Building a Society: Kurdish Transformative Mobilization in Times of Violence

Contemporary Kurdish mobilization, as it unfolds in multiple and overlapping contexts of conflict, offers a critical site for examining how non-state-seeking movements build capacity and sustain mobilization beyond traditional frameworks of ethno-nationalist struggles. This dissertation sheds light on mobilization at the intersection of survival and resistance, focusing on the agential practices of narrating, imagining, and self- and place-making as an emancipatory praxis. Navigating a complex history of violence and driven by a desire to restore a fractured society, Kurdish mobilization around the non-state seeking frame posits itself as a paradigmatic case of what I call survival paths of mobilization. First, the study unpacks the relational and procedural dynamics of violence as manifested in the history of Kurdistan and examines how the multi-scalar and transregional assemblage of Turkey's Kurdish conflict turns Kurds into colonial subjects of dereliction and death politics, enforcing collective and translocal emotions of enduring statelessness beyond the legalistic frames. Second, it shows that the ability to spread beyond a specific locality and constituency is fundamentally influenced by how violence is experienced and how alternative social and political orders are imagined in response. The study shows that amid what I conceptualize as composite statelessness, the resignified forms of resistance are not simply about territorial gains or losses but about carving out spaces of autonomy and society-building. Hence, the context of conflict – its intensity, spatial, temporal and sequential variations and how these are perceived and remembered by those affected – directly shapes the strategic and organizational choices, capacities, and narratives of Kurdish mobilization. The empirical material of this within-case study is clustered around three processes of subjugation and their respective situatedness in the conflict assemblage: (1) persecuted movement actors, (2) refugeeized Kurds of the Maxmur refugee camp and (3) minorityized Ezidi-Kurds . Based on in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observations, overall, this research is rooted in accounts from more than sixty participants. Contributing to the broader discussions on how people imagine and seek freedom in times of violence, I argue that the resignifications from below – as distinct as they are in their specific contexts of conflict – emphasize the transformative faculties of relationships, eventually both constituting and being constituted by Kurdish mobilization towards building a society, and not a state.