Kurdish Home-Making and the Politics of Space
Violence, Resistance, and Dwelling in Gever
In: Kurdish Studies JournalSearch for other papers by Omer Ozcan in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article examines how counterinsurgency functions as a mode of statecraft in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands by tracing the spatial, sensory, and affective disfiguration of domestic life in Gever (Yüksekova). Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and oral histories, it theorizes the home not as a private refuge, but as a politicized space where sovereignty is enacted through the disruption of care, kinship, and social continuity. Based on narratives shaped by repeated displacement and militarized siege, the article introduces “displacement without movement” to describe how the home is not only evacuated or destroyed, but incrementally undermined through surveillance, raids, and the everyday management of fear. Focusing on the Kurdish concept of mal, home as both material structure and social relation, it argues that domestic space is not collateral to violence, but central to the counterinsurgency logic of rule. In this context, acts of dwelling become forms of intimate resistance and endurance.
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Kurdish Home-Making and the Politics of Space
Violence, Resistance, and Dwelling in Gever
In: Kurdish Studies JournalSearch for other papers by Omer Ozcan in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This article examines how counterinsurgency functions as a mode of statecraft in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands by tracing the spatial, sensory, and affective disfiguration of domestic life in Gever (Yüksekova). Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and oral histories, it theorizes the home not as a private refuge, but as a politicized space where sovereignty is enacted through the disruption of care, kinship, and social continuity. Based on narratives shaped by repeated displacement and militarized siege, the article introduces “displacement without movement” to describe how the home is not only evacuated or destroyed, but incrementally undermined through surveillance, raids, and the everyday management of fear. Focusing on the Kurdish concept of mal, home as both material structure and social relation, it argues that domestic space is not collateral to violence, but central to the counterinsurgency logic of rule. In this context, acts of dwelling become forms of intimate resistance and endurance.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 237 | 237 | 14 |
| Full Text Views | 14 | 14 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 37 | 37 | 0 |
