Emergent Conversation 24

This essay is part of the series Kurdistan(s): Repression, Resistance, and the Fight for Survival,
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 24

By Özlem Göner

This paper takes on a gap in the imaginary of the SWANA region: Kurdistan, ancestral lands of Kurdish and other indigenous populations, erased from the maps of the region following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century.^[1] While Kurdish autonomy had already been undermined by the centralizing efforts of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, it was ultimately abolished through the colonial partitioning of the region into modern nation-states. During this process, France and Britain denied Kurdish autonomy, divided Kurdistan into four parts, and “minoritized” Kurds across four different states. This erasure, and the colonial violence it entailed, involved both regional and global powers.

To this day, much of Kurdish and SWANA studies continues to label Kurds as “minorities,” reinforcing the colonial partition and erasure of Kurdistan. While “security” and “conflict” studies explicitly criminalize anti-colonial resistance, even more progressive scholarship has often concealed the colonial reality and the foundational violence embedded in that reality (Goner 2023). The rejection of colonial frameworks often stems from exceptionalizing Kurdistan—overstating its uniqueness while overlooking its ties to broader colonial histories. Although Kurdistan has distinct features, such as its interstate fragmentation and the involvement of multiple colonial powers, even common traits like population diversity are sometimes misused to argue it doesn’t fit the category of a colony (Yadirgi 2017). Others reject colonial frameworks for allegedly overlooking the agency and internal hierarchies of colonized societies (Táíwò 2022; Seikaly 2016). Although I share some of these critiques, I argue they target a narrow and simplistic view of colonization–decolonization frameworks.

In reality colonialism has always taken diverse forms and sparked varied anti-colonial responses—from art and literature to armed resistance. Colonizer states have employed multiple strategies, including co-opting local elites, using them as intermediaries, and negotiating power with them. Recognizing this complexity means acknowledging both the multiplicity of colonial relations and the class, gender, religious, and sectarian hierarchies within colonized societies that were often instrumentalized, reshaped, or transformed through colonization.

Robert Young highlights the diverse and often contradictory ideologies and administrative systems that shaped colonial governance (Young 2016, 17). Even a single colonial power like Britain employed varied ideologies and administrative systems in Nigeria, India, and Ireland. While this diversity of systems cautions against homogenizing colonial experiences, identifying their connections remains essential to avoid replicating colonialism’s own “divide and rule” strategy (Young 2016, 18). The twin pitfalls of homogenizing colonialism and exceptionalizing individual cases can be avoided through a dialectic of particularity and universality. Recognizing each case’s uniqueness reveals specific colonial strategies, while acknowledging shared structures of oppression allows for relational, collective theories and practices of decolonization that resist divide-and-rule tactics.

Colonization of Kurdistan

My aim is to revisit, reconnect, and reframe the colonization of Kurdistan by exploring both its unique and universal dimensions. Notably, early organic scholars of Kurdistan voiced its colonial realities, even if they did not always use the term explicitly (Aydınkaya 2024). In the 1960s, Kurdish intellectuals across various regions of Kurdistan, alongside burgeoning internationalist organizations in the diaspora, authored influential essays addressing the colonization of Northern Kurdistan (Çelik 2020). These writings highlighted critical issues such as political erasure, violence, resource exploitation, and anti-colonial resistance. Under Abdullah Öcalan’s leadership, the PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers’ Party) advanced a Marxist-Leninist anti-colonial view, highlighting the collusion of Kurdistan’s four colonizer states with imperialist powers (Jongerden and Akkaya 2011). Throughout the 1980s, PKK intellectuals employed the concept in various ways, as exemplified by Sakine Cansiz’s denunciations of the illegitimacy of Turkish colonial courts (Cansız 2014).

Kurdistan’s colonization involved denying autonomy over its ancestral lands and erasing its peoples’ political identity, beginning with Ottoman and Safavid centralization and culminating in the early twentieth-century colonial restructuring of the SWANA region. Assaults on Kurdish autonomy occurred in tandem with the annihilation of other indigenous populations, notably Armenians and Syriac Christians, with many Kurds participating in and benefiting from their erasure—a process that culminated in the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Although subsequent massacres and genocides failed to eliminate Kurds as a people from their homeland, the systematic dismantling of Kurdish political autonomy and the erasure of a territorial entity named Kurdistan closely mirrored the fate of Armenians in the region.

Across the four states dividing Kurdistan, control over land, resources, people, and environment was centralized by governments that saw Kurdistan both as a political and cultural threat to be erased through colonial violence, demographic settlement, and forced assimilation, and as a resource to be exploited—resulting in resource extraction and “de-development (Yadirgi 2017; Soleimani and Mohammadpour 2020).” I will explore these characteristics of Kurdistan’s colonization through three questions:

• • When, how, and by whom was Kurdistan colonized?
  • Where does Kurdistan fit within the classical typology of settler versus extractive colonialism?
  • How has this unique colonial experience—marked by violence, displacement, and extraction—shaped the racialization and exploitation of the Kurdish working class?

When, How, and By Whom?

Until recently, Kurdistan’s colonization was traced mainly to the early twentieth-century nation-state system. However, recent scholarship shows it began earlier, with violent assaults on Kurdish autonomy—including massacres and exiles of notable families during Ottoman and Safavid centralization efforts (Özok-Gündoğan 2022; Yadirgi 2017; Ates 2021; Atmaca 2021; Klein 2011; Jongerden and Verheij 2012; Özoğlu 2004). Interconnected colonial violence against Kurdistan—from massacres and exile of autonomous nobility to resource extraction causing economic decline and environmental degredation—are traceable to imperial practices (Yadirgi 2017; Özok-Gündoğan 2024).

As Özok-Gündoğan (2024) argues, Ottoman colonialism should not be viewed merely as “defensive” or “borrowed” in relation to Western and capitalist processes and discourses (670). However, a deeper understanding of the colonization of Kurdistan cannot focus only on regional actors, or those in positions of direct colonization either. Rather, one must pay attention to the intersections of Western capitalist discourses and systems of governance with the distinct strategies and economic motivations of regional actors.

With the emergence of new nation-states in the early twentieth century, the colonization of Kurdistan assumed a distinct form marked by the complete erasure of Kurdish political sovereignty and the partitioning of Kurdish geography across multiple nation-states. This divided and stateless condition—what Beşikçi (2013) terms an “international” or “inter-state colony”—seeks to erase the very imaginary of Kurdistan. As Hamit Bozarslan (2018) explains, the absence of political status also produced an inter-state security regime, transforming Kurdistan into a space governed by a “permanent regime of exception”  (13). During this period, both regional and global actors played active roles in the colonization of Kurdistan. From the denial of autonomy and the supply of military equipment for genocidal campaigns, to the exploitation of Kurdish resources by international and multinational corporations, to criminalization of the Kurdish movements, European colonial powers, followed by the United States, have been deeply complicit (Dirik 2021, Yonucu and Schamberger in this series). Thus, analyses that either attribute colonization solely to regional actors or dismiss it due to the involvement of non-Western powers overlook the multilayered nature of Kurdistan’s colonization.

Typology of Colonial Governance over Kurdistan: Settlement vs. Exploitation Colonies

Colonialism is most commonly typologized as either settler or extractive. Settler colonialism involves large-scale settlement, as seen in British North America, Australia, French Algeria, and Palestine, while extractive colonialism centers on resource exploitation without significant settlement, as in British India, the American Philippines, or the Dutch East Indies. Drawing on this framework, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan (2024) characterizes Ottoman Kurdistan as an instance of extractive colonialism. While this categorization is useful, it is also necessary to interrogate potential settlement ambitions of colonizing states and examine the relationships between these ambitions and realities and layered forms of extraction.

Demographic engineering in Kurdistan dates back to the Ottoman dismantling of Kurdish autonomy. Yadirgi (2017) highlights the use of systematic exile, alongside massacres, in the destruction of Kurdish emirates in the early 19th century. These policies intensified after the Armenian Genocide, when between 700,000 and over a million Kurds were deported to Anatolia and Thrace, with many dying en route (Jwaideh 2009; Üngör 2011; Yadirgi 2017). Although large-scale settlement of other Muslim populations in Kurdistan remained limited in the following decades, such aspirations have persisted and continue today. From the 1934 Settlement Act, which incentivized the settlement of Muslims from other regions in Kurdish areas to “Turkify” the region, to the forced relocation of Dersim Genocide survivors (1938–39) and the displacement of one to two million Kurds in the 1990s, Turkey has used settlement laws to uproot Kurds and dismantle the social and political fabric of Northern Kurdistan (Jongerden 2017).

Similarly, Syrian and Iraqi Arabization policies established Arab “belts” in Western and Southern Kurdistan. Between the late 1950s and 1963, Syria settled primarily landless Arab peasants, including migrants from Egypt, in the Derik and Hasakah regions of Western Kurdistan (Rojava) (Roberts 2014, Tejel 2011, Altuğ 2013). The Iraqi state also employed demographic engineering, culminating in the Anfal Campaign of 1986–88 (McDowall 2013). Successive Iranian states—from the Safavid era to the Islamic Republic—employed demographic engineering strategies, such as “dilution” and “fragmentation,” to disrupt Kurdish geographic continuity and undermine autonomy claims (Hassaniyan 2019; Mohammadpour and Soleimani 2021).

Settlement ambitions persist to this day, as seen in Afrin, Western Kurdistan, where Turkey ethnically cleansed the Kurdish majority and resettled populations and militias aligned with its interests, effectively acting as a surrogate settler colonial power since 2018.^[2] Targeted settlement against key groups and families critical to Kurdistan’s social and political fabric has had lasting effects. While Kurdistan’s colonization cannot be classified as settler colonialism—since it remains predominantly Kurdish—continued attention to demographic engineering and socio-political erasure is essential to understanding the links between genocidal violence and economic exploitation.

I will further explore these linkages by focusing initially on extractive colonization. As Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) explains, colonial logic “sees territories as commodities,” resulting in profound destruction of social ecologies and indigenous social ties (5). From movement intellectuals like Kemal Burkay, Abdullah Öcalan, and Sakine Cansız to contemporary scholars, the control of Kurdistan’s land and mineral resources by colonizing states has been a central focus. Veli Yadırgı (2017), for example, highlights how the Turkish state’s exploitation of Northern Kurdistan’s energy and mineral sectors has led to regional “de-development”, with profits largely retained by the state and private interests outside the region (208; see also Çaylı, this series).

Yadirgi (2017) also highlights how Northern Kurdistan’s water resources, including the GAP project—which generates nearly half of Turkey’s hydroelectric power—and the extraction of chrome, copper, and petroleum primarily benefit the Turkish state and private companies (208, 209, 255). While Yadirgi avoids using the term colonialism, Özok-Gündoğan (2024) explicitly frames Ottoman mineral extraction from Keban and Ergani mines as extractive colonialism. She emphasizes the critical links between “economic exploitation, environmental degradation, increased state control, and the suppression of local autonomy” (667). Moreover, energy extraction, especially through dam construction and mining often displaces indigenous communities, dispossesses them of ancestral lands, and erases historical sites, memories, and connections to land and ecology (Goner and Rebello 2017; Çaylı 2021).

Analyzing Kurdistan through the lens of extractive colonialism offers valuable insights, and future research linking political autonomy, exploitation, and environmental degradation would deepen this analysis. I propose two additional layers: First, the interplay between genocide, displacement, and extraction blurs the lines between settler and extractive colonialism, as well as between political and economic forms of domination. In the following I will highlight cases where displacement is tightly linked to resource control. Second, given that transnational and multinational corporations have benefited from the production and consumption of these resources, extractive colonialism over Kurdistan is also shaped by global racial capitalism and imperialism, extending beyond the actions of regional colonizing states.

Much of Syria’s oil wealth is concentrated in Western Kurdistan, particularly Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor, which helps explain Arab belt policies aimed at settling non-Kurds in these areas. Similarly, Saddam Hussein displaced Kurds from Kirkuk between the 1970s and 1990s and incentivized Arab settlement to maintain control over its oil resources (Anderson and Stansfield 2009; Jasim, this series). While Arabization policies sought to undermine Kurdish autonomy, colonizer states continued profiting from resource extraction. In Syria, for example, state control over agriculture, treating Western Kurdistan as a “wheat basket,” had lasting economic and environmental impacts (Türk and Jongerden 2024, 1742–43). Colonizer states’ control over river flows continues to affect agriculture, access to clean water, and public health. In a striking example of economic and environmental colonial violence, Turkey cut off rivers from Northern to Western Kurdistan, triggering a cholera outbreak in Western Kurdistan during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A key aspect of Kurdish colonization is the intersection of genocidal violence and resource extraction, where land is both destroyed and exploited. In Northern Kurdistan, state violence—including the burning of hundreds of villages and forced displacements—led to widespread loss of agriculture, property, and livestock, fueling colonial de-development (McDowall 2013, 440; Yadirgi 2017, 249). Unlike underdevelopment, which explains the core’s advancement through peripheral stagnation, de-development emphasizes the active, destructive violence of colonialism where exploitation is accompanied by deliberate devastation. Displaced villagers from Dersim, for example, often recounted Turkish soldiers burning not only homes, but crops and livestock, inflicting economic loss and deep psychological trauma, as people were deeply connected to their non-human animals (Goner 2017, 155-6). Finally, forced displacement not only severs Kurds’ ties to land, memory, and culture, but also funnels them into urban capitals of the colonizer state, where they become a super-exploited labor force under capitalism, as I will explore briefly below.

Colonization, Class, and De-colonization

In her analysis of Mandate-era Palestine, Nahla Abdo (1992) reveals how Zionist settler colonialism combined the extermination of the colonized with their exploitation as cheap, precarious labor. Mass killings and ongoing incarceration to suppress anti-colonial movements sustain both the de-development of colonized lands, and what Claudia Jones (1995) in the context of Black women’s work in Harlem observed, the “super-exploitation” of colonized labor (109).

Recent research highlights the super-exploitation of precarious Kurdish labor, exposing how colonization drives racialized exploitation of displaced and migrant Kurdish workers in colonizer-state metropolises or in seasonal agriculture (Gunay 2017; Duruiz 2023; Yarkın 2023). A key source of Kurdish labor precarity is the criminalization of formerly internal, locally rooted economic activities as “smuggling” due to imposed border divisions (Yegen 2016). Shaped by imposed borders on the Kurdish geography, extractive colonialism, and de-development, the border regime has produced the precarious cross-border labor of kolberi in Eastern Kurdistan—workers who carry goods on their backs and often die from Iranian armed forces’ gunfire, landmines planted by the state, or harsh environmental conditions such as freezing temperatures or falls from cliffs (Soleimani and Mohammadpour 2020, 742). For the further marginalized kolberi women, this colonial “apparatus of death,” is silenced by the “patriarchal regime of truth” (Mohammadpour and Javaheri 2025, 843, 846). The Roboskî Massacre, in which Turkish forces killed 38 mostly teenaged villagers for smuggling basic goods, reveals how colonizer states impose a “death economy” on Kurdish workers at Kurdistan’s colonial borders (Kele 2023).

Many other questions remain about colonialism and class in Kurdistan—such as shifting class structures before and after colonization, how colonialism reshaped land ownership, the co-optation of landowners, and the class dynamics of anti-colonial and national movements. I also left out key forms of colonial violence, including the criminalization of resistance, incarceration, forced assimilation, and psychological colonization, which I previously addressed as defining features of Kurdistan’s colonization (Goner 2023).

Finally, important questions remain about internal hierarchies within Kurdistan and the broader colonial and imperial forces that shape its governance and imagination. How is colonialism experienced differently and intersectionally by various social classes and marginalized groups—such as women, LGBTQ+, Alevi, and Yezidi Kurds—who face layered forms of oppression? This essay aims to provide a basic framework for understanding Kurdistan’s colonization, as a starting point for decolonizing both knowledge production and material conditions. Reviving the memory of a land targeted for erasure is not about returning to the past, but imagining a future rooted in freedom—one that honors the indigeneity of other communities, Armenian and Syriac claims to the land, and confronts multiple layers of coloniality beyond state violence. I hope this encourages scholars and organizers to engage with the complexities of colonization and its intersections with other hierarchies, and to contribute to unapologetic, abolitionist visions of decolonization for Kurdistan, the broader SWANA region, and beyond.

Ozlem Goner is an associate professor at the City University of New York. Her research interests lay in the intersection of racial capitalism and social movements, with attention to anti-colonial and inter-sectional movements of the oppressed. Her book, Turkish National Identity and its Outsiders: Memories of State Violence in Dersim, was published in 2017 by Routledge. She has written academic and popular journal articles on the themes of state violence, memory and identity, social movements, gender and intersectionality, and anti-colonial self-determination.

Notes

[1] SWANA refers to the region of Southwest Asia and North Africa and is used in decolonial literature in place of the colonially imposed geographic designation “Middle East.”

[2] See for example, https://rojavainformationcenter.org/2023/01/explainer-afrin-5-years-under-turkish-occupation/

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