Beginning in the early 2000s, however, the Turkish state moderated its attitude vis-à-vis the Kurdish issue and recognized the ethnopolitical aspect of the problem and so initiated democratization efforts in addition to socioeconomic and security measures. In this new era, Turkish governments have implemented major legal and institutional changes and granted some cultural rights to Kurds, such as legalizing publishing and broadcasting in Kurdish and learning the Kurdish language, allowing parents to give their children Kurdish names, allowing political party campaigns in Kurdish, and introducing elective Kurdish courses. Since 2009, the Turkish and Kurdish sides have also been negotiating for a final peaceful settlement of the three-decade-long armed conflict. Some major initiatives in this new period have been the 2009 Kurdish Opening and the 2009–2011 Oslo Talks with the PKK leadership. In late 2012, the government launched a new initiative to find a peaceful solution to the armed conflict and started direct talks with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan (also known as the Peace Process). In March 2013, Öcalan sent a message from prison on İmralı Island (in the Sea of Marmara) and called for the end of armed struggle against the Turkish state and declared a cease-fire. Following Öcalan’s historic message, the PKK leadership in Northern Iraq declared a cease-fire and announced that the PKK would withdraw its militants from Turkey. However, in the aftermath of the June 2015 general elections, the cease-fire and the peace process collapsed, and the severe armed conflict between security forces and the PKK resumed.
Rather than providing a general survey of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, this study focuses on the dominant wing of the Kurdish movement (i.e., the secular, leftist, ethnonationalist formations) and examines its relations with Islam, which have shown interesting shifts and transformations in the past decades.16 As I analyze the shifting attitude of the Kurdish movement toward Islam, I focus on both the legal and illegal wings of the movement. On the illegal side, we have the PKK as the main actor. As a secular, leftist, and armed movement, the PKK emerged out of the revolutionary left in Turkey in the late 1970s and became the dominant political formation of Turkey’s Kurds (see also N. Özcan 1999; Yavuz 2001, 9–10; Taspinar 2005; Romano 2006; Marcus 2007; Tezcür 2009, 2015; Jongerden and Akkaya 2011). Initially, its ultimate goal was to establish a united Kurdistan based on Marxist-Leninist principles. For that purpose, the PKK initiated an armed struggle against the Turkish state in the first half of the 1980s. Since then, the fighting between Turkish security forces and PKK members has resulted in over 35,000 casualties, the destruction of about 3,000 villages, and the internal displacement of at least 3,000,000 people.17 By the mid-1990s the PKK had started to distance itself from separatist and Marxist ideas. Instead, the PKK-led Kurdish movement proposed a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict and appropriated a discourse of democratic rights and freedoms for Kurds (Imset 1996; White 2000; Yavuz 2001; Romano 2006; Gunes 2012b).18 Especially since the early 2000s, the PKK has rejected claims for national liberation and statehood and instead put increasing emphasis on Kurdish rights and demands, such as the constitutional recognition of Kurdish ethnic identity, language rights (e.g., education in one’s mother language), and political and administrative decentralization and power-sharing arrangements. For instance, rejecting secession, PKK leader Öcalan proposed “democratic autonomy” (demokratik özerklik) for Turkey and “democratic confederalism” (demokratik konfederalizm) for the region.19
On the legal side, there were several pro-Kurdish, secular, ethnic political parties that appeared on the Turkish political scene in the early 1990s (Watts 1999, 2006, 2010).20 These parties operated in a format that could be called issue parties: their primary concern was the Kurdish issue. In general, they argued that the Kurdish problem could not be reduced to a security issue; it was instead a complicated problem with ethnic, political, psychological, and socioeconomic dimensions. Hence, they advocated a peaceful and democratic solution to the Kurdish conflict and further democracy in Turkey. As a result, these parties have articulated several demands, such as the constitutional recognition of Kurdish ethnic identity, cultural rights (e.g., publishing, broadcasting, and education in Kurdish), decentralization and empowerment of local government, ending the state of emergency in southeastern Turkey, investigating extrajudicial killings, removing the village guards system, and a general amnesty for PKK members. They also demanded socioeconomic development in the southeast, where Kurds constitute the vast majority of the population (see also Watts 2010). However, these parties were accused of involvement in separatist activities and propaganda against the indivisible integrity of the Turkish territory and nation and of helping the “separatist,” “terrorist” PKK. As a result, most of the successive pro-Kurdish political parties were banned by Turkey’s Constitutional Court. Currently, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), which was formed in 2012 and succeeded the BDP in summer 2014, represents the Kurdish movement in legal party politics in Turkey.
Findings/Arguments
This study analyzes the shifting attitude of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement toward Islam and Islamic actors in the past decades through the lens of the boundary approach, which is primarily concerned with boundary-making or construction processes such as the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of the symbolic and social boundaries of an ethnic group or movement (e.g., see Barth 1969a; Lamont 2000; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Alba 2005; Wimmer 2008a, 2013; Jackson and Molokotos-Liedeman 2015). As the empirical chapters illustrate, Kurdish ethnopolitics since its inception in the late 1970s has involved striking boundary processes (e.g., contesting or challenging the official understanding of national identity and of the state’s discourse on the Kurdish issue, as well as making, unmaking, and remaking the boundaries of Kurdishness and of the Kurdish movement itself) and so offers us an excellent laboratory for exploring ethnic boundary-making processes and dynamics.
It is, however, unfortunate that the boundary approach has so far not been employed in a comprehensive way in studying the Kurdish case.21 One recent study (Aydin and Emrence 2015), which analyzes the organizational, ideological, and strategic aspects of Kurdish insurgency and counterinsurgency, attempts to utilize this approach. However, that study focuses on the territorial zones of armed conflict between the PKK and Turkish security forces. Due to its conscious focus on physical or territorial borders of the conflict between the Kurdish armed groups and the security forces, it neglects boundary-making processes and dynamics at symbolic and social levels. Thus, as one of the initial studies utilizing the boundary approach in the Kurdish context, this work not only will shed light on the recent shifts within the Kurdish movement with respect to its relations with Islam and Islamic actors and so help us gain insights into Kurdish ethnopolitics but also will contribute to our understanding of ethnic boundary processes, particularly boundary-making strategies and boundary contestations.
This study divides the evolving relations between the secular Kurdish movement and Islam into three different stages or periods: (1) an indifferent/apathetic and/or antagonistic/aggressive attitude in the 1970s and 1980s, (2) a sometimes ambivalent but increasingly friendly approach in the 1990s, and (3) an accommodative attitude and the rise of a Kurdish-Islamic synthesis since the early 2000s. Approaching such a trajectory from the perspective of boundary-making theory, this study treats the Kurdish movement’s Islamic opening as a major case of boundary work and suggests that each of these periods is associated with a different boundary-making strategy: boundary contraction, boundary expansion, and boundary reinforcement or empowerment, respectively. Thus, with a hostile attitude toward Islam and Islamic actors and movements in the 1970s and 1980s, the Kurdish ethnonationalist movement contracted both symbolic boundaries of Kurdishness in its ethnonational imaginary and the social boundaries of the movement itself. By developing an increasingly friendly approach toward Islam and Islamic circles in the 1990s, secular Kurdish ethnopolitical elites expanded the contracted symbolic and social boundaries of the movement. Since the early 2000s, we have seen even more systematic and comprehensive efforts by secular Kurdish ethnopolitical elites to accommodate Islam and Islamic actors. These efforts might be interpreted as the reinforcement or empowerment of expanded boundaries.
Regarding the causes of the Kurdish movement’s boundary expansion (i.e., its Islamic opening), I demonstrate