After nationwide protests in 2013, Turkey was convulsed by a “clash of Islamisms” on the one hand, and the breakdown of a peace process between Ankara and the Kurdish movement on the other. Driven by the fraught interplay of charismatic personalities, rousing ideologies, and an increasingly unstable regional context, these processes exacerbated the turns to illiberal governance and religious populism. Two key results of these processes were (i) the Erdoğan-led AKP’s pivot to an alliance with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and (ii) a failed coup attempt on July 16, 2016. A critical juncture in the fullest sense of the word, the coup attempt led to the consolidation of the ruling alliance around a renewed version of Turkish-Islamist synthesis.

The central question of this chapter is how a region like Ottoman Kurdistan comes to explode in violence. I suggest that violence manifests in a cumulative way. To make this argument, I adopt an expanded conception of violence that moves beyond physical encounters or bloodshed between groups to also incorporate smaller acts of property violation, such as animal theft, as well as violence on a larger canvas, such as through state-building strategies and environmental change. Thus, I argue that to understand the roots of the Armenian massacres of 1894–96 requires understanding decades of environmental degradation and the various forms of violence produced.

This chapter makes four historical interventions. First, It argues that the relief program of the Ottoman central state during the continuum of crisis aimed to maintain agriculture, cities, and the army, but not pastoralists. Although pastoralists lost millions of herd animals, their source of food, financial capital, and sociopolitical power, available historical documents indicate that the Hamidian government did not distribute grain or flocks to pastoralists, and neither did they lend money to rebuild their herds, as they did for peasants. It is unclear whether this was a deliberate policy of the state in order to turn pastoralists into taxable agriculturalists. What is clear is that the traditional Ottoman famine relief policies contributed to mounting ecological and economic disequilibrium between peasants and pastoralists in times of crises and to irreversibly expanding this imbalance in the political ecology of Kurdistan in the post-crises period by triggering displacement, migration, and proletarianization among pastoralist communities.

The current countries in the Middle East and North Africa were all formed, or transformed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by processes of partitioning and territorialization propelled by European colonial expansion and local responses to those interventions. As the region’s political topography was remapped before and after the First World War, collective identities were activated, reimagined, and mobilized within and across these newly delineated units. From Northern Africa to the Iranian plateau, an array of nationalisms emerged over the course of this transformation, pairing notions of peoplehood and political sovereignty in new frameworks of identity. For the Middle East and North Africa, the related questions “what is a nation?” and “when is the nation?” are best answered by focusing on a third question: how has the nation (and nationalism) worked in the region over the past two centuries?

Chapter 4 examines the Jazira’s divided connection from 1918 to 1939 as the region was divided between the Republic of Turkey, French Syria, and British Iraq. It does so through a focus on locusts, refugees, and various interwar state-making projects. While all of the different states in the Jazira endeavored to differentiate themselves from the Ottomans, they undertook strikingly similar projects based on refugee resettlement and sodium arsenite, the new insecticide that each state wielded to kill locusts. The substance did not altogether end the reign of locusts in the region, but it marked a shift in envisioning the land without the insects. The change also coincided with an unprecedented autonomist movement advocating for a French protectorate of the Jazira, and the ensuing conflict encompassed all of the protagonists of Locusts of Power, from the Shammar and the Millî to Armenian genocide survivors and Assyrian refugees. The autonomist effort failed, and the Jazira became the foremost space of Syrian agricultural development, Ottoman dreams of prosperity finally coming to fruition.

Chapter 2 foregrounds locusts and the seminomadic Kurdish group known as the Millî between 1890 and 1908. In a shift from the policies of previous years, the Ottoman state created light cavalries known as the Hamidiye Brigades. Typically seen as co-opting Kurdish groups in defense against Russian invasion or Armenian rebellion, the Hamidiye also encompassed the Millî under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha, who actually pushed south into the Jazira. The chapter traces how provincial borders became invoked alongside the environmental border of the desert in clashes between the Millî and the Shammar. All the while, locusts created conditions favorable to pastoralists. Locusts also forced people to move and, in other cases, offered a plausible justification for nomadic encroachment on the landholdings of urban notables. The chapter concludes with the death of Ibrahim Pasha, and the new political era it seemed to portend, even as locusts continued their work on the edge.

This chapter assesses the evolution of demands by the Turkish Kurdish community from secession to devolution in the context of the most recent negotiations between the Turkish state and Kurdish leaders. The chapter begins by offering background on the Kurdish community with an emphasis on Turkish Kurdistan and the priority placed on decentralization by the Kurdish leadership in that country. This context sets the stage for a close examination of the reconciliation or “peace” process in Turkey between 2009 and 2015 and the evolution of Kurdish leaders’ views on decentralization that emerged over the course of that period. In the third section, the chapter engages with the published political tracts detailing the theory of democratic confederalism that encapsulates the innovative thinking that has emerged over the last two decades among the Kurdish leadership about the potential for devolution to serve their goals of self-governance. The final section of the chapter considers from the perspective of the comparative literature on federalism and devolution the implications of Kurdish theorizing about decentralization as a form of self-determination and the potential of the political experimentation underway in Turkish Kurdistan seeking to implement those theories on the ground.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

Iraq’s brutal leader Saddam Hussein threatened the Persian Gulf regions for two decades. Soon after coming to power he went to war against Iran in 1980. The eight-year war drained both countries of lives and funds. In search of additional oil wealth, Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 to replenish its treasury. President Bush ultimately decided to go to war to repel the Iraqi troops. He forged a multi-national, United Nations–backed coalition and won US congressional approval to expel Hussein’s Republican Guards. The Persian Gulf War featured advanced technological weaponry that utterly vanquished the Iraqi forces as in a Nintendo videogame. The short war contributed to the notion of a Revolution in Military Affairs that promised America easy victories. RMA proved to be no silver bullet against insurgents. The war deepened the Pentagon’s involvement in the Middle East. To protect the rebellious Kurds within Iraq, it established no-fly zones with airpower, which rained down missiles on Iraqi air defenses. This de facto war in the time of peace represented a new version of armed diplomacy. Critically, it set a precedent for future use of aerial drones (pilot-less aircraft) to strike at Islamist militants within countries not at war with the United States.

This chapter describes the duty of States to respect and protect the right to life by preventing and prosecuting racially motivated killings. Race is central to the protection of fundamental human rights, including the right to life. Indeed, the development of the Charter of the United Nations was a response to the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews and the extermination of Roma in the Second World War. Massacres and atrocities have, however, since been perpetrated on every continent: against Tutsis in Rwanda; against Bosniak Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and against Uighurs in China, among many others. In 1988, the Iraqi air force aircraft supported by artillery dropped the nerve agent Sarin and mustard gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in the north of the country. Thousands of people – mainly women and children – died that day, with up to 12,000 believed to have lost their lives since as a result of the effects of the chemical weapons.

Chapter 2 provides a brief overview of the Kurdish region, its peoples and its historic experience in the Turkish Republic since the 1920s. It describes the multiple peoples of the region, including Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Yezidis and Syriacs before discussing its linguistic heterogeneity. It proceeds to outline the emergence of Kurdish Nationalism in the early twentieth century, and how Kurdish political forces were confronted by the Turkish Nationalism of the early Republic. It discusses the Kurdish rebellions of the 1920s and 1930s and the violent state reaction. It finishes by describing some of the socio-economic and political transformations which changed the country in the 1940s and 1950s such as industrialisation and the installation of a form of electoral democracy. It explains how the unintended consequences of the state presence in Kurdistan led to the formation of an educated class of young Kurds with the social capital required to lead a Kurdish cultural and political rival from the 1950s.

This chapter examines the trajectory of challenge in Syria’s Kurdish regions, which stands in marked contrast to trajectories of contention seen in other areas of the country, which generally tended toward ethnic violence. The regime’s relatively conciliatory response to protest in Kurdish areas and toleration of ethnic group–level institutions, namely its courting of Kurdish political parties and the reciprocation of one party, combined to direct challenge away from violence and toward Kurdish-specific issues.

This chapter analyses what happened to the undesired citizens of the Kemalism during the Kemalist nation-building project. The ‘other’ to the state’s desired citizen of Homo LASTus were practising Muslims, Islamists, non-Atatürkists such as leftists and socialists, non-Muslims, Alevis and Kurds who were discriminated against by the Kemalist state in a variety of ways. Not only were attempts made to assimilate or dissimilate them, but they were also denied important bureaucratic positions, despite officially being ‘equal citizens'.The chapter looks at the ‘others’ to the Homo LASTus in order: practising Muslims and Islamists (opposite to the laicist), leftists–socialists–communists (opposite to the Atatürkist), non-Muslims and Alevis (opposite to the Sunni Muslim) and Kurds (opposite to the Turk). Before concluding, the chapter discusses how, for a variety of reasons, these minorities felt a need to hide their identities in public, resorted to dissimulation and were constructed by the majority as villains in different conspiracy theories linked to the insecurities, anxieties, fears and paranoias of the state and the nation.