The Everyday Life of the State

A State-in-Society Approach

Adam White

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780295992556
• eBook ISBN: 9780295804637
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Today there are more states controlling more people than at any other point in history. We live in a world shaped by the authority of the state. Yet the complexion of state authority is patchy and uneven. While it is almost always possible to trace the formal rules governing human interaction to the statute books of one state or another, in reality the words in these books often have little bearing upon what is happening on the ground. Their meanings are intentionally and unintentionally misrepresented by those who are supposed to enforce them and by those who are supposed to obey them, generating a range of competing authorities, voices, and allegiances. The Everyday Life of the State explores this "everyday" transformation of state authority into multiple scripts, narratives, and political activities. Drawing upon case studies from across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, the chapters in this book investigate the many ways in which those subjects traditionally regarded as being weak, passive, and obedient manage not only to resist the authority of state actors but to actively subvert and appropriate it, in the process making, unmaking, and remaking the boundaries between state and society over and over again. Collectively, these chapters make an important contribution to the expanding literature on "everyday politics." The "state in society" concept used in this volume has been developed by political scientist Joel S. Migdal, the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies in the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

PART I

THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE TURKISH STATE

1

Seeing the State

Kinship Networks and Kurdish Resistance in Early Republican Turkey

CEREN BELGE

A Guardian journalist who visited a Kurdish village in the Siverek district of Urfa in 1973 wrote: “The real power in the region is held by big landowners…. They function as unelected justices of the peace, mayors and social workers in villages that lack any other governmental authority. Also they are often the only link between the village and the Government institutions in towns nearby” (quoted in McDowall 2004, 402-3). Six years after the Guardian journalist's visit, the rule of landowners in Siverek was challenged by a nascent Kurdish nationalist organization, the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Kârkeran Kurdistan, or PKK), established in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan. Influenced by the Marxist guerrilla movements of the 1970s, the PKK challenged not only the Turkish government and its nationalist ideology but also Kurdish landlords and clan leaders—the local “comprador class”—who collaborated with the Turkish government. At the time, Siverek was controlled by the Bucak clan. In July 1979, PKK militants staged an assassination plot against the leader of the Bucak clan, Mehmet Celal Bucak, who was a member of parliament from the center-right Justice Party and was believed to hold three hundred armed men under his control (İmset 1993, 59-64; Marcus 2007, 44-66). While Mehmet Bucak survived the attack with an injury, the assassination plot marked the beginning of what grew to be a mass, armed movement for Kurdish self-determination led by the PKK. In the following decades, the PKK became a formidable challenge to the Turkish government. By the 1990s, the government could no longer deny the existence of the Kurdish people in Turkey, and in the 2000s the Kurdish movement won a number of crucial concessions for the recognition of Kurdish identity. In the meantime, more than thirty years after the Guardian journalist's visit, the Bucak clan still controlled Siverek. A local lawyer echoed his words: “The people here are not citizens. They have no relationship to the state. The state itself doesn't see them as citizens. It prefers to deal with four strongmen. Here, legislative, judicial, and executive powers are all in the hands of four [clan leaders].”¹

Clan authority in the Kurdish regions of eastern Turkey has been puzzlingly resilient despite the aggressive and often violent strategies pursued by both the Turkish government and the Kurdish national movement to remold the loyalties of the local population along exclusively national lines. Since the establishment of the republic in 1923, the Turkish government has pursued a repressive assimilation policy to transform Kurds into loyal and obedient Turks. The drive for assimilation often went hand in hand with efforts to destroy local sources of allegiance—to tribal chiefs, religious sheikhs, and landlords—and to supplant them with exclusive allegiance to the Turkish nation. While vigorously contesting the government's assimilation policy, the Kurdish national movement's approach to clans has not been very different from the Turkish government's. Urban nationalist movements since the 1960s, as well as the PKK since the 1980s, have often approached clan loyalties as an obstacle to the emergence of a unified Kurdish national movement. The durability of clans as sources of authority and allegiance in parts of eastern Turkey, then, is striking.

Yet relatively little has been written in the scholarly literature on the role Kurdish clans have played in the broader struggle over identity and authority in eastern Turkey.² Instead, recent studies have focused on two actors, the state and Kurdish nationalist activists. The exclusionary and repressive nature of Turkish nationalism, it is argued, has catalyzed a Kurdish nationalist challenge, which, in time, has overcome the fragmentation caused by tribal loyalties, and surmounted an integrated challenge to Turkish nation-state building (Yavuz 2001; Natali 2005; Romano 2006). In these accounts, clans appear either as the prehistory of Kurdish nationalist mobilization and consciousness, delaying and obstructing its inevitable emergence, or as nodes ably controlled by the Turkish government to divide and rule the Kurdish population. Implicit in this perspective is a zero-sum view of power as possessed either by the Turkish state or by the Kurdish national movement.

But the role of clans—and their relationship to the state, as well as to the Kurdish national movement—has been more variegated than the dominant explanations would suggest. Alongside Kurdish nationalist movements openly contesting the authority of the state, kinship networks and morality constituted an alternative route of resistance to state building and nation building. Such resistance was motivated not always by Kurdish nationalism but by an ethic of survival. Moreover, it consisted not in organized, confrontational actions of the sort favored by the Kurdish nationalist movement but in what James C. Scott (1985) calls “everyday acts of resistance.” Everyday acts of resistance embedded in kinship loyalty undermined the twin projects of nation building and state building while creating a third layer of authority that coexisted alongside the authority of the state and of the rising Kurdish national movement.

Kinship networks undermined the image of a centralized state with a homogenous nation in two ways. First, as the Turkish government attempted to reorder the Kurdish regions according to principles of centralized rule and bureaucratic authority, Kurdish society occasionally absorbed public officials into their local networks of relationships, transforming the goals, priorities, and loyalties of these officials and, ultimately, the very nature of bureaucratic authority. Second, the government's need for local allies provided the latter with inroads into the state. Once “inside” the state, however, these local forces could use the state for unexpected ends, blurring the boundaries of where the state “begins,” so to speak, and where it “ends,” giving way to other forms of authority. Together, these two transgressions of the boundary between state and society—a boundary that is at once constitutive of its authority—provide a starting point for rethinking the nature of state power in eastern Turkey.

As Scott argues, the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of “high modernist” states that attempted wholesale transformations of their societies according to new disciplinary logics. An essential component of this form of statecraft, Scott suggests, is the attempt to make a society legible, “to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion” (1998, 2). Scott's emphasis on state practices to render society “legible” suggests a new way of thinking about state power, as resting not only in the materiality of the state's presumed monopoly on force, or the “real interests” the state represents, but in the conceptual order that radiates from state institutions. In particular, Scott highlights the significance of routine administrative practices—such as census taking, birth registration, the drawing of maps, and so forth—in the creation, simultaneously, of knowledges, subjects, and mechanisms of control. Timothy Mitchell similarly refers to the disciplinary power of the state when he suggests that “the state should be addressed as an effect of detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society” (1991, 95).

The emerging literature on disciplinary power, however, often imputes too much coherence and effectivity to the disciplinary power radiating from state institutions.³ As the anthropologist Sally Falk Moore reminds us, “The making of rules and social and symbolic order is a human industry matched only by the manipulation, circumvention, remaking, replacing, and unmaking of rules and symbols in which people seem equally engaged” (1978, 1). This is because the state is not the only “center” from which order radiates. The conceptual order generated by the state is imposed on social segments that often have their own conceptual and moral order. As Joel S. Migdal writes, resistant practices are “not simply…deviations from normative—good—behavior as set out in state codes. They [are] moral codes in their own right, contending with that expressed in the state's image for predominance” (2001a, 19). The moral code of the subjects, moreover, can permeate the state, as much as the world of the subjects is invaded by the conceptual order imposed by the state.

The theoretical framework proposed by Migdal in State in Society provides a flexible approach that captures the limits of disciplinary power radiating outward from the state. States are shaped by two elements, writes Migdal: the image of a coherent and purposive organization and the actual practices of its multiple parts. The image refers to the image of a dominant, integrated, autonomous entity that controls all rule-making activity in a particular territory. Practices, in turn, refer to the “routine performance of state actors and agencies” (Migdal 2001a, 18). Migdal's definition of the state through the distinction between “image” and “practices” is analogous to Mitchell's (1991, 94) approach to the state as a “powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.” The question, then, is how practices sustain but also undermine the image of a coherent, centralized state—or the image of a homogenous nation—and how this image, in turn, constrains and shapes the practices of the officials.

The image and practices may reinforce each other, when, for instance, state officials' activities, such as issuing a passport, imposing a fine, or requiring all citizens to take surnames in a particular language, serve to accentuate, in the minds of the citizens, the idea of a single community bound by a single set of rules—the Law—protected by the state. Image and practices may also be mutually destructive, suggests Migdal, when the practices deviate from the image. Where the state's legitimacy is weakest and state officials must contend with alternative sources of morality, practices may be expected to deviate furthest from the image. It is by examining such fields of contestation, suggests Migdal, that we can understand not only how “the state” transforms a society but also how social forces transform and constitute the state.

An exclusive focus on state practices to make a population “legible” and to transform peoples into national citizens, then, is insufficient for a full understanding of how power emanates from order in the construction of national states. The “ways of seeing” with which state officials try to know and control dissident populations confronts radically different maps with which social forces, too, try to make sense of new modalities of state power. Through this complex dynamic it is possible to examine how a world in which men were connected to other men through their uncles' sons and mutually recognized sheikhs, through good deeds and obligations incurred from prior favors, encountered a world in which commands generated in the Ministry of the Interior were transmitted to outposts like Diyarbakır through a chain of men who did not know one another. Examining the lenses through which social forces “see the state” can shed light on the limits of the state's disciplinary power.

THE WAR ON LOCAL SOURCES OF SOLIDARITY, 1923-46

The establishment of the Turkish Republic from the remains of the multi-religious and multiethnic Ottoman Empire fundamentally transformed the nature of the tie between the residents of Ottoman Anatolia and their new Turkish state. The redefinition of membership through Turkishness rather than religion left the Kurdish population in an ambiguous relation to the new state. As Muslims of non-Turkish origin, Kurds were simultaneously inside and outside the boundaries that defined membership in the new Turkish nation. On the one hand, their Muslim origins and their participation in the War of Independence (1919-22) qualified the Kurds for first-class membership in the Turkish nation-in-the-making. On the other hand, their dubious loyalty to the new regime, as evidenced in several armed uprisings that followed the state's top-down secularization reforms, and the fact that many Kurds did not speak the Turkish language set the Kurds apart from other Muslim constituents of the republic. In Mesut Yeğen's (2006) apt description, Kurds were considered “prospective Turks,” who could become full and equal members of the Turkish nation, if they could be persuaded, and more often forced, to give up other loyalties.

The basic premises of the government's Kurdish policy were shaped in the early years of the republic, following the first mass-based Kurdish uprising, the Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925.⁴ A secret government report drawn after the revolt recommended a series of measures that have, until the 2000s, formed the backbone of Turkey's policy toward its Kurdish population. The measures enumerated in the report reflected the new image of the republic and articulated the kinds of governmental techniques whereby this image would be achieved. First, in a departure from Ottoman practice, the report called for deliberate policies to assimilate Kurds into Turkishness. After noting with alarm that the Turkish population in the region was less than one-fourth of the Kurdish population, the report proposed that Muslim immigrants arriving in Turkey from former Ottoman territories be settled into eastern Turkey, while Kurds, who had been involved in the rebellions, be transferred to the western provinces. By rearranging Anatolia's demographic map, the officials hoped to accelerate the consolidation of a Turkish national consciousness. Beyond this demographic engineering, increased schooling and instruction in the Turkish language and discouragement of speaking Kurdish were suggested as the fastest route to assimilation.

A second cluster of proposals focused on increasing the presence and authority of the central government in eastern Turkey. The proposed measures included building schools, hospitals, railroads, and highways; repairing government buildings; requiring all public officials to serve in eastern Turkey at some point in their career, while preventing the appointment of Kurdish officials to Kurdish regions; and placing the region under military control. The increased presence of an interventionist state was a radical departure from the Ottoman era, during which Kurds enjoyed de facto autonomy and local affairs were largely beyond the reach of the state (Bruinessen 1992; Kasaba 2004). The image of the new republic called for an active, visible, and, if necessary, violent state. Finally, the report urged the elimination of the influence of local authorities, such as tribal leaders, religious sheikhs, and landlords, to establish direct rule between the citizens and the government. The local authorities were described as a corrupt, abusive, and rebellious class that undermined both the republican project and the well-being of Kurdish citizens (Bayrak 1993, 490; 1994, 260).

In sum, the report outlined a new image of a centralized, homogenous nation-state and a set of governmental techniques to translate that image into reality. In the next two decades, these proposals constituted the core elements of a highly repressive campaign of assimilation and transformation to be carried out by inspectorate generals, a special administrative unit with quasi-military powers, set up in 1927 to bring the Kurdish regions under control. While studies of Kurdish nationalism have focused on the first two prongs of this new paradigm—assimilation policies and a repressive state apparatus—less has been written on the battles waged to eliminate local structures of authority. Since all of the uprisings of the 1920s and 1930s had been initiated by the traditional elite of Kurdish society, the inspectorate generals looked to tribal leaders, landlords, and sheikhs with great suspicion, holding them responsible for the uprisings. As a result, the campaign to transform Kurds into Turks went hand in hand with an all-out war on these local sources of authority. In 1934, the Settlement Law formally abolished the tribe as an organizational unit recognized by the state (Bayrak 1993, 562) and authorized the government to resettle “tribes [and nomads] who are citizens of Turkey but are not loyal to the Turkish culture,” “those who are loyal to the Turkish culture but do not speak Turkish,” and “those who have previously served as tribal chiefs, begs [notables], agas [landlords], or sheikhs, or who aspire to do so.”⁵ Other laws authorized the government to exile members of prominent families to western Turkey, to confiscate their land, and separate the adult male members of these families from one another. The land confiscated from the leading families was to be distributed to the landless peasants to win them over to the republican government. The children of insurgent tribes were placed in the boarding schools established to disseminate Turkish language and culture. The use of traditional titles such as sheikh, beg, and reis (chief) was forbidden, and religious brotherhoods and orders were closed. If the government could remove the ruling strata of Kurdish society from the region and undermine their authority in their society, the inspectors assumed, the local population would naturally shift its loyalties to the republican state.

KINSHIP NETWORKS AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE

The Absorption of Bureaucracy

As the inspectorate generals embarked on their task of bringing the Kurdish regions under the central authority of the republic, they confronted a great deal of resistance, both overt and covert. Overt resistance included the numerous regional uprisings, among them the Ağrı uprisings of 1926-30 and the Dersim uprising of 1937-38. But the inspectorate generals also faced resistance of a subtler kind in everyday acts embedded in kinship solidarity.

In a report in 1931, for instance, the inspectorate general complained that his efforts on crime prevention failed, because “with the assistance of their tribes and families, [the rebels] find shelter in the mountains, and again with the help of their families acquire such needs as food supplies, arms and ammunition, and as a result, continue in rebellious activities…. Since the behavior of the families and relatives does not constitute crime per se, these [the families] do not receive punishment, yet another reason emboldening [the rebels].”⁶

What bothered the inspector was that the state could not penetrate the protective covering provided by kinship networks unless it was prepared to attack the entire population. Such networks of trust based on kinship facilitated cooperation between Kurds escaping the clutches of government and also began to permeate th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: A State-in-Society Agenda
• Part I. The Everyday Life of the Turkish State
• Part II. The Everyday Life of the Israeli State
• Part III. The Everyday Life of the State in Asia and North Africa
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index