City and Resistance in Kurdistan: Poverty, Urban Development, and the Struggle for Democratic Autonomy in Diyarbakir
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How does an excluded population engage a hostile state to affect transformations of its social and political situation? Focusing on the Kurdish movement for self-determination in Turkey, this dissertation examines different modes of engagement with the Turkish state adopted by the Kurds in Kurdistan. These modes of engagement comprise a set of imbricating and at times conflicting practices that variably draw on Kurdish cultural repertoires of struggle, collective experiences of ethnohistorical oppression, and symbolic topographies of past and present resistance (mountain and city). I explore how the Kurdish struggle is shaped by and responds to the process of state formation in Turkey based on Turkish ethnonationalism, which has been historically entrenched by violent denial and exclusion of the Kurds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 in the city of Diyarbakir, I examine the process through which the city became the center of Kurdish politics with multiple instantiations in urban modes of political engagements. I argue that the Kurdish movement was caught in managing the contradictions that arose once the battle for Kurdish self- determination—a struggle that had predominantly been fought from the mountains—moved onto the urban terrains of Kurdistan, especially the city of Diyarbakir, in the last two decades. The shift of confrontation to the city resulted in a significant transformation in Kurdistan that was manifested in a flourishing civil society as well as in municipalities for the Kurds to exercise self-government. I analyze how the Kurdish movement and the modes of political engagement with the state in urban spaces came under the influence of class-based dynamics and the European Union’s reform packages for Turkey. My examination also includes the devastating destruction wrought by the Turkish state after many cities in Kurdistan declared autonomy or what was later called “self-rule resistance” in 2015. My research contributes to anthropological studies of the state and political movements by expanding our knowledge on how excluded and marginalized populations, often indigenous to their lands, take part in political movements, and how communities of resistance engage, react to, or refuse state power in the environment of political violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".