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Abstract
This article examines Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands to revise theories of state-making by focusing on informal practices and unwritten norms. Based on twelve months of political ethnography (2013–2014), including participant observation and interviews, it explores how the Turkish state has employed both formal and informal strategies—violent and non-violent—to suppress Kurdish dissidence and control people, land, and property. By analyzing everyday practices such as border-crossings, kinship networks, and land cadastre, the article uses informal control as an analytical lens to engage with bottom-up perspectives on ethnic conflict. It finds that lived experiences of uncertainty, fear, and manipulation are central to the state’s authority in contested border regions. Informal control, I argue, is a key tool of state-making where multiple actors compete. This article contributes to debates on political violence, border governance, and informal institutions in divided societies, particularly in the MENA region, offering a grounded view of territorial control and state-society relations.
Supplementary materials
Title
Interview Participant Groups and Demographic Breakdown
Description
Appendix A provides detailed information on the research participants interviewed during twelve months of fieldwork in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands. Table I presents the overall composition of 115 participants across five key groups, including 74 Kurdish villagers and farmers, journalists, lawyers, civil society activists (mostly affiliated with pro-Kurdish parties), and state officials. The table includes gender distribution (89 men and 26 women), offering participant diversity and representation transparency.
Table II focuses specifically on Group I: Kurdish villagers and farmers who lost property during the war. It highlights individual interview details, including participant characteristics, interview dates, locations (primarily in Hakkari), and the languages used (Kurdish and Turkish). These villagers—mostly over 40 and politically engaged—provided critical insights into the everyday experiences of dispossession, violence, and survival. This level of granularity supports the article’s ethnographic approach and contextualizes how informal control operates in contested borderland spaces.
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