Displacement, Homemaking, and Resiliency in the Kurdish Regions of Turkey

This paper examines the experiences of displaced Kurdish populations in Diyarbakır, Turkey, in the span of the enduring conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish liberation movement. In the 1990s, the Turkish state forces destroyed more than 5,000 villages in the Kurdish region, forcefully displacing between 2.5 and 4.5 million people. The forcefully displaced Kurdish population who had to leave their rural houses migrated to the suburbs of big cities, Diyarbakır being one of them. Since then, the districts formed by this population have been commonly criminalized and stigmatized by the state and subjected to various security measures and gentrification projects. Recently, some of these neighborhoods became the main battleground between the state and Kurdish militants after the end of the tentative peace process in 2015. As one of these sites, the ancient inner-city town of Diyarbakır, Sur was sieged by the army and lost most of its infrastructures during the months-lasting armed conflicts in 2015 and 2016. Afterward, the Turkish state compelled the district to systematic demolishment and urban restructuring, which once again displaced mainly lower-income Kurdish inhabitants. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews in Diyarbakır between 2016-2024, this paper reveals the residents' multifaceted and spread over time socio-spatial struggle to navigate forced displacement, urban restructuring, and ongoing state oppression. By examining home-making and space-making as forms of resistance and resiliency, I discuss how marginalized populations re-appropriate urban space and reclaim their social identity in a war-torn geography.