The “Life” of the State: Social Reproduction and Geopolitics in Turkey's Kurdish Question

Jessie Hanna Clark

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016, vol. 106, issue 5, 1176-1193

Abstract: At the heart of geopolitical concerns today are questions about life: the sustainability of life, the quality of life, and the biological capacity and resilience of life. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than in the contemporary partnership between security and socioeconomic development and aid. In Kurdish southeast Turkey, increased governmental investment in gendered development highlights the role of household, neighborhood, and community production and reproduction in processes of securitization and nation building. These events suggest a deeply corporeal geopolitics at play in Turkey's Kurdish question, one that rests on the intimate relationship between social reproduction and geopolitics. This article draws on interview and participatory observation data in Diyarbakır, Turkey, to explain how specific practices and ideas around motherhood, marriage, and mobility and rights in the city create and challenge ethno-national identities. In doing so, I contend that the Kurdish question—and understandings of Turkishness and Kurdishness—are embodied, reified, and contested in the spatial constitutions of “life's work.”

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1187061

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