Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics. Zeki Sarigil
or constrain Kurdish ethnonationalism (also known as the “Islamic peace hypothesis”). Can Islam really serve as an antidote for Kurdish ethnonationalism? This study expands our comprehension of the recent developments and shifts within Kurdish ethnopolitics with respect to religion and shows that it is problematic to expect Islam to contain ethnonationalist orientations or aspirations. In other words, the findings of this study challenge the Islamic peace hypothesis.
This study also discusses the implications of the Islamic opening of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement for Turkish leftist politics and the debates on political Islam. As has been widely acknowledged, most of the Turkish leftist circles have been strongly secular and antireligious. The shift toward religion in the Kurdish case implies that such boundary work may trigger similar debates and possibly transformations in Turkish leftist circles.
Finally, this particular case study also has major ramifications for the debates on political Islam. The empirical analyses show that while Kurdish ethnopolitical elites have expanded the symbolic and social boundaries of the movement to incorporate Islamic ideas and actors, they have also attempted to promote a more liberal, democratic interpretation of Islam. Given that the rise of relentless violence by radical jihadist Islamic groups (e.g., Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—ISIS or Daesh) across several parts of the world in the past decades has revived the conventional debate about whether Islam is really compatible with secular, liberal, democratic values, such an initiative by the secular Kurdish movement becomes quite significant and deserves further scholarly attention.
Organization of the Book
The book is organized as follows: Chapter 1 focuses on theoretical issues. The chapter first presents the main assumptions and arguments of ethnic boundary-making theory. Next, it introduces key terms such as the notions of boundary and symbolic and social boundaries. Then, the chapter discusses main boundary-making strategies and internal and external boundary contestation processes, which are likely to be triggered by major boundary work. Finally, the chapter advances some specific hypotheses about boundary-making processes, particularly about boundary contestation.
Chapter 2 presents the evolving relations between the secular Kurdish movement and Islam since the late 1970s and interprets the movement’s shifting attitude toward Islam from the perspective of the boundary approach. This chapter shows that the movement, which initially adopted a secular, Marxist outlook, distanced itself from Islam and Islamic actors and movements during the 1970s and 1980s. In other words, the Kurdish movement showed a strong secular ethnonationalist character in its initial period. To put it in more theoretical terms, by dissociating themselves from Islam, the Kurdish ethnopolitical leaders contracted the symbolic boundaries of Kurdishness and the social boundaries of the movement itself. Then, the chapter documents the rise of an increasingly positive and welcoming attitude toward Islam and Islamic actors within the secular Kurdish movement in the post-1990 period, arguing that Kurdish ethnopolitical leaders were expanding the social and symbolic boundaries of the movement. Finally, the chapter shows that in the 2000s the movement initiated much more systematic and comprehensive steps to accommodate Islam and Islamic actors, reinforcing the expanded boundaries.
Chapter 3 analyzes the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of Kurdish movement’s boundary work. The chapter addresses the following questions: Why, how, and with what consequences has the secular Kurdish movement adopted a much more Islam-friendly attitude? How can we theorize the Islamic opening of the secular Kurdish movement? What can we learn about ethnic boundary-making processes from this particular case? The chapter draws attention to the role of four causal factors behind Kurdish boundary expansion: ideological shift (i.e., the declining influence of Marxism); the need to expand the movement’s social basis and popularity; electoral politics; and legitimacy struggles. The chapter then scrutinizes internal and external boundary contestations activated by the Kurdish ethnopolitical leadership’s boundary work and analyzes whether such contestations had any impact on boundary-making efforts of the Kurdish leadership. The chapter finally engages with some possible alternative considerations.
Finally, the conclusion first summarizes the key arguments of the book and then focuses on the broader theoretical and practical implications of the study, particularly for the boundary approach (e.g., ethnic boundary-making and boundary contestation processes), for ethnicity and nationalism studies (the ramifications for structural, e.g., the primordialism and sociobiological approaches, and agential, e.g. constructionist, instrumentalist, and elite theory, perspectives in the field), for the nexus between religion and nationalism, for the evolution of Kurdish ethnopolitics, and for the debates on secularism and political Islam in the region.
Given such a structure of the book, readers who are not really interested in the theoretical discussion on the processes of ethnic boundary-making and boundary contestation might skip chapter 1 and move to the remaining chapters for the analyses of the Islamic opening of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement in the past decades and the broader implications of the case of Kurdish boundary work.
1
The Boundary Approach to Ethnicity and Nationalism
In analyzing the shifting attitude of the Kurdish movement toward Islam in the past decades, this study utilizes the boundary approach as a main theoretical framework. As many studies also acknowledge, boundary making is an inherent part of ethnic or national group formation and identification, as well as of ethnic and nationalist movements. For instance, Nash (1989, 10) convincingly explains, “Where there is a group [ethnic group or movement], there is some sort of boundary, and where there are boundaries, there are mechanisms to maintain them.” Similarly, Wimmer (2013, 3) suggests, “Social and symbolic boundaries emerge when actors distinguish between different ethnic categories and when they treat members of such categories differently.” Regarding ethnic or nationalist movements, Conversi (1995) indicates that nationalism entails boundary creation and boundary maintenance processes. In the same way, Eriksen (2010, 10) remarks, “Like ethnic ideologies, nationalism stresses the cultural similarity of its adherents and, by implication, it draws boundaries vis-à-vis others, who thereby become outsiders” (see also Handler 1988; Cornell and Hartmann 2007). Hence, the boundary approach is a highly relevant theoretical tool for ethnicity and nationalism studies. As the current study shows, it is also highly useful in making better sense of the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of the recent shifts and transformations in Kurdish ethnopolitics (i.e., the Islamic opening of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement in the past decades).
This chapter first presents the main assumptions and arguments of the boundary approach and then draws some specific, exploratory hypotheses about ethnic boundary-making processes, particularly about the processes of (internal and external) boundary contestation.
Ethnic Boundary-Making Theory: Assumptions and Arguments
Boundary-making theory, which is primarily concerned with boundary-making or construction processes such as the demarcation, reproduction, and transformation of the boundaries of ethnic or national categories and of ethnonationalist movements, was first presented in the late 1960s in a collection of ethnographic studies edited by Fredrik Barth (1969a).1 Challenging the idea that stable and shared intrinsic, cultural features constitute ethnicity, this seminal work offers a more subjectivist, relational, processual, and interactionist approach to ethnicity and suggests that the focus of research should be on the dynamics of intergroup interactions, encounters, boundaries, and self-categorization or self-identification processes rather than on the “cultural stuff” that ethnic or national categories contain. For Barth (1969b), groups are the products of boundary production and reproduction during interactions between insiders and outsiders (see also R. Jenkins 2015, 20). As Brubaker (2009, 29) notes, “Barth was reacting against the static objectivism of then prevailing approaches to ethnicity, which sought to ground ethnicity in stable, objectively observable patterns of shared culture.” Along the same lines, Cederman (2002, 413) suggests, “Reacting to such reified conceptions of ethnicity, Fredrik Barth (1969) shifted the