Commentaries

Promoting Terror by the Turkish State
The Case of the Turkistan Islamic Party

|Seevan Saeed, Shaanxi Normal University

|Executive Summary:

When it comes to the issue of terror and terrorism, the Turkish State very comfortably labels whoever is not in line with Turkey’s interest and strategy. Moreover, almost all Western states are outspokenly suggesting that they do understand Turkish concern about its national security and its struggle for counter terrorism actions. However, the other side of the coin is very rarely looked at. This article argues that the Turkish State is promoting terror through supporting the Islamist fundamentalist organisations inside and outside Turkey. The aid and support of the Turkistan Islamic party is one of the cases that Turkey has its hand in it.

https://journals.tplondon.com/com/article/view/2795

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Some Implications of Sweden and Finland Joining NATO

|Michael Gunter, Tennessee University, US

|Executive Summary:

Sweden and Finland’s decision to abandon their longtime, famous neutrality and apply for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) indicates that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has disastrously backfired. These two new NATO members will bring tangible geostrategic benefits to the alliance, not just a token weight. NATO has suddenly gained a new and greater strength and legitimacy. As for the Kurds, they need to understand that NATO’s deal with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to approve Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership in return for their cracking down on supposed Kurdish terrorists sheltering within their borders is not as hostile to Kurdish interests as they claim. Sweden and Finland are not likely to extradite Kurds accused of political crimes to Turkey. The Kurds should comprehend their very secondary position in the existential power struggle involving NATO and Russia and not overreact against it. As explained below, this deal with Turkey, like earlier ones, is not likely to be as inimical to Kurdish interests as first meets the eye the eye.

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Turkish Racism Against Kurds: Colonial Violence, Racist Slurs and Mob Attacks

|Güllistan Yarkın, Independent Researcher, Istanbul

|Executive Summary:

This commentary focuses on how the Turkish state facilitates military urbanism as revanchist and racialized mechanisms of collective punishment to suppress grassroots mobilization, oppositional politics, This commentary focuses on how the Turkish state facilitates military urbanism as revanchist and racialized mechanisms of collective punishment to suppress grassroots mobilization, oppositional politics, Throughout the 20th century, the modern Turkish state has dealt with ethnically, socially, historically, and religiously defined groups living in the remaining Ottoman territory with different forms of integration and authoritarianism. It built a racialized social regime based on Turkish supremacy, and the state has ruled northern Kurdistan as a colony. This article focuses on Turkish racist slurs and racist mob attacks targeting Kurds in Turkish cities and analyzes them in relation to Turkish colonial domination in northern Kurdistan. It argues that the Turkish army has an important place in making the racialized social regime and producing and disseminating the racialized ideas, slurs and practices targeting Kurds. The article also identifies the year 2005 as a milestone in the history of Turkish-Kurdish relations and Turkish racism. In that year, following the flag-provocation event in Mersin, which was carried out by the Turkish deep-state forces, ‘respect the flag’ demonstrations were organized throughout Turkey. These demonstrations mobilized thousands of Turks around anti-Kurdish sentiments, and since then, the number of racist mob attacks against Kurds in Turkey has increased significantly.

https://journals.tplondon.com/com/article/view/2218#.YsQ8ci0ElCl.twitter

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Turkey’s Military Urbanism and Neocolonial Architecture in Kurdish Cities

|by Diren Taş, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich – Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology

|Executive Summary:

This commentary focuses on how the Turkish state facilitates military urbanism as revanchist and racialized mechanisms of collective punishment to suppress grassroots mobilization, oppositional politics, This commentary focuses on how the Turkish state facilitates military urbanism as revanchist and racialized mechanisms of collective punishment to suppress grassroots mobilization, oppositional politics, and resistance in Kurdish cities. Based on an ethnographic case study in Sur, Diyarbakır, it shows how neocolonial urban policies are employed to annihilate, displace, and dispossess localities while replacing them with standardized, bordered, and financialized architectures of state security and control. Mass scale destructions, militarized policies, and coercive restructuring in Kurdish cities reveal the state’s emergent spatial strategy to recolonize the region at the urban level. The state dominates, frames, and reconfigures Kurdish urbanities so as to eliminate alternatives, opposition, and challenges to its existing and deepening hegemony.

https://journals.tplondon.com/com/article/view/2100

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Environmental Racism and Resistance in Kurdistan

|by Pınar Dinç, Lund University

|Executive Summary:

Delisting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) as a terrorist organization would be a bold, imaginative move by Turkey, the European Union (EU), and the United States (US), among others, that might contribute to Environmental degradation is identified as a key factor that threatens the future of life on Earth, but such generalised reading entails that conceal the uneven effects of environmental degradation. When environmental degradation takes place on the lands of the marginalised groups, it is often overlooked or further justified by hegemonic powers that view these areas as natural resources or hideouts for insurgent groups that need to be drained. The embedded prejudice and discrimination against the internal others are often inflamed through the media and followed by the dominant society. This commentary addresses this issue of differential significance attributed to environmental degradation in Kurdistan and discusses how the concept of ecological racism may help uncovering this variance. In doing so, this piece covers the existing literature about conflict and environment nexus in Kurdistan, and suggests ways forward to advance knowledge and work towards political and ecological justice.

https://journals.tplondon.com/com/article/view/2189

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