Co-Productions of the Nation, State and Outsiders: The Making of Dersim in Turkey

• In Event: 146 - Regular Session. Nations/Nationalism

Abstract

This paper analyzes relational formations of the nation, state, and outsiders in Turkey in the early twentieth century based on the case of Dersim, a municipality in Eastern Turkey, which was problematized due to its outsider populations, namely Kurdish, Alevi, and Armenian, who became targets of massacres and displacement in the 1930s. I argue that construction and management of outsiders through different means and strategies determined at the historically contingent intersections of local, national, and transnational relations are key to an understanding of the state and national identity. In the 1930s Dersim, with its religious and cultural beliefs and customs, people from different ethnic backgrounds, its rivers, mountains, and caves, was problematized as a threat to the unity of the nation, an anomaly in the nation-space, and a problem of management for the state. Through the example of Dersim this paper centralizes outsiders in discussions of the nation and the state and argues that the limits to the construction of a national identity are not set by inherited national myths and symbols, but rather a historical construction of boundaries, which are reconfigured through relationships of power and the struggle between the state and outsider populations. Moreover, a modern Turkish state, a relatively recent formation, can exert power effects through constructing, reaffirming, and transforming boundaries and securing state's sphere of influence by including the insiders in this sphere.

Author

• Ozlem Goner, College of Staten Island, CUNY