States of Dispossession
Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press
Publishing:12th Aug '25
£23.99
This title is due to be published on 12th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
States of Dispossession highlights everyday experiences in an attempt to understand the persistent and intangible effects of dispossession and the ways people of differing religious and ethnic backgrounds remember, experience, and live with the remains of a violence that is still unfolding.
Traces the violence of the protracted conflict in the Kurdish region of Turkey through the lens of dispossession
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.
"States of Dispossession stands out with its rich conceptual framework allowing for a close look at a non-western example of precarious cosmopolitanism in both urban and rural contexts following the footprints of violent past and protracted conflicts. The author’s original longitudinal ethnographic engagement with the material and immaterial actors and imaginary elements makes this book worth reading for the students and researchers of not only Middle Eastern studies but also social sciences including politics, sociology, anthropology and history." * British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies *
"[A]n impressive attempt to tackle layers of violence, suffering, and memory while focusing on the everyday experiences of Kurds, Turks, and Syriacs. The book’s success lies in years of fieldwork that offers a deep and thick understanding of violent relations historically and spatially. Thanks to Biner, one can imagine the stone buildings, lands planted with grapes or cotton, and the yellowish dirt hiding the stories of pain while reading the book. It is an ethnography of suffering that conveys pain, fear, anger, disappointment, and hope to the reader in a complete sense." * New Perspectives on Turkey *
"Biner’s book is an impressive account of the ways in which people live a life with the dead and the past in the present, and how death itself is never far away; it’s a book how people navigate through the pain, injury and loss of others as well as that of themselves. It’s an account of the ways in which people live a precarious life. Ultimately, it’s a book about hope for a better, different life. But it’s also a book that shows the suffocating effects of that hope being ravaged by new rounds of violence as the possibility of a livable life sways back and forth between sheer phantasy and toxic asset." * Politics, Religion & Ideology *
"States of Dispossession makes important contributions to the study of contemporary life in Turkey’s Kurdish regions. The way in which it investigates questions of violence and dispossession through the vantage point of the built environment and the agency of spiritual forces is a welcome move away from the focus on social movements and political parties that prevail in the study of the Kurdish conflict." * Kurdish Studies *
"States of Dispossession is a highly original and rich ethnographic and theoretical work on violence in the Kurdish region of Turkey. It fills a pressing need." * Lale Yalçin-Heckmann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology *
"Zerrin Özlem Biner's book offers sharp analysis of how past violence, the built environment, and law shape the circumstances in which different people in the city of Mardin in southeast Turkey confront the present and envision futures." * Stef Jansen, Manchester University *
ISBN: 9781512828634
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
264 pages