Kurds in Dark Times

Reviewed by: Kurds in Dark Times: New Perspectives on Violence and Resistance in Turkey ed. by Ayça Alemdaroğlu and Fatma Müge Göçek Mehmet Gurses Kurds in Dark Times: New Perspectives on Violence and Resistance in Turkey. Edited by Ayça Alemdaroğlu and Fatma Müge Göçek. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2023. 432 pp. Hardback, $85.00. ISBN: 0815637705. Few edited volumes have accomplished what this one has in bringing together a collection of chapters written by scholars with diverse backgrounds and training while simultaneously offering a coherent argument. Kurds in Dark Times starts with a fascinating introductory chapter by the editors and ends with an intriguing afterward by a veteran scholar of Kurdish politics. In between awaits many equally thought-provoking chapters by more than a dozen sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists. With its gloomy yet apt title, this book illuminates the "dark times" that Turkey has witnessed in recent years. The book's most significant added value is "daring to think" as it appeals to both the cognitive and emotive senses. The book's central thesis revolves around how the state's repressive approach to the Kurdish question has turned into an instrument for subduing both Kurds and Turks, forcing them into submission and thus robbing them of agency. The darkness into which the country has descended is closely tied to the Kurdish question, and any end to these dark times will be found by solving this problem. Selahattin Demirtaş, the former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), issued a sharp warning in January 2023 from his prison cell to the opposition leaders struggling to win upcoming elections. "Soon," he said, "we will meet. Either you will join me as inmates, or I will see you outside as a free man." The book begins with a chapter on Kurdistan's shifting nature as a geographical and political unit. Metin Atmaca's chapter illustrates the vastness of Kurdish geography, on the one hand, and the closely linked nature of Kurdishness and territoriality, on the other. In Chapter 2, Janet Klein departs from her earlier assessment of Ottoman-Kurdish relations and highlights how both Armenians and Kurds were "minoritized" in the last decades of the empire. Klein's chapter has significant implications for the Turkish approach to the Kurds and the origins of Kurdish nationalism, both of which are rooted [End Page 362] in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Barış Ünlü, in Chapter 3, offers a thought-provoking argument for what he has termed "the Turkishness contract." Drawing parallels with race relations in the United States, Ünlü highlights how Turkishness is more than just an ethnic category but a learned experience that is being reproduced in everyday life. In Chapter 4, Michael Ferguson examines the migrant communities of the Kadifekale neighborhood of Izmir and explains the Kurds' precarious existence as they are stuck between recognition and denial. The Kadifekale case, coupled with Chapters 5 and 6, which study Kurdish migrant communities in Istanbul and Bursa, respectively, demonstrates different forms and manifestations of Kurdishness in the "core Kurdish geography" and Kurdish migrant enclaves in majority-Turkish cities. These three chapters argue that Kurds are subjected to subtle and, at times, not-so-subtle, colonial and racial processes as they interact with dominant Turks. One troublesome outcome of this "racialization" process that Kurds are subjected to has been "violence from below," which is addressed in Chapter 7. Şefika Kumral, using fine-grained data on anti-Kurdish communal violence between 1980 and 2011, exposes the harmful and destructive aspects of deteriorating Turkish-Kurdish relations. The finding of a close correlation between Kurdish empowerment and anti-Kurdish communal violence is an ominous sign of tense intercommunal relations. Another problematic manifestation of seeing Kurds through a colonial prism is the representation of the Roboski Massacre of late 2011. Keleş, in Chapter 8, provides an extensive assessment of how the Turkish media has embraced the hegemonic official narrative dismissing Kurdish pain and viewing the Kurdish population as expendable. In Chapter 9, Delal Aydın shifts gears to a high school in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey, that serves as a barometer

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