Kurdish tribes and the question of assimilation in Turkey

Abstract

After modern Turkey was founded, state elite initiated a comprehensive nationbuilding project and assimilation of Kurds has been a fundamental of part that project. From forced resettlement to compulsory Turkish education, various Turkification policies were put into force. However, it is hard to say that the Turkish state has achieved goal of Turkification in most of Kurdish geographies today. It has become a substantial question what enabled the Kurds to resist assimilation throughout 20th century in the face of ever-growing state repression. I accept that the repression has been the main reason behind the development of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. However, based on a hypothesis-generating case study that I conducted on several tribal and non-tribal Kurdish groups, I argue that the so-called state repression entered into a dialectical relation with the local socio-political power blocks, Kurdish tribes, which decelerated assimilation of the Kurds to a certain degree. Marginalized and ill-treated Kurds were forced to gather around tribes and continue to live within boundaries of these sociologically powerful communities. I also claim that the Kurdish tribes in themselves have a potential to slow down cultural assimilation to a certain degree. They take consent of their members, generate their loyalty and they could become divergent sources of political authority as distributor of scarce economic resources particularly when the state showed infrastructural, economic and administrative incapacity.