RP7: Reclaiming the State’s Security Promise from the Perspective of Statelessness
RP7 is about Turkey’s Kurdish political movement—in particular, its technical experts and their environmental practices of protection. Kurds are the world’s largest stateless nation. Turkey’s Kurdish liberation movement has held on to the desire for a Kurdistan state while also exercising sovereignty creatively in the absence of their own state. Their situation complicates singular narratives in relevant scholarship about decline: the decline of democracy, of liberalism, and of the state form of sovereignty. It troubles the novelty often assigned to “crisis” and “catastrophe” today; the Kurds have long experienced statelessness itself as a crisis and a catastrophe. It therefore raises an underexplored question regarding the promise of inclusive protection associated with the state: what do stateless communities do to and with this promise? How do they relate to it and engage with it?
RP7 explores this question through civic environmentalist initiatives founded recently by Kurdish technical experts. These experts worked for Kurdish-run municipalities before being dismissed by the Turkish state during its crackdown on the Kurdish political movement in the late 2010s. The experts had taken up these municipal posts from the mid-2000s onwards as part of a strategy of exercising sovereignty through municipalism. This experience positions them at the intersection of the three modes of protection that the Research Unit calls governmental triage, self-organization and co-production.
In exploring how communities made unsafe by state-authored security respond practically and physically by creating environments, RP7 uses the following methods:
- Ethnographic research with the members and beneficiaries of the civic environmentalist initiatives;
- Co-design and co-dissemination activities with them;
- Cultural production (e.g. a podcast and an exhibition)—because RP7 aims to reflect the lived, embodied, and place-specific character of the environmental practices mentioned above.