States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey

The Ethnography of Political Violence

by Zerrin Ozlem Biner

The military conflict between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish Armed Forces has endured over the course of the past three decades. Since 1984, the conflict has claimed the lives of more than 45,000 civilians, militants, and soldiers, as well as causing thousands of casualties and disappearances. It has led to the displacement of millions of people and caused the forced evacuation of nearly 4,000 villages and towns. Suspended periodically by various cease-fires, the conflict has been a significant force in shaping many of the ethnic, social, and political enclaves of contemporary Turkey, where contradictory forms of governance have been installed across the Kurdish region.In States of Dispossession, Zerrin Özlem Biner traces the violence of the protracted conflict in the Kurdish region through the lens of dispossession. By definition, dispossession implies the act of depriving someone of land, property, and other belongings as well as the result of such deprivation. Within the fields of Ottoman and contemporary Turkish studies, social scientists to date have examined the dispossession of rights and property as a technique for governing territory and those citizens living at its margins. States of Dispossession instead highlights everyday experiences in an attempt to understand the persistent and intangible effects of dispossession. Biner examines the practices and discourses that emerge from local memories of unspoken, irresolvable histories and the ways people of differing religious and ethnic backgrounds live with the remains of violence that is still unfolding. She explores the implicit knowledge held by ordinary people about the landscape and the built environment and the continuous struggle to reclaim rights over dispossessed bodies and places.

264 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 8, 2019

Reviews

[Oktay Yagiz · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author, Biner, focuses on the violence of the protracted conflict in Southeast Turkey through the lens of dispossession, which she starts defining in the introduction of her book as "the act of depriving someone of land, property, and other belongings". Why land and property are separately mentioned is puzzling starting with, and what other belonging refers to is quite enigmatic until you find towards the end that it is, in fact, the cultural identity of the "dispossessed".

The book reads like a doctoral thesis of someone who is alien to the ethnographic realities of what she has written about. It is overloaded with references --about one in every third page and approximately one out of ten to herself-- to a curiously narrow range of resources that mostly seem to be as much alienated from the indigenous as the author is (p. 152 quoting Das and Poole, 2010 as "state used violence... to sell protection of access to its resources and from its possibility of violence.` Same page quoting Minow, 1998, "state uses reparative justice mechanism to engender debt-producing mechanisms that mortgage not only the past but also the present and future of Kurdish citizens.").

"Alien" is not an overstatement for someone who makes references to public posts non-existent as "provincial mayor" or "co-mayor" --obviously a blunder as mayors in any country serve urban entities only and not geographical areas defined as provinces.

Suffice to say, this is not the only example for someone who seems not to have lived and absorbed through personal experience the spatial and temporal realities of a region --which in fact need be studied in-depth and hopingly in impartiality.