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States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey

Biner, Zerrin Özlem (2020) States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey. Ethnography of Political Violence . University of Pennsylvania Press, 264 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-5175-3. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:69996)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. (Contact us about this Publication)
Official URL:
https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16013.html

Abstract

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.

Item Type: Book
Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Human and Social Sciences > School of Anthropology and Conservation
Depositing User: Zerrin Biner Arroyo-Kalin
Date Deposited: 08 Nov 2018 15:28 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Feb 2021 13:59 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/69996 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Biner, Zerrin Özlem.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0466-1423
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