Yer Siyaseti: Türkiye Kürdistani’nda Devlet ve Toplumun Mekânsal Düzenlenisi

This article is concerned with a particular form of identity politics in Turkey: attempts by state-institutions to mold society and state-society relations through the construction of space, and oppositional attempts by other state-institutions working against this. Based on a discussion of two cases, this article will show how Turkish state institutions have attempted to shape society through spatial means, but with rather limited success specifically due to the contradictory moves on the part of other institutions. The first case is the so-called ‘Anatolia Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project Sub-Regional Development Plan’, a master plan for the development of a new settlement structure in the war-affected southeast of Turkey. Implementation of this master-plan, drafted under auspices of the Regional Development Administration of the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP-BKI), is obstructed by other state-institutions, in particular the governorships in the region. The resulting stalemate derives from the different aims and objectives motivating institutional thinking: while GAP-BKI plans are shaped by a developmental approach, the governors’ thoughts and actions are dictated by security concerns. The second case is an urban one, the names and renaming strategies for the names attached to streets, parks and other public places in cities (in the same area, Turkey’s southeast). This case will show how municipalities, run by a pro-Kurdish party, attempt to bring names representing a struggle for Kurdish and social rights into the existing city-text. These two cases afford a particular perspective on the internal composition of the political system – an uncovering enabled by the particularly fraught circumstances of this region and its recent geo-political history. Taken together, they suggest that ‘the state’ as such does not exist as a real entity, but only as a cluster of institutions which do not have any necessary unity, and may, on the contrary, be inherently contradictory and conflicting with each othe