The military conflict between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the
Turkish Armed Forces has endured over the course of the past three
decades. Since 1984, the conflict has claimed the lives of more than
45,000 civilians, militants, and soldiers, as well as causing thousands
of casualties and disappearances. It has led to the displacement of
millions of people and caused the forced evacuation of nearly 4,000
villages and towns. Suspended periodically by various cease-fires, the
conflict has been a significant force in shaping many of the ethnic,
social, and political enclaves of contemporary Turkey, where
contradictory forms of governance have been installed across the Kurdish
region.
In States of Dispossession, Zerrin Özlem Biner traces the violence of
the protracted conflict in the Kurdish region through the lens of
dispossession. By definition, dispossession implies the act of depriving
someone of land, property, and other belongings as well as the result of
such deprivation. Within the fields of Ottoman and contemporary Turkish
studies, social scientists to date have examined the dispossession of
rights and property as a technique for governing territory and those
citizens living at its margins. States of Dispossession instead
highlights everyday experiences in an attempt to understand the
persistent and intangible effects of dispossession. Biner examines the
practices and discourses that emerge from local memories of unspoken,
irresolvable histories and the ways people of differing religious and
ethnic backgrounds live with the remains of violence that is still
unfolding. She explores the implicit knowledge held by ordinary people
about the landscape and the built environment and the continuous
struggle to reclaim rights over dispossessed bodies and places.
