Geographies of Killing: The dispossession, disconnection, and displacement of Kurdish communities in Turkey’s borders towns

Abstract

This paper proposes a feminist geopolitical analysis of everyday militarism in Kurdish-majority border towns in South-Eastern Turkey. The Turkish state has long been waging war against Kurdish armed forces, considered separatist and terrorist. However, despite the official discourse, which holds Kurdish communities separate from militant groups, the Turkish state’s military tactics have targeted Kurdish civilians in the region. Moreover, the military regime in Kurdish-populated border villages does not run merely with regular operations and patrolling. Instead, it seems to be resorting to extrajudicial practices, such as random harassment-fires, accidental killings, torture, and rape, to paralyze the social life of Kurdish villagers. As a result, these practices transform Kurdish settlements as geographies of extrajudicial practices, and feelings of intimidation, insecurity, despair, uncertainty, and trauma become a part of Kurdish villagers’ everyday lives. Therefore, this paper explores how the geopolitical strategy operates by creating geographies of killing and surrounding ordinary people’s social lives, emotions, psychological registers, and daily relationships.