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 Adnan Çelik & Deniz Yonucu

The Middle East is burning yet again. The stateless and minoritized peoples of the region, as has so often been the case, are the ones most affected by the neo-colonial ambitions and aspirations behind violent map-making. As we watch the suffering of the people of Gaza unfold on our screens, we also see Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), being received at the UN and other international platforms as the legitimate representatives of the “new Syria.” Meanwhile, Alawite, Druze, Christian, and Kurdish populations in Syria suffer massacres and other forms of violence.

The Kurds, whose homeland spans four nation-states (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria), are a living testament not only to how Western imperialism draws maps and, with them, destinies, but also to how regional colonialisms and supremacist ideologies operate on the ground, causing dispossession, exclusion, and violence. At the intersection of global and local power structures, the territory of Kurdistan has been a site of aggression and repression at least since the end of World War I.

Today, Kurdistan, like the rest of the Middle East, stands at the brink of a turning point. The brutal police murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini on September 16, 2022, and the subsequent protests that revitalized the Kurdish movement in Iran; the overthrow of the Assad regime by HTS in Syria, followed by the March 10, 2025 agreement between the Syrian transitional government and the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) to integrate the latter into a new Syrian framework; and the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK, Kurdistan Workers’ Party)’s decision to decommission on May 12, 2025, following its leader Öcalan’s appeal for dissolution, are among the most significant events concerning Kurdistan(s) in the past three years. The trajectories emerging from these events illustrate how Kurdish activists and liberation movements are adapting and responding to shifting circumstances by drawing on historical experiences of colonization, repression, and resistance that not only persist but continue to shape the present.

This series brings together contributions from across the four parts of Kurdistan as well as the Kurdish diaspora, particularly in Germany. Caught between regional and international powers amid the backdrop of the Syrian war and rising Turkish and Iranian hegemony, the Kurdish pursuit of liberation, democratic autonomy, and coexistence has been largely ignored by those powers, despite growing global awareness following the Rojava revolution. Today, what is at stake for Kurds is not so much the right to self-determination as the even more fundamental right to survival.

The Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which recognized the sovereignty of modern Turkey, effectively erased Kurdistan from international recognition. İsmail Beşikçi (1991) writes that the treaty rendered Kurdistan an “international colony,” deprived of sovereignty and divided among four nation-states. This division left Kurds, one of the largest stateless nations in the world, subject to systematic denials of their identity, language, and political rights. Colonization of Kurdistan entails a denial of the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, followed by structural violence made possible by the lack of official recognition even as a formal colony (Göner 2023). In Turkey, where nearly 20-25 million Kurds live, the very words “Kurd” and “Kurdistan” were banned for decades; expressions of Kurdish identity remained criminalized until the 1990s. Kurdistan remains a highly sensationalized term.

Kurds faced simultaneous oppression from four different state apparatuses, each implementing distinct yet similar policies of cultural erasure, political suppression, territorial control, massacres, and genocidal violence (Bozarslan et al. 2021). Multifaceted violence emerges from various forms of supremacism embedded within the nation-state formations where Kurds reside (Mohammadpour 2024; Vanly, 1968; Bozarslan 1997; Vali 2014; Yarkin 2022; Yonucu 2024). In critical accounts of the trajectory of divided Kurdistan, various conceptual, political, and legal frameworks have been proposed to describe the governance of the Kurds by the nation-states that divided them over the past century: genocide, colonialism, apartheid, linguicide, ethnocide, forced assimilation, and so on.

More broadly, four recurring structural elements characterize the policies of these colonial states towards the Kurds. As the contributors to this series demonstrate, deliberate ethnic violence (ranging from massacres to scorched earth policies, pogroms to genocide), racism (structural, despite its variations: sometimes based on a more ethnicist conception of national identity, sometimes on a more religious one), legalized impunity that protects individuals and organizations guilty of crimes like politicide, ecocide and cultural erasure committed in the name of the nation, and finally a fierce denial of this violence (Çelik 2025). Yet as they also emphasize, Kurdistan is not merely a site of oppression. It is equally a space of life-affirming, world-building resistance.

The series opens with Özlem Göner’s analysis of the colonization of Kurdistan, exploring both its unique features and its broader, universal dimensions. She traces the historical roots of this colonization and examines Kurdistan’s position within classical typologies of settler versus extractive colonialism. Göner’s work reveals how Kurdistan’s distinctive colonial experience, characterized by systemic violence, displacement, and resource extraction, has profoundly shaped the racialization of Kurds and the exploitation of the Kurdish working class.

Dastan Jasim considers a critical yet often overlooked issue: the intersection of Ba’athism, Arab supremacy, and the fusion of Arab nationalism with Sunni Islam, which has historically rendered minoritized populations in Syria and Iraq such as Kurds, Druzes, Yezidis, and Alawites, especially vulnerable to targeted violence. Jasim’s analysis shows how these dynamics play out in recent years, particularly with the rise of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and president of Syria, who had connections with both Al-Qaeda and ISIS. By connecting these regional developments to the rise in anti-Kurdish violence in contemporary Germany, Jasim offers a transnational, historically grounded framework for understanding the persistence of anti-Kurdish racism across borders today.

Hardy Mède examines partisan politics in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), the only part of divided Kurdistan to have achieved internationally recognized federal autonomy since 2005. Political organizations in the KRI in fact occupy a dominant position in society and play a central role in governing the population. By exploring the dynamics of the patrimonialization of Iraqi Kurdish parties, Mède discusses their organizational structure, identity rituals, and symbolic practices, and he offers preliminary anthropological reflections on these political parties.

Turning to Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan in Iran), Somayeh Rostampour reflects on the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” and its evolution from the Kurdish women’s movement in Bakur (Northern Kurdistan, in Turkey) in the 1990s to its global resonance after the murder of Jina (Mahsa) Amini. Rostampour provides a genealogy of the slogan and shows how Kurdish women’s resistance continues to inspire movements worldwide. Also in Rojhelat, Massoud Sharifi analyzes the 2025 Newroz celebrations across more than one hundred towns and villages in Rojhelat, demonstrating unprecedented participation levels. His piece reveals how Newroz is more than a celebration of spring, serving as a potent act of resistance, a performative assertion of Kurdish identity that challenges hegemonic state narratives and gender norms through visible, embodied, and communal expressions.

Many authors in this series engage with the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the PKK, but Adnan Çelik’s contribution focuses directly on the PKK’s evolving strategies, particularly the contentious issue of disarmament. To understand the ongoing disarmament process and grasp its consequences, he states that a number of fundamental facts need to be considered. Some of these relate to current developments in the Middle East, while others are rooted in the recent history of Turkish state policies in Northern Kurdistan, as well as in the Kurdish movement’s resilience in renewing itself and surviving. According to Çelik, behind the PKK’s decision to end its armed struggle in response to the call of its leader Öcalan there is a form of confidence in the ability of the Kurdish movement and people to survive, live, and renew themselves without resorting to force and arms. It signals confidence in the civil Kurdish political movement, which has become its backbone in the legal sphere and continues to survive despite politicide of rare brutality.

Rosa Burç considers the Kurdish liberation movement as one that articulates practices of self-determination and freedom focused on society-building rather than state-seeking. She proposes an ethnographically grounded analysis of the way experiences of  state violence have led Kurdish activists to conceive of self-determination in terms of society rather than building their own a nation-state .

Yasin Sunca compares two armed political movements, the PKK and  Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) considering their projection of power. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Colombia, alongside a decade of research on and in Kurdistan, Sunca argues that the PKK’s ideological transformation provides new insights into projections of power that were previously inconceivable within a state-centric logic. This transformation, for Sunca, offers crucial lessons for liberation movements.

Eray Çaylı investigates environmental colonization through the concept of earthmoving in Bakur, drawing on his recent book, Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan.  He highlights the central role that earthmoving trucks play in Turkey’s environmental racism, serving as both instruments of physical transformation and symbolic tools of domination. His analysis contributes a critical intervention in the growing scholarship on racial capitalism and environmental colonialism in the Middle East, arguing that the histories and agents behind these processes are not solely European or North American but include regional powers such as the Turkish state.

Finally, Deniz Yonucu and Kerem Schamberger consider Germany’s use of lawfare to suppress activism associated with the Kurdish Freedom Movement, as well as Kurdish cultural expression and production. Germany’s actions demonstrate how the repression of colonized populations can transcend borders. They argue that Germany’s repressions against Kurdish activists and their allies are not merely a transnational extension of Turkey’s authoritarianism, but also a revealing symptom of Germany’s own authoritarian drift and suppressions of political speech, including sanctions against  pro-Palestinian activism.

This series offers readers an inclusive account of Kurdish struggles and resistance in the contemporary moment, connecting historical analysis with current events and local experiences with transnational movements for justice and self-determination.

Adnan Çelik, anthropologist and historian, is an Associate Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS) in Paris. He is the author of Dans l’ombre de l’État : Kurdes contre Kurdes (Brepols, 2021), and co-author of Laboratories of Learning: Social Movements, Education and Knowledge-Making in the Global South (Pluto 2024) with M. Novelli, B. Kutan, P. Kane, T. Pherali, and S. Benjamin. He also co-authored La Malédiction: Le génocide des Arméniens dans la mémoire des Kurdes de Diyarbekir (L’Harmattan 2021) with Namık Kemal Dinç, and co-edited Kurds in Turkey: Ethnographies of Heterogeneous Experiences (Lexington Books, 2019) with Lucie Drechselová. His research focuses on political violence, memorial regimes, and transnational activism.

Deniz Yonucu is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at Newcastle University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, political theory, law & society studies, and urban studies. She has published extensively on topics related to policing, criminalisation, racism, and left-wing and anti-colonial resistance. Her work has appeared in various venues, including Current Anthropology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Race & Class, City & Society and Social and Legal Studies. Her monograph Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press) is the winner of the 2023 Anthony Leeds Prize for the best book in urban anthropology.

Works Cited

Beşikçi, İsmail. 2013. Devletlerarası Sömürge Kürdistan. İstanbul: İsmail Beşikçi Vakfı Yayınları.

Bozarslan, Hamit.  1997. La question kurde: État et minorités au Moyen-Orient. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Bozarslan, Hamit, Cengiz Gunes, and Veli Yadirgi, eds. 2021. The Cambridge History of the Kurds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Çelik, Adnan. 2025. Cent ans plus tard, les Kurdes au bord de la survie. Paris: Collection “Imprimés AOC.”

Göner, Özlem. 2023. “Rightful Recognition of Kurdistan as a Colony and De-Colonizing Knowledge Production.” The Commentaries 3(1): 165–196.

Vali, Abbas. 2014. Kurds and the State in Iran. London: I.B. Tauris.

Vanly, Ismet Chériff. 1968. Persecution of the Kurdish People by the Baath Dictatorship in Syria. Geneva: ISK.

Yarkın, Güllistan. 2022. “Turkish Racism Against Kurds: Colonial Violence, Racist Slurs and Mob Attacks.” The Commentaries 2(1): 77–90.

Yonucu, Deniz. 2024. “Sectarianism as Racism: The Collective Punishment of Alevi Communities in Turkey.” Race & Class 65(3): 47–68.