolonizing Voices From Rojhelat: Gender-Othering, Ethnic Erasure, and the Politics of Intersectionality in Iran

Allah, Bread, Freedom: Turkey’s Muslim others and transnational mosques in Europe

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