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 Rosa Burç

In a historic ceremony on July 11^th, 2025, thirty guerrilla fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) laid down their arms by casting their weapons into fire, following Abdullah Öcalan’s call for disarmament as part of unfolding peace negotiations between the Turkish government and Kurdish actors. In the context of global militarization and escalating armaments, the PKK’s commitment to disarmament seems like a deviant trajectory. However, it reflects a longer-standing orientation within the Kurdish movement that posits militancy not as an end in itself, but as part of a broader emancipatory project centered on building a society rather than a state.

This will for disarmament, rather than signaling retreat, materialized a militancy for peace that reimagines the terms of struggle beyond the hegemonic norms of sovereignty through statehood. The growing body of scholarship on the practical and ideological articulations of Kurdish revolutionary mobilization over the past decades emphasized precisely this reconfiguration (Dirik 2022, O’Connor 2021). It shows how the twenty-first century has engendered a novel comprehension of the Kurds, whereby their designation as a people without a state has been superseded by their self-conceptualization as a people beyond the state (Jongerden and Akkaya 2021). It is against this backdrop that the Kurdish movement’s decisions, such as disarmament, must be understood as strategic and normative refusals of the hegemonic imaginaries of anticolonial freedom embodied in a nation-state of one’s own. In contrast to assumptions that state violence in ethnically divided contexts necessarily amplifies secessionist and nationalist aspirations, colonial violence in Kurdistan has produced an internalized condition. Özlem Goner (2018) calls this condition an “(antistate) outsider identity” (67), in which mobilization not merely signifies “resistances against state violence, but struggles that are built in and through violence” (21).

This piece discusses Kurdish mobilization in its capacity to translate the enduring experience of violence, colonialism, and statelessness into a bottom-up politics of care, recognition, and autonomy, rather than statism. Such forms of mobilization, which embed political imaginaries into modes of living, thinking, and organizing, reflect a broader inquiry into the relationship between political life and the conditions under which it is cultivated.

To Survive

In a handwritten response to my questions handed to Sabahat Tuncel in Turkey’s Sincan Closed Women’s Prison in 2022, the former Member of Parliament for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Kurdish politician, and feminist activist writes:

“Every political movement organizes its own ideological political approach, its life, within the framework of its politics. It doesn’t matter whether inside (in prison) or outside, people live the way they think. A human’s action, practice, is the reflection of their intellectual mental focus.” (Interview, October 22, 2020. Tuncel was incarcerated between 2016 and 2024. Interlocutors’ names are anonymized except for public figures.)

Following Tuncel’s words, studying mass mobilization that unfolds in an enduring mode of societal survival as in the Kurdish case, requires efforts to reveal the framework of the movement’s politics, to ask about the context in which its life unfolds. Given that contemporary Kurdish mobilization unfolds in a violent order of multiple, overlapping and/or simultaneous contexts of subjugation, I argue that the context is not merely a backdrop but rather a constitutive element in shaping how Kurdish movement activists mobilize, organize, and develop repertoires of resistance. For Zeynep Gambetti (2009), “Place-making is not only about a locality or physical setting but about constructing a movement and a form of struggle in its own right” (43). Hence, agential practices of imagining, narrating, and self-making amid contexts of colonial violence manifest as modes of societal survival, eventually shedding light on how colonized societies seek freedom and become subjects of their own history  (see Burç 2024).

In a case study on martyrdom in Bakur (Northern Kurdistan), Minoo Koefoad (2017) examines Kurdish activists’ strategies to avoid demobilization despite increasing political violence in post-2015 Turkey. By introducing the concept of emotional resistance, Koefoad (2017) convincingly argues that “Emotional spaces represent spheres within which political resistance is articulated and nurtured and serve the purpose of regaining agency over subjects’ own emotional landscapes amid political violence” (14).

Koefoad’s analysis makes an important contribution to the study of emotions in resistance movements; however, Koefoad locates reasons for the endurance and survival of movements in violent environments mostly within the conceptual realms of resilience and through practices that “prefigure a sensation of freedom” (14). I argue instead that the paradigmatic shift of a subjectification “beyond the state” has given rise to emancipatory politics that are neither prefiguration only nor necessarily tied to temporalities of and interactions with state power. Instead, it demonstrates an inward-looking societal and individual process of transformation, where new sets of moral values are discursively established, spaces of mutual recognition developed, and a new relationality formed among individuals subjugated by omnipresent state violence.  This new relationality deriving from contemporary Kurdish mobilization resonates with James Jasper’s intervention that collective identity eventually is a “necessary fiction” rather than a concept to guide an individual’s entire life. He argues that “social movements and other political groupings are not based on reflex emotions; they are built upon affective and moral convictions” (2018, 104).

I conducted remote and on-site fieldwork with Kurdish movement activists and their constituencies between 2019 and 2022, in different sites from Turkey to Northern and Southern Kurdistan, to diasporic spheres in Europe, and from within minoritized groups such as refugee camp communities or Ezidis. Although all my interlocutors were embedded in different context-specific histories of violence in Kurdistan, they had both fragmented and collective memories of violence, which entailed a perception of state power that renders individuals, groups and societies “lonely,” destroying social ties, physical encounters, solidaristic relations, and above all, memories of those former connections. For instance, reflecting on the enduring plight of the Kurdish people, my interlocutor Hatem, a Kurdish politician in German exile, called the Lausanne Treaty that established the Westphalian state system a “century-long conviction” imposed upon Kurdish populations with the intention to render them “lonely.” Another interlocutor, Hêvîdar, an elementary teacher and activist in Bakur, drew a similar analogy when recollecting her memories from the violence of 2015-2016 in her hometown: “…It was like Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. The state had reminded the Kurds of their solitude” (Field notes, June 12, 2021). For Hêvîdar, the way the Turkish state targeted certain neighborhoods, streets or districts by concentrating violent military rule in strictly demarcated spaces, like the historical center of Sur in Diyarbakir, created a sense of fracturing within the Kurdish communities; feelings of isolation, erasure, and intracommunity separation were enforced by a simultaneity of destruction, displacement, dispossession, and death for some in the city while the rest continued their lives:

“After so much violence happened in front of everyone’s eyes, the people were as if they had lost their memory, as if they were determined to live as if nothing happened but also knowing this was their only option, this is how much solitude was internalized” (Field notes, June 21, 2021).

Despite the undeniable violence witnessed by all, she remembers that there was a pervasive sense of collective amnesia as a product of the militarily besieged space of the city’s center, while the rest of Diyarbakir’s population were forced to bear helpless witness. The notion of solitude as put forward in the witness account of Hêvîdar or Hatem’s historical reflections, reveal a perception of “the state” that is not only an agent of violence, which sentences society to multiple modes of survival, but also as the creator of an emotional landscape where fear and disaffection replace solidarity, where empathy is overshadowed by the pending threat of state violence. Therefore, for my interlocutors, this regime of fear is associated with the rule of the state, an entity which attempts to occupy the spaces where communal bonds and shared suffering might foster resistance and care within society.

To Signify

The internalization of state power as an agent in the politics of brutalization (Bozarslan 2020, Mbembe 2024) has given rise to an emancipatory aspiration for an alternative society formed through a new radical relationality. For my interlocutors, survival and resistance are not to be reduced to mere physical endurance or the imitation of colonial violence as a means to freedom. Their life narratives construct affective legacies based on the premise that mere physical survival was not enough to uphold life, as Zerya, an inhabitant of Maxmur refugee camp reflects:

“We never approached our situation as an escape from something, as if we could simply flee from something. We turned this refuge into a field of struggle, we tried to understand the causes that forced us to leave, (…) we asked, how we can contribute to the struggle for freedom from where we are” (Interview, October, 18, 2020).

Developing norms and narratives of one’s own, such as self-determined curricula in grassroots schools, administrations guided by feminist politics, the visibility and legitimacy of women and minoritized communities as (co-)chairs of assemblies, and most importantly a solidaristic consciousness, were mentioned by interlocutors as quintessential pillars for survival in a life-affirming mode in contrast to the life-denying mode of state power. It is precisely under the perception of brutal state power that the Kurdish movement finds ways to transform survival into a generative and relational practice. Hence, Kurdish resistance is not as simply a reaction to oppression but are proactive efforts of world-making that offer an alternative morality and system of values, eventually broadening mobilizational capacities across time and space. Society-building in the postcolony therefore is not limited to repertoires of “unmaking the colonizer” or “taking over state power” but in restoring the relations to oneself and to each other, as the Ezidi cleric Rodin described it:

“The Kurdish movement has established a utopia of Kurdistan by enabling Ezidis and others to face towards their own history. The new center of values has affected the relations communities build with each other and with their own identity, history, and ideas of autonomy” (Interview, January 6, 2021).

To Rebuild

Restoring societal relations through the cognitive resignification that state power and freedom are not mutually constitutive also created space for further ideological grounding. One key transformation was the Kurdish movement’s shift from revolutionary violence toward the concept of self-defense, understood not merely as military necessity but as a social and political principle given that “violence triggers hierarchy, whereas self-defense is grounded in social and political mechanisms, so as not to regenerate patriarchy, statehood, or statism” (Güneşer 2020, 25). Framed this way, self-defense became central as a means to reorganize society from within. It opened the ground for women’s liberation to emerge as a foundational concern of societal freedom. Decentering the state enabled a broader decolonial critique that brought into focus interwoven systems of domination within society itself, ultimately allowing the Kurdish movement to designate “women as the oldest colony” (Öcalan 2017), or in the words of Kurdish activist Dîlan:

“Women’s question is a question of how we want to live as a society . . . the self-defense of a society cannot be limited to physical survival or military dimension alone . . . it requires the preservation of the society’s identity, a political consciousness and processes of democratization inside the society” (Interview, December 18, 2019).

Self-determination, if considered as a reverse discourse (Jongerden 2023), can be representative of both territorial and non-territorial spaces. Kurdish politics of mutual recognition and radical representation are developed against orders of violence based on domination, de-subjectification, and the politics of denial and destruction. One feminist organizer from Bakur explains that in the process of joining a political organization of the Kurdish movement, she entered a space where all “Comrades were equal and existed with their own histories and identities” (Interview, January 4, 2020). For her, this space was not only a space of learning about the other person’s identity and history but also a space of feeling seen and being recognized herself. If self-determination is located within the sphere of democratic self-organization and if it is paradigmatically opposed to self-determination in the nationalist sense, then one of the key pillars of the emancipatory politics in contemporary Kurdish mobilization has been the process of subject formation both as individuals (knowing who you are) and as a society (knowing who the other is).

 Concluding Thoughts

Kurds experience violence not as an episodic rupture but as an enduring condition that unfolds across time and space. These experiences are shaped by distinct chronicles of violence based on geography, class, gender, and political location, producing differentiated yet interrelated forms of subjugation. The emancipatory politics of Kurdish mobilization, as explored in this contribution, unfold along interwoven trajectories of survival, resignification, and reconstruction. By displacing the state as the center of political inquiry and instead considering human relations as essential pillars for the praxis of liberation and societal survival, I argue, the Kurdish movement’s society-building frame opened a new space of possibility for political and social interaction. These processes of resignification evolved into material and non-material spaces of mutual recognition and eventually informed new affective ties to ideas of freedom and concepts of autonomy. The emancipatory politics of Kurdish mobilization therefore reflect a radically relational approach that addresses ongoing violence, not through state-centered politics, but through new shared narratives of freedom, and that reconstitutes social life in times of violence.

Rosa Burç is a political sociologist working on how narratives of violence and repertoires of resistance travel across time and space, especially in Kurdistan and among stateless and marginalized communities. She received her PhD from the Center on Social Movement Studies at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. Her dissertation was awarded the 2025 Honorable Mention by the American Political Science Association MENA Politics Section. Since 2023 she is the project lead in a research project on transnational racism and solidarity in postmigrant societies at the DeZIM-Institute in Berlin.

Works Cited

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