Abstract
This article addresses the role and impact of religious civil society in situations of armed conflict through a case study of Kurdish Islamist civil society organisations and activists in Turkey. The focus is on the period following the collapse of the peace process and resurgence of violence in mid-2015 between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkêrên Kurdistanê). Based on 40 in-depth interviews conducted in the city of Diyarbakir, I identify three main challenges to the effectiveness of religious civil society in peacebuilding processes: (1) relations with the state, (2) legacy and relationship with institutional violence, and (3) advocacy and representation of community needs. This article shows how ethnicity and Islam are shifting, contingent interactions in the construction of Kurdish identity, especially in response to violence. Although the public expression of pro-Kurdish rights claims altered under a securitisation rubric during this period, the demand for a peaceful settlement to the conflict transcends ideological and social differences across many Kurds.
The role of Kurdish religious civil society in peacebuilding efforts has not received sufficient attention in the case of the nearly 4-decades-long insurgency waged by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkêrên Kurdistanê or PKK) against the Turkish Armed Forces. 1 This article addresses the question, how do religious civil society organisations (CSOs) respond to armed conflict that is primarily driven by identity and influence debates around conflict resolution and peacebuilding? By examining the collapse of the 2-year ceasefire and the peace or “resolution” process in Turkey that was followed by unprecedented resurgence of urban violence in July 2015 and the first half of 2016, this article makes the following argument. Kurdish Islamist CSOs constitute understudied sites where it is possible to observe how ethnicity and Islam are shifting, contingent interactions in the expression of Kurdish identity, and the ways in which the experience of armed conflict can rupture or reaffirm perceptions of group identity over time. The postpeace process period was highly polarised along the Islam–secularism axis among the Kurdish polity, resulting in certain Kurdish religious groups to move closer to the orbit of state rhetoric, institutions, and authority. By considering the types of rights claims, mobilisation tactics, and practices of Kurdish Islamic organisations during and after the peace process, I point to how organisations shifted to a defensive human rights discourse away from a more assertive discourse on collective self-determination and certain group rights. 2 I show how this emerged as a response to the bipolarity in the Kurdish sphere namely between the state, on the one hand, and the Kurdish movement on the other and the politics of securitisation that emerged following armed violence. 3
In order to do so, I identify three main challenges that constrain the effectiveness of Kurdish Islamist CSOs in the postpeace process period: (1) relations with the state, (2) legacy and relationship with institutional violence, and (3) ability to advocate and represent the needs and desires of the local community. The period under study can be analysed as case of a complex “no peace, no war” scenario that defies clearly defined linear phases of peace or violence (Richards, 2005).
My approach is based on the premise that intersectional ethnoreligious identity constitutes mutually compatible fields and, following the social constructivist school, sees identity as malleable, fluid, and prone to renegotiation (Barth, 1969). The focus in this article is on what I term “nonaligned” Kurdish Islamist civil society that claim independent origins, ideas, or programmes outside of the state and the Kurdish movement. 4 However, assigning labels can be misleading; there is often organisational or discursive congruity across Kurdish actors even as they claim to be autonomous. Generally, Kurdish Islamists endorse ethnonationalist goals but oppose secularism, which is generally seen as antithetical to “authentic” Kurdish society and religious values. My research focuses on groups who claim the goal of their activism is a political and peaceful resolution to the Kurdish conflict and consider the main purpose of their work as peace activism.
The Kurdish rights struggle in Turkey is a complex and multidimensional subject that must be contextualised within wider Turkish national politics. Sarkissian and Özler (2013) argue that civil society acts as an extension of party politics and point to how state control of religion has compelled religiously oriented groups to “express their political interests through the realm of civil society” in Turkey (p. 1015). This analysis can be extended to the study of Kurdish Islamist civil society. Specifically, conservative Kurds constitute a significant electoral constituency who employ civil society activism to gain recognition for social, linguistic, and political demands at the state and substate levels.
Since coming into power in 2002, the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AKP) in Turkey won almost half of the electoral vote in Kurdish-majority southeastern Anatolia. However, in the June 7, 2015, parliamentary election (shortly before the collapse of the peace process), the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a secular and left-leaning pro-minority party in the Kurdish movement, won an unprecedented 80 parliamentary seats. Disaggregated provincial- and district-level election results revealed that the lion’s share of the HDP’s new votes originated in the Kurdish religious–conservative constituency (Meyersson, 2015). Although the majority of these votes drew from Kurdish-populated eastern and southeastern provinces, a noticeable shift also took place in cities like İzmir, Adana, Mersin, Antalya, Kocaeli, and in districts in Istanbul where lower working-class Kurdish religious voters typically reside (Muğurtay, 2015). In the next national election held on June 24, 2018 (in the postpeace process period), the AKP gained 30 parliamentary seats, and the HDP won 27 across provinces located in southeastern Anatolia. A close look at election results shows that Kurdish identity is not reducible to either religion or ethnicity alone. Furthermore, restrictions on Kurdish political representation highlight the importance of studying Muslim civil society as it provides insight into the interests, desires, and anxieties among diverse Kurdish voters as well as shared political and civic demands that transcend ideological and class-based differences.
This article draws upon and complements two main theoretical and empirical bodies of scholarship. The first entails literature on the role of religious civil society in conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes in protracted conflicts. The second concerns the significance of religion on the construction and evolution of Kurdish ethnic and national identity. Islam has traditionally played an important meaning-making role for many Kurds in the Middle East (Atacan, 2001; Cizre, 2002; Leezenberg, 2006; van Bruinessen, 1992; Yegen, 1996). Anthropological and historical sociological accounts show that protonationalism inspired Kurdish religious sheikhs and scholars in the late Ottoman and early Republic periods (Bozarslan, 2000, p. 17; Houston, 2003; van Bruinessen, 2000).
An expanding body of valuable literature in recent years has considered religion and ethnicity in the field of Kurdish studies. Such research generally follows two broad strands. One examines the role of religion in the construction and evolution of Kurdish ethnic and national identity and generates analytical classifications (Al, 2019; Gürbüz, 2016; Kurt, 2017b; Sarigil, 2010; Tekdemir, 2018). For instance, Tekdemir (2018) maps the central agents of Kurdish Islamist identity, examining their various strategies and discourses; Çiçek (2016) identifies three distinct social imaginaries among Turkey’s Kurds: secular, socialist, and gender-neutral; pro-Islamist; and Alevi identity-based. Türkmen (2018) usefully introduces a 3-fold typology of religious and ethnic identities, as conceptualised by Sunni Muslim elites: religio-ethnic, ethnoreligious, and religious. Sharing a concern with ethnic boundary-making, Al (2019) offers a multilevel and historical analysis to unpack competing Kurdish and Turkish Islamist actors. Another strand of research has interrogated the peacebuilding function of religion and religious discourses in the Kurdish conflict (Guürses, 2015; Sarıgil, 2010; Sarıgil & Fazlıoğlu, 2013; Yavuz & Özcan, 2006). This article does not seek to create or affirm a typology of groups but instead analyses the ideas, relationships, and agency of a subset Kurdish Islamic civil society to study their discursive and tactical adaptation and resilience in the postpeace process period.
The article begins with a review of debates in the literature on civil society, peacebuilding, and the role of religious actors, followed by an account of the views voiced by nonaligned Kurdish Islamist groups during the peace process (2012–2015) in Turkey. Next, I systematically present the findings of my research and analysis. Finally, a concluding section reflects on the significance of including religious civil society actors in any future peace process, despite their limitations, and offers some thoughts on why this may matter for peacebuilding and development.
Method
The empirical material for this research was gathered through 40 in-depth interviews conducted in Diyarbakir, a major Kurdish city in Turkey, during research trips in September 2013, March 2015, May and September 2017, and November 2018. Interview selection was mindful to consider broader types of CSOs active in the region as well as locally organised ones. The first type includes the Free Thought and Education Rights Association (Özgür-Der) and the Association for Human Rights and Solidarity for the Oppressed (Mazlumder). Both are national-level CSOs, with provincial or regional affiliates at the subnational level in Diyarbakir. Mazlumder was established in 1991 as an Islamist human rights organisation. Its Diyarbakir branch has historically mobilised to raise awareness of the Kurdish conflict and as a result been targeted by Turkish nationalists for veering too close to the Kurdish movement. For example, Mazlumder defended the rights of political prisoners incarcerated in the 1990s due to their alleged affiliation with the PKK. Created in 1999 in Istanbul, Özgür-Der declared equal higher education opportunities in Turkey as its goal but was mainly concerned with lifting the ban on the headscarf (Kadıoğlu, 2005).
Among other groups interviewed were the Hak Insiyatifi (Right Initiative), a left-leaning Islamist human rights organisation founded after the dissolution of Mazlumder and smaller peripheral groups that are not mobilised nationally.
Confidentiality issues were extensively discussed, and pseudonyms are used to respect the privacy of interviewees. To gain a broad-based and representative understanding, interviewees were selected from across partisan lines; however, I can only represent the views of those individuals who were willing to speak with me. Despite efforts to ensure gender balance among the interlocutors, only six were women. The ages of the interlocutors range from 19 to 65. All of the respondents identified as Sunni Muslims. Data gathering took the form of face-to-face, semistructured interviews with the location based on the preference of the respondent. Following initial contact, the snowball method was used. Informal conversations were also held with activists, former volunteers, or unaffiliated Kurdish Muslims during this period. Analysis also draws upon secondary research, organisational pamphlets, articles, and workshop reports published by Kurdish Islamist civil society groups based in Turkey.
I posed open-ended questions on the government-led reforms, the narrative of “Islamic brotherhood/fraternity,” and understandings of the political context and actors at national and subnational levels. During my research trips following the collapse of the peace process in 2017 and 2018 for over a month, questions focused on perceptions and impact of the armed violence and challenges to civil society activities, participation, and mobilisation in Diyarbakir. While all but two interviews were digitally recorded during 2013 and 2015, none of my interviewees consented to this in 2017–2018 at which point I took detailed notes instead. After the transcription, I used an open coding method and identified common or reoccurring words and patterns in the transcripts. The aim was to identify differences and congruence between the pre- and postpeace process phases.
Religious Civil Society and Conflict
Debates
While considerable literature exists about the ways in which civil society can support peacebuilding aims in the aftermath of violent conflict (Barnes, 2005; Crowther, 2001; Goodhand, 2006; Paffenholz, 2010; Pouligny, 2005), there is less research about the function of religiously oriented civil society in situations of ongoing or protracted conflict. The role of religion in conflict and peacebuilding is complex and highly variable across different cases (Fox, 1997; Gürses & Rost, 2017). Türkmen (2018) notes that conflict scholarship has traditionally treated religion as a divisive force (p. 572), and Gürses and Rost (2017) find that co-religiosity among warring ethnic parties in a civil war does not guarantee longer postwar peace duration. However, religious actors have been recognised by some scholars for their role in war-to-peace transitions (Haynes, 2009; Toft et al., 2011). This parallels a critical turn over the past 2 decades in the study of civil society and peacebuilding, where critics have challenged decisions to avoid traditional or religious authorities in favour of international NGOs or government-funded, technocratic peacebuilding initiatives (Elayah & Verkoren, 2019, p. 4). A body of scholarship emerged to show that religious actors effectively contribute to peace in violent conflicts, and ethical ideals such as fraternity and solidarity can help divided societies emerging from a history of violence (Crocker, 2003; De Juan et al., 2015). This aligns with the “local turn” in peace and conflict studies that have argued that peace processes need to be inclusive of local actors and bottom-up processes (MacGinty & Richmond, 2013).
Scholars have pointed to the use of Islamic teachings and practices by a range of social and political movements worldwide as testament to its discursive resonance and potential as an agent of change (Walton, 2017; Wickham, 2002; Wiktorowicz, 2004); that religious elites can play a productive role in democratisation the civil liberties (Yildirim, 2013) and peace processes (Toft et al., 2011). In contrast, notable studies have concluded that in ethnic conflicts where actors share a common religion, religion often fails to serve as an effective conduit for peace (Aspinall, 2009; Guürses, 2015; Guürses & Rost, 2017; Türkmen, 2018). However, There is a dearth of understanding when it comes to how religious organisations actually react and respond to violence, renegotiate their status with the state, and shift their practices of advocacy and rights claiming over time.
This article modifies and builds on the framework developed by Poskitt and Dufranc (2011) and Elayah and Verkoren (2019). These authors identify a number of challenges faced by CSOs in the context of conflict, including state failure, restrictions on freedom of speech, and the preferences of external donors to show that conflict dampens opportunities for CSOs to influence government policies and achieve social change.
Polarisation in the Kurdish Field: A Brief Account
The role of Kurdish Islamist civil society needs to be contextualised within the political and social bipolarity that prevails in most of the Kurdish-majority areas in Turkey between the state and its interlocutors on the one hand and the Kurdish national movement on the other. Established in 1923, the secular Republic of Turkey regulated the public expression of religion, which was upheld through a mix of secular institutions and the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı). Successive conservative Turkish political parties brokered alliances with local religious or tribal elites in the Kurdish areas for decades by upholding a system of privileged beneficiaries and providing security, status, and cultural identity in order to expand their voter base. The idea of Islam as a unifying doctrine was consolidated in the post-1980 coup d’état era when the “Turk-Islam synthesis” became the state’s political–cultural organising principle to combat a leftist revolutionary programme of ideas (Sarkissian & Özler, 2013, p. 1018; Toprak, 1990). In the late 1990s, Kurdish Islamic social networks, religious intellectuals, and CSOs expanded in Diyarbakir and surrounding areas. This accelerated with the ascendency of the AKP, which marked a phase of relative liberalisation due to legal reforms connected to Turkey’s harmonisation and accession process to the European Union (Türkmen, 2018).
Tracing these trends, the PKK, founded in 1978 as an armed Marxist-Leninist organisation, moved to mute and modify its hard-line rejection of religion in the 2000s, although debates on the question of Islam and the Kurds date back to the 1990s (Al, 2019, p. 128). A number of peripheral groups populate the Kurdish Islamist field also, including religious traditions, prominent sheikh families, the Kurdish medrese culture, and descendants of the Prophet (Atacan, 2001; Tekdemir, 2018). A contentious actor is the outlawed Kurdish Hizbullah, an outlawed Sunni Islamist militant organisation that was founded in 1979 and is generally regarded as the state’s clandestine ally against the PKK throughout much of the 1990s (Çakır, 2001; Kurt, 2017a, 2017b).
Kurdish Islamist Civil Society During the Peace Process in Turkey
Islamic brotherhood, the idea that Islam constitutes a unifying bond tying together Muslim Turks and Kurd since time immemorial, was a common refrain in the AKP’s approach to the Kurdish conflict (Yavuz & Özcan, 2006). Beginning in mid-2009, the AKP government introduced a series of social, cultural, and political legal rights. An amendment to Law No. 2923 in 2003 had already permitted private courses for the learning of different languages and dialects traditionally used by Turkish citizens in their daily lives. On September 30, 2013, the ban on political propaganda in languages other than Turkish and restrictions on the use of Kurdish letters “x,” “w,” and “q” were lifted. Reforms also allowed education in mother tongue languages other than Turkish in private but not state-funded schools. In late 2012, a second track began that aimed for the disarmament and demobilisation of the PKK and the withdrawal of armed guerrilla units from Turkish territory by facilitating talks between the Turkish National Intelligence Service and high-ranking militants in the hopes of a peace settlement (Çandar, 2013; Özpek, 2017).
During my fieldwork in Diyarbakir between 2012 and 2014, respondents framed the peace process as a historic opportunity for dialogue and levied an Islamic critique of Sunni-Turkish orthodoxy that delegitimised Kurdish distinctiveness. Islamist activists advocated three main types of collective rights: the official recognition of the Kurdish language as a mother tongue language, a formal status in the constitution, and greater political and civic rights.
During this period of relative free speech in 2013–2014, the subject of group rights for the Kurds emerged frequently during my interviews. Often the contents of such rights-claims were described in abstracted, apolitical terms like the “right to exist”; “gain visibility” or “experience my Kurdish identity” freely within Turkey. In the same period, some actors argued that self-determination was the philosophical and institutional expression of Islamic social justice, fairness, and moral equivalence as well as bureaucratic efficiency. According to an experienced civil rights activist with Ozgur-Der in Diyarbakir, “Kurdish identity-based rights are justified because they are natural God-given rights that are endorsed by the diverse constellation of the people of the ummah.” 5
In September 2013, a Muslim Kurdish activist who had volunteered with Mazlumder, argued that protection human rights would contribute to an egalitarian society on the basis of equal citizenship. While some advocates avoided concrete institutional proposals for change, others openly debated alternative power-sharing models. Socio-economic grievances were common in my interviews, such as intergenerational poverty, youth drug abuse, and unemployment in Diyarbakir, which respondents seemed to rationalise as a result of social trauma caused by mis- or nonrecognition of their Kurdish identity and cultural rights by the state.
Despite ideological, class-based, and factional intra-Kurdish cleavages, most Kurdish actors agreed on key individual and collective rights during the peace process. A number of interviewees noted that “Islamic brotherhood” (Islam kardeşliği) denotes a de facto assimiliationist or elitist approach. Across a range of actors and activists, there was a consensus that an Islamic identity should not override legal recognition of Kurdish cultural and political rights claims.
Challenges Faced by Kurdish Islamist Civil Society in the Postpeace Process Period
In the second half of July 2015, the PKK-linked Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement militia launched what they called an armed resistance in Kurdish-populated urban areas close to the Syrian border in towns like Sur, Lice, Yuüksekova, Nusaybin, and Cizre against Turkish security forces. Kurdish insurgents unilaterally declared “democratic autonomy,” claims a model of political, administrative, economic, legal, and ecological autonomy based on Öcalan’s ideology (Akkaya & Jongerden, 2012; Ziriğ, 2014, p. 76). However, unilateral assertions of local autonomy without deliberation and consent by the central state are generally not viewed as a legitimate exercise of the principle of self-determination under international law (Buchanan, 2017; Fabry, 2015).
In the first 2 years following the onset of violence, the government replaced almost 90 elected mayors in southeastern districts with appointed trustees, and the coleaders of the HDP Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yuüksekdağ were arrested in November 2016 on terrorism charges. The government declared emergency curfews in 22 towns and city neighbourhoods. Investigations were launched into close to 100 Kurdish-run municipalities on charges of acting in cohort with the PKK to forcefully implement a system of self-rule (Geerdink, 2015). According to third party figures, at least 4,906 people have been killed in clashes or terror attacks since 20 July 2015 (Crisis Group, 2020). The government approach put emphasis on securitisation, with implications for civil society across Turkey but especially in the Kurdish-dominated areas. The concept of “securitisation” is borrowed from the Copenhagen School in security studies (Buzan et al., 1998; Kaliber & Tocci, 2010) and describes situations where the so-called Other is perceived to pose an existential threat to a “referent” group, demanding extraordinary measures that overtime become normalised (Kaliber & Tocci, 2010, p. 192).
Based on analysis of my research findings, this section discusses three challenges confronting Kurdish Islamist CSOs in the postpeace process period (2015–2018): (1) their relations with the state, (2) the legacy and relationship with institutional violence, and (3) their ability to advocate and represent the needs and desires of the local community.
Managing Relations With the State
My findings suggest that certain CSOs saw the postconflict moment as introducing a new opportunity structure and variously justified state cooperation to meet immediate postconflict humanitarian goals, increase their visibility and moral symbolic legitimacy, or reposition in relation to competing Kurdish actors. In January 2016, an umbrella organisation consisting of close to 100 smaller associations, including Özgür-Der, created the “Diyarbakir Islamic NGOs” Platform and began a nationwide charity campaign called, “Let us aid the refugees of Sur” for victims in especially heavy-hit areas (Sırat & Kaynak, 2016). The organisers did not claim a desecuritising purpose (Kaliber &Tocci, 2010) and instead set out to highlight the Muslim credentials of Kurdish war-torn communities. Volunteers visited the governor’s office and the Diyarbakir head of the AKP party office (Deniz & Temal, 2016), and the campaign resonated in the progovernment media. 6 The main purpose of such state–local partnering can be identified as naming local Kurdish groups as allies to the government and as ideologically, materially, and morally in opposition to the Kurdish movement.
However, Kurdish Muslim groups claimed they were unfairly targeted on social media for endorsing state security policies for self-aggrandizement, material gain, and status (Alkış, 2015). Indeed, sceptics have long claimed that many Islamist CSOs function as partisan “Governmental Non-Governmental Organizations” (Ruhavioğlu, 2016).
In contrast, Kurdish civil society activism and human rights monitoring that appeared critical of the government were subject to scrutiny and surveillance. For example, Mazlumder established a commission “to monitor the situation” and “promote a peaceful solution” after the restart of violence in southeastern cities in 2015–2016 (Vicini, 2018, p. 771–772). The commission, based mainly in Diyarbakir, authored two reports in the wake of the armed conflict, which was criticised for its reporting of human rights violations seen as unfairly critical of state security forces by central headquarter members (B. Kilinç, 2017). During emergency rule, a trustee was appointed to the board of Mazlumder, and in March 2017, an emergency executive board meeting convened in Istanbul decided to shut down 16 branches, 12 of which were based in Kurdish-majority cities in the southeast region, and approximately 3,000 volunteers stripped of their membership. After the dissolution of Mazlumder in Diyarbakir, some former members reorganised to establish the Right Initiative ( Marksist interview, 2017).
A significant national crisis occurred in Turkey after the failed coup d’état attempt on July 15, 2016, organised by a faction of Turkey’s military loyal to the Muslim cleric Fethullah Guülen. The coup attempt resulted in the tragic deaths of over 300 people and injured more than 2,100 others. Subsequent statutory decrees under the State of Emergency introduced restrictions on civil society and freedoms of expression, association, and assembly in the interest of national security and order (The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, 2018). Many Kurdish Islamist groups initially believed that the spirit of national solidarity against the coup instigators would permit a return to the Kurdish peace process since the AKP was seen to have reasserted its status as the guarantor of stability in the face of an existential threat (B. Kilinç, 2016; Hafiza Merkezi, 2018). However, speaking to me in late 2018, an activist with Ozgur-Der in Diyarbakir, stated that “At no point in the political history of the Republic has the hegemony of Turkish ethnic, military, and institutional power been so visible in Diyarbakir.” He noted that pious Kurds felt threatened by nationalist slogans that were perceived as excluding Kurdish Muslims from the narrative of postcoup victory that was attributed mainly to ethnic or nationalist Turks.
However, other respondents in 2017–2018 expressed a favourable response to government interventions. According to a Kurdish Muslim male affiliated with the Right Initiative: During the critical juncture of peace-making, many in the Kurdish religious community began to see no clash or fundamental contradiction in this new public and dual self. They continued to insist on the right to mother tongue education but these voters justified the co-existence of a tolerant sub-Kurdish identity with political allegiance to the government and its local intermediaries. They read the works of Kurdish nationalist poet Cigerxwîn, Şerefnamê, a definitive Kurdish history, and the Kurdish literary epic Mem û Zîn. This is the new Kurdish conservative class who believe in incremental, steady progress in the name of Kurdish rights: they are not Kurdish nationalists, but rather, Kurdish culturalists. (Interview September 30, 2017)
Historical Legacy and Relationship With Violence
Division between accommodationist versus rejectionist responses to secular-leftist conceptions of Kurdish nationalism has historically been a driver of internal Kurdish factionalism. Islamist rejectionists oppose the imposition of Marxist doctrine, and interviewees’ condemnation of pro-Ocalan insurgents can be read as a practice of self-legitimation through internal boundary-making. This ideological and symbolic fracture deepened in the postpeace process period for a number of interrelated reasons.
The displacement of guerrilla tactics into urban centres compelled Kurdish Islamist groups to morally and discursively ostracise the Kurdish insurgency, spawning a cycle of assigning blame at the intrapersonal and organisational levels. According to one Islamist human rights activist who spoke with me in February 2016, “the violence erected new and confirmed existing boundaries between Kurdish interests, actors and the state.” He described it as a moment of dislocation and a “life/death” severance in the Kurdish imagination, which he understood as signalling the end of hopes for a political settlement to the armed conflict. In 2015 and 2016, Özgür-Der issued public statements denouncing the PKK-backed youth militants for urban violence, including digging barricades and trenches, costing civilian lives and destruction to homes and local businesses (Haksöz Haber, 2016; Kaya, 2016; Nazlıcan, 2016).
A 52-year-old male volunteer with Özgur-Der told me in November 2018 that the violence triggered by the gradual erosion in piety by the secularising paradigm of Öcalan’s ideology, which ruptured the umbilical cord between Islam and “Kurdish self-knowledge.” He continued: “My right to exist as a Kurd is derived by my birth as a Muslim believer. My diminished status by virtue of being a Kurd in this country has nothing to do with a Marxist or socialist struggle.” The view that Islam and Leftist politics are not compatible is common among social conservative voters across Turkey and is not exceptional to the Kurds.
Another area of intragroup contention relates to postviolence rehabilitation in the area. The government allocated over USD$3.4 billion to fund a reconstruction plan for areas most affected by the violence with regeneration programmes focusing on the ancient neighbourhood of Sur, which was the epicentre of armed clashes. 7 Many residents opposed what they saw as “gentrification” to erase traces of Kurdish social and cultural history from public spaces, such as the removal of Kurdish nameplates and inscriptions hung on municipal buildings. Interviewees expressed mixed ideas, with some praising economic investment as a step towards local reconciliation. For example, one said, “Sur used to be a highly charged political, even quasi-military, zone controlled mainly by youth sympathizers of the PKK. A bird could not fly here without their permission.”
My findings suggest that Islamic CSOs struggle to navigate a deeply polarised field of competition over the right to mobilise for Kurdish sociopolitical and religious demands in the making of a future peace agreement. To act impartially, Islamist groups struggle to balance their condemnation of armed violence with attention to the needs and interests of their local constituency who have incurred emotional and material losses due to protracted violence, state discrimination, or lack of economic opportunities.
Advocacy and Representation of the Needs of the Community
The spatial distortions and social trauma caused by the urban violence (2015–2016) and policies of state securitisation compelled Kurdish Islamist CSOs to pursue diverse advocacy and mobilisation tactics. One was to reframe rights discourse away from divisive political self-determination to social–cultural rights. The collapse of the peace process altered the semantics of rights claiming, as navigating a securitised rubric meant that actors began to self-censor or express demands in passive, flexible, or indeterminate language. This included phrases such as “spiritual emancipation” for the Kurds, calls for spaces of “Kurdish self-knowing,” and legal autonomy to pass laws in line with Islamic scripture and Kurdish values on family and honour. Unlike the period of the peace process, demands like the constitutional recognition of Kurdish rights, Kurdish autonomy, and decentralisation were dropped from the public sphere. Civil society actors did not want to be castigated as propagating a separatist agenda in the wake of the unilateral declarations of autonomy that spurred violence, which according to Ahmet, a former activist with Mazlumder, is a function of “civil realpolitik and common sense.” When the “right to self-determination” was uttered, it referred mainly to the symbolic idea of “controlling one’s own fate,” cultural rights, the right to nonviolence, and freedom from physical harm. This can be read as a reaffirmation of religio-symbolic identity over an ethnicised political one in response to violence.
In contrast, in my interviews in 2017–2018 with left-wing or unaffiliated Kurdish Muslims, Islamist activists were described as “little more than moralizing bystanders wielding the stick of religion,” “out of date and out of ideas,” and “blind to Kurdish national aims and true self-determination.” Another interviewee said Islamists adopt “hypermoralism,” singularly draw upon Quranic verses or scripture to demonise ideological opponents and caution against pervasive moral decay. Critics also point to the problem that most religious CSOs outside of the Kurdish national movement tend to exclude nonorthodox conceptions of piety or other sects such as Alevis in Turkey. A graduate law student told me in November 2018 that the Kurdish Islamist camp failed after the peace process to uphold the principles of fairness, truth-seeking, and justice: “Islamists have a narrow and ideological constituency in the Kurdish region, and lack wider public trust, mainly owing to the inadequacy of their response to state violence and human rights violations against Kurdish citizens.”
In response to these criticisms, interviewed Islamist activists pointed to “secular biases” and Marxist stigmatisation and voiced frustration at being identified as government apologists or assimilationists. Instead, many insisted that they struggled to “keep the flame” alive in defence of basic rights and freedoms, including issuing press statements protesting certain policies adopted by regional government-appointed political trustees and the reinstatement of the Turkish national oath and continued to defend language rights (Özgur-Der, 2018). However, a prevalent view was one of collective fatigue and weariness among interviewees who argued their calls for all sides to end violence and return to a civilian peace process fell upon deaf ears in 2016. “It is not that we did not implore the government to return to the table, but we simply did not find an audience; we were not seen as a counterpart” said one member of Özgur-Der in November 2018.
Some interviewees confessed to “wait-and-see” approach to mitigate against the risk that peace activism may incur too high a personal or mean legal encumbrances. One activist put it this way in late 2018, It is not true that our ideas and activities as Islamist activists are protected by the state, or are immune from penalties. I cannot risk imprisonment or the loss of employment…. Activism is a privilege, an expensive political token for individuals like me.
Feyzi, a former Mazlumder volunteer, told me he became disillusioned mainly because the Islamist movement failed to deliver original political, social, literary, or artistic contributions to peace activism. “There is only so much we can accomplish by summoning Qur’anic scripture,” he said, “We need to cultivate original ideas that speak truth to power from a Muslim perspective.” This gives credence to the point that peacebuilding requires transformation in the political and civic status of citizens rather than the mere provision of reparative or religio-moral gestures. Overall, my interview material demonstrates myriad complexities encountered by Kurdish Muslim activists who struggle to express their hybrid ethnic and religious identities.
Conclusions
A number of preliminary conclusions can be drawn from this case study. Ethnicity and religion mutually constitute a field of political, social, and symbolic competition. In the period under study, both nationally organised CSOs and local organisations endured securitisation measures that limited their propeace advocacy activities. Religious Kurdish organisations struggle to claim impartiality or independence either within their local community or vis-à-vis the state, which limits their inclusion in dialogues about peace and development. The interface between ethnic and Islamic identities is likely to continue to evolve, with significant consequences for propeace programmes. The three types of challenges identified here can be adapted to analyse the limitations and opportunities faced by a number of religious civil society actors in diverse conflict situations.
The findings here align with studies that argue co-religiosity is not by itself a sufficient basis on which to build an inclusive and durable peace settlement to ethnic or protracted conflict. As a unifying hegemonic discourse, “Islamic fraternity” was opposed by a cross section of Kurds across ideological, partisan, and class-based lines both during and after the end of the peace process. However, this should not dissuade policymakers and practitioners from recognising the role that religious organisations may perform in facilitating conflict transformation overtime. Religious actors and ideas are best understood as diversifying peacebuilding options rather than as a substitute for socio-economic investment and legal redress for longstanding citizen grievances.
From a policy perspective, in cases where a diverse range of actors along the secular–religious spectrum can agree on a common set of cultural, political, and civic rights, governments may be compelled to address demands for reform. However, it is important that no one group is granted a privileged status in peace negotiations in exchange for their acquiescence or submission to statist rhetoric, which would go against the principles of inclusion and true representation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study has been funded by Leverhulme Trust.