Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xxiii Introduction: Other Routes of Resistance 3 1 Early Routes: Conditions of Kurdish Electoral Mobilization 26 2 New Collective Challengers: The Institutional Trajectory of Turkey’s First Pro-Kurdish Party 51 3 Resources of the System 75 Contents 4 Characteristics of Coercion: Obstructing Access to Resources 94 5 Producing Competing Truths 122 6 Creating a New Kurdish Subject 142 Conclusions: Assessing a Challenger’s Impact 161 Notes 179 References 185 Index 201 Just as we must abandon the image of the state as a free-standing agent issuing orders, we need to question the traditional figure of resistance as a subject who stands outside the state and refuses its demands. Political subjects and their modes of resistance are formed as much within the organizational terrain we call the state, rather than in some wholly exterior social space. —Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State,” 1991 The notion that social movements are completely separate from the state doesn’t really describe reality. —David S. Meyer, Valerie Jenness, and Helen Ingram, Routing the Opposition, 2005 To ascertain or demonstrate the impact of a challenge, researchers must ascertain what might have happened in its absence. —Edwin Amenta and Michael P. Young, “Making an Impact,” 1999 We should not ask “what is a nation” but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states? How does nation work as a practical category, as classificatory scheme, as cognitive frame? What makes use of that category by or against states more or less effective? —Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 1996 ...