This geography belongs to us… what I am, is…who calls for? : Belonging and national identity in Southeast Turkey

This paper will try to challenge the claim of national belonging as revealed by the official discourse of Turkish national identity, through an exploration of narratives of belonging among the Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian populations of Turkey inhabiting three south-eastern cities of Turkey, namely Diyarbakır, Mardin and Urfa. Identical for these groups are their autochthony and long standing cohabitation on a geography perceived by each as being of theirs. Depending on a qualitative fieldwork in these bordering cities, which is conducted between February-October 2011, this paper will base its argument on an analytical framework which conceptualizes belonging as multilevel, multidimensional, historical social fact articulated vis-à-vis the power relations.

For some decades now, we are familiar with the debates on the erosion of the national borders and shrinking importance of the nation-state as the ultimate ground of political communities, with vital consequences on belonging and national identity. The established understanding of Turkish national identity is, also, challenged in the de-national order of things, due to various factors, one being the ongoing war between Kurdish ‘illegal’ military organization and Turkish state military power. And war, more than often, imbues identities with black and white! What I will do, regarding such a socio-political space of contestation, is to confront the assumptions of uniqueness, homogeneity and fixity of the Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian “Identity” vis-à-vis a uniform “Turkishness”; and, instead, point at of identifications and belongings of the “members” of these groups in the face of alternating discursive forms and historical operations of Turkish national identity and state. Consequently, I will reveal how these differentiating positions provide for perceptions and experiences of continuities and discontinuities of geography, ambiguity of boundaries between “us” and “others”, inside and outside.