(Non)Recognition and the Roots of Turkish-Kurdish Conflict

As we worked on Diversity, Violence & Recognition, and then at our book workshop at beautiful NYU Florence, we benefited from helpful conversations with Murat Somer, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul, and his work on Kurdish (non-) recognition in Turkey. Indeed, while our book ultimately focused on recognition, there was a time in our book process where we thought that there might be a case study chapter on Turkey, as an example of unexpected non-recognition (a plurality regime where we would have expected recognition) alongside Ethiopia as a case of unexpected recognition (a minority regime that adopted recognition, contra wider trends). We learned a lot from Murat and are delighted that you can now read more of his important work in his new book, Return to Point Zero: The Turkish-Kurdish Question and How Politics and Ideas (Re)Make Empires, Nations, and States (SUNY Press, 2022).  In his book, Murat argues that roots of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict lie in three key dilemmas: (1) challenges of forging a nation from a multicultural population in a post-imperial context, (2) questions of external territorial security, and (3) elite (non)cooperation. We are thrilled he agreed to answer our questions about his new book.  Welcome to our blog, Murat! 

King and Samii: Per our definitions that involve naming ethnic groups as key parts of the body politic, we would call Turkey a “non-recognition regime” vis-a-vis Kurds in Turkey. Do you agree with this assessment? 

Somer: Absolutely. This certainly is true for long periods until the 1990s when, leaving aside the absence of any legal-institutional non-recognition, even talking about Kurds “as Kurds” was taboo in mainstream media and politics. Parliamentarians would at best be booed and at worst face legal and political sanctions if they uttered terms such as Kurdish or Kurdistan in public speech. For many people, the Kurdish category was not only politically incorrect, it was unknown or “forgotten”.

Non-recognition in the 2000s and the present may be less easy to see. Today, to a significant degree, it is normalized to talk about Kurds as Kurds in mainstream discourse. It is possible to learn Kurdish in elective courses in schools, the public TV even has a channel in Kurdish. But all of this does not amount to recognition, not only in terms of the definition in your book but also in terms of the different conceptualization in my book. First, the laws, the Constitution and the state institutions make no reference to Kurds whatsoever. Education in (not of) mother tongue, which is a major Kurdish demand, is illegal. So, any institutional recognition, which you emphasize in your work, is very limited. But even more importantly for me, recognition is limited in the sense of the three conditions I formulate in my book:

·       Seeing a group: “recognizing” a people in terms of their own identity, realizing that there is a group with distinct qualities (in addition to what they may have common with “us”, of course) and therefore deserving to be classified and expressed as a distinct group. We all know situations when people look at us but don’t “see” us, or they don’t see us the way  we would like to be seen and described. They do not realize our personal qualities and/or group belongings, and when they do, they do not describe us by using the names and categories that are meaningful to ourselves (emic identities).

·       Knowing (about) a group: having some knowledge about that group’s identity, culture, history, politics, demands, etc. This of course cannot include everybody in society, but I mean an average person in society, institutional knowledge as in schools, universities, government, and political and intellectual elites.

·       Normative recognition: Acceptance that this group has a particular name, particular characteristics/background and longings/demands that deserve respect and accommodation by laws, institutions, and mainstream politics.

I think these three conditions may to some extent be necessary but insufficient for legal-institutional recognition. But they are facilitating conditions for sure. They may also be necessary facilitating factors for the sustainability of legal-institutional recognition. Look at the US. Is not the lack, or weakness of these conditions, at least among major segments of society, a main reason for the underlying problems of racial equality and peace?

In Turkey, the 2000s witnessed some progress in the first condition and in institutional recognition, but very little advancement in the second, and partial regress in the third. The average Turk now knows that there are “Kurds” in Turkey and refers to them in speech but has very little knowledge – and reliable knowledge for that matter – about who Kurds are, their history, culture, etc. And, while “seeing” Kurds has made half of society more open to Kurdish rights (about 30 percent of Turks for example now support education in Kurdish), others who previously did not “see” the Kurds but also did not have any negative opinion about them (based often on clichés such as “we are all Turks, Turkish citizens, brothers” etc) now also hold negative views of them. “They,” at least those who are vocal, are seen as terrorists, separatists, troublemakers. I call this phenomenon “seeing without recognizing” in the book.

King and Samii: In our book, working off admittedly stylized facts, we focus on ethnic power configurations and the structural relationship between plurality/majority and minority ethnic groups.  In your case, you focus especially on the majority Turks and questions of intra-Turkish “politics and ideational dynamics” (p.25). Why is this such an important focus?

Somer: Your book focuses on an important “instrumental-rational” consideration that surely enters the decision-making processes of majority/plurality group leaders: functional and mobilizational consequences of recognition. There are also other considerations. Caring about nationalism and nationalist legitimacy is completely rational both substantively and instrumentally. Hence, competition with political rivals over symbolic and material leadership of the group – the question of who can be trusted to most reliably defend group interests  –  is an important mechanism, as the scholarship on (ethnic/national) outbidding argues. Most politics is symbolic after all. Always present are also normative/reputational group pressures on group members and representatives (how much, may depend among other factors on the political regime in each case, as you also discuss). I argue that the decision-making of majority group elites can be, and it regularly is, much more complex than that.

I focus on three factors of intra-majority group politics. First, group leaders not only consider the direct consequences of how recognition or non-recognition may affect majority-minority group relations and their own bid for nationalist leadership. They also utilize the “political”, i.e. indirect consequences of recognition/non-recognition to settle intra-group conflicts that have nothing directly to do with minority-majority group relations. Hence, recognition may fail due to power struggles among majority group elites who try to undermine each other to win other battles. For example, the struggle over secularism among Turks in Turkey. Alternatively, recognition efforts may be short-lived because political elites saw them as instruments to achieve other political goals and thus were not seriously committed to the project. Second, the desirability/possibility of recognizing a minority in the eyes of majority/plurality elites much depends on their prior beliefs (ideas) regarding what recognition involves and its expected consequences on state unity and social-political stability. Third, we cannot assume that recognition of a minority has no impact on the identity and self-image of the majority group itself.

King and Samii: Our analysis of cross-national trends in Diversity, Violence and Recognition would suggest that Turkish majority leaders would recognize the Kurds, and that doing so would also help promote peace. Why didn’t, or don’t, they do that?  You write that “Kurds’ demands for recognition create a sense of anxiety among Turks about the nature of their own identities” (p.53). Can you elaborate on the basis of these anxieties? Are there important differences among Turks in whether they harbor such anxieties, perhaps in terms of ideology, region, or generational cohort? 

Somer: Common identity dilemma is one of the three dilemmas that the book defines and argues that “Turkish politics” has failed to resolve due to mainly political and ideational factors. What is the common identity dilemma? How can Kurds be recognized while at the same time ensuring that, not only Turks and Kurds maintain a common national identity in the same state, but also “Turks” preserve a common identity among themselves? This of course is not a dilemma for a Kurdish nationalist who aims for a separate state, but it is a dilemma for any political actor who wants to resolve the conflict within one state. “Turks” are ethnically quite diverse among themselves. And forming from the diverse lot of post-Ottoman Muslims a “Turkish nation” had been a major goal of the dominant string of Turkish nationalist movement and republican state-founders. Recognizing the Kurds is often justified based on “Turkishness” being an ethnic category. When this is accepted, then the legitimacy of Turkishness as a common national identity, which most non-Kurds with various ethnic backgrounds and a minority of Kurds have embraced, comes into question. This is the source of the “identity anxiety and insecurity” that recognition creates among Turks about the future of their own identity and self-image.

I argue in the book that this “common identity dilemma” can only be resolved based on a “state-nation” identity, a term I borrow from Stepan, Linz and Yadav. I develop their concept by maintaining that people should be able to embrace a state-national identity with different names and contents. Turks and Kurds can uphold their common national identity as “Turkishness” or “Of-Turkey-ness (Türkiyelilik)” without imposing the same name onto each other, for instance. Hence, “ideational factors” is an important causal factor in explaining recognition versus non-recognition in any particular case: e.g. the dominant beliefs among majority group members regarding the name of their nation, what makes them a nation or “what being a sovereign and unitary state can and cannot allow”.

King and Samii: You also note that “Kurds comprise a significant minority population of several neighboring states; yet they do not possess a nation-state of their own. This situation has created a sense of anxiety among the governments and dominant populations (whether Turk, Arab, or Persian) in these countries about the possibility of Kurdish secessionism” (p.43). Does this international aspect make the Kurdish question/conflict especially unique? 

Somer: Being a trans-state ethnic-national group is certainly not unique to Kurds. We have Tamils, Basques, Amazigh, Azerbaijanis, Hungarians, Irish. And to very differing degrees there are similar “secessionist” potentials, aspirations and fears among some in all of these cases. What makes it more complicated in Turkey is the combination of this “external security dilemma” with the other two dilemmas about elite cooperation and common identity. Kurds were part of the post-Ottoman Turkish or “Of-Turkey” nation-building project, i.e. part of the same state-nation together with Turks and other ex-Ottoman Muslims. But then they were divided between three states, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, the latter two being initially French and British mandates, in 1926. This gave rise to a major distrust between Turks and Kurds from then on. Some Kurds believed that the Turkish nation-builders deliberately divided them to weaken them. I discuss in the book what really seems to have happened and its consequences. As for the Turkish state, any sign of Kurdish nationalism at home even when peaceful became a fifth column, and any prospect of a Kurdish state in the region came to be viewed as a stepping stone for pan-Kurdish irredentism. This was the beginning of Turkey’s “external security dilemma.”

King and Samii: Is recognition ultimately a prerequisite for peace in this context? How optimistic are you about prospects for peace, whether through recognition or otherwise? 

Somer: I would say a necessary ingredient of sustainable peace. Both in the sense you discuss and in terms of the three conditions I formulate. And these conditions are also facilitating conditions for conflict-resolution in the sense I said earlier.

I am cautiously optimistic for the Turkish-Kurdish case. I discuss that we are in a reformative period since 2011, which poses very similar challenges to political elites as a hundred years ago. İn the 1919-1926 formative period, the three dilemmas were not resolved because the nation-builders prioritized “Turkish” nation-state formation among Turks and rapid secularization/modernization. Today, there is a strong, constitutionally secular, urbanized and modernized nation-state. So, there is more room for political elites to prioritize democratization, which cannot fully happen without resolving the Kurdish Conflict. And the opposition parties have come a long way in resolving the elite cooperation dilemma by working together with the aim of defeating President Erdoğan and the AKP’s authoritarian rule. They understand well that they need the pro-Kurdish party to win the election and be able to rebuild pluralistic democracy as they promise if they can come to power. Still, the challenges are very high. What I call “ideational barriers/bottlenecks” such as rigid public beliefs about the contours and requirements of unitary state and the supposed historical role that recognition played in causing the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, are well-entrenched.   

King and Samii: Finally, you wrote and published this book in Turkish first, and we have the pleasure of reading it in English now, about 7 years later.  In the preface, you describe how and why you made this choice very purposefully.  Please tell us more. 

Somer: The relation between this book and the first one in Turkish evolved to be quite unique. The common practice in “international” academia, which I also follow in most of my work, is to think, write and publish first in a dominant language – mainly English – by a publisher based in a country like the US or UK, for an audience who reads and thinks in this dominant language, and then sometimes have it translated to the scholar’s native language, in my case Turkish, after at least several years. What are the scholarly, epistemological, theoretical, and practical consequences of this practice? We lack theoretical knowledge originally conceived and concocted in non-dominant languages. Contributions of scholars based in an academically non-dominant country, especially but not exclusively those that were written in a non-dominant language, tend to be perceived as empirical work that informs and applies general theories, not those that build theories. I don’t think this practice and institutionalized “business model” serves us well in terms of producing the best theories we can that represent the experience and have useful real-world implications in a wide variety of countries in the world. We can call it more universal, pluri-versal or de-colonized knowledge if you prefer. I wanted to deviate from this pattern. I conceived quite a few concepts in Return to Point Zero originally in Turkish, which I then translated to English. And I made great efforts to build theory, as I do in most of my work, and I hope to be read and understood that way. I also had another motivation for switching to Turkish one month into the writing of the book in 2011, when I was at Princeton University for my sabbatical. There was a peace initiative in Turkey at that time. If I had followed the common practice, by the time the book was published in Turkey and reached Turkish and Kurdish readers, it would be too late to have any real-world impact, which I think scholars should always care about without compromising rigor.

But I should say that the original job of having translated from Turkish to English a non-commercial academic book in social sciences, which aims to be regenerative both theoretically and empirically, was not an easy task. It proved to be a very consuming but also educative and rewarding effort and process in the end. So, my fixing the original translation by a professional translator literally sentence by sentence in the midst of all my other research and writing projects turned, first, into substantial revising. Then my dissatisfaction with merely revising evolved into rewriting, and rewriting evolved into reshaping, expanding and developing. During this time, my thoughts, arguments and theoretical framework developed quite a bit. At the end of four years, including the revisions requested by the readers at SUNY Press, it more or less became a new book built on the first one. Even though it was intense, I am quite happy with the result. I hope its readers will enjoy and agree, too, and it will make a thought-provoking and long-lasting contribution as I intended.