Scholars in Context: Dilan Okcuoglu
Jadaliyya's Scholars in Context series consists of Q&As in which scholars of the Middle East describe their research and the paths they took to arrive at it. The series provides a platform for these scholars to highlight the significance of their work, identify the audiences they seek to reach, and outline their future research trajectories, giving readers an in-depth look at the latest research in a given field.
Jadaliyya (J): What is the main focus of your current research, and how does it connect to or depart from your previous work?
Dilan Okcuoglu (DO): My research, broadly speaking, falls into three categories. First, it often centers around state-society relations, territorial and border politics, democratization, political violence, civil wars, ethnic control, and conflict in the MENA, with a specific focus on Kurds and Kurdish borderlands. Second, my side project is on social movements, contentious politics, minority activism, and political mobilization. Third, my work also relates to the politics of emotions and experiences in international relations and comparative politics through a peace and conflict studies lens. I have a keen interest in qualitative research methods on the theme of positionality and I have a working paper on this subject too.
I am currently working on two complementary projects. The first one is an article which explains how the territorial logic of state-building is manifested and experienced in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands. Drawing on interview data from twelve months of fieldwork in 2013-2014, the primary focus is on state practices and Kurds’ everyday experiences of administrative and demographic control. The key contribution of my current research is to identify and explain various control mechanisms that go beyond formal institutions and policies. Understanding the lived experiences of control also helps us understand how the spatial/territorial process of state-building works. It may also help us explore other prominent questions, such as why Kurdish mobilization is high in certain areas, how the local population respond to the state practices, and so forth.
My PhD dissertation and book project, “Territorial Control and Minority Reforms: An Empirical Study of Kurdish Borderlands in Turkey,” examined the failure of the peace process in Turkey, arguing that unpacking everyday dynamics of territorial control along the Kurdish borderlands tell us a nuanced and complex story about the failed peace process in Turkey. Territorial control mechanisms have been in place while, paradoxically, the Turkish state announced the start of the Kurdish reform process in 2009. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2014, with 115 participants, as well as archival research, I discovered five distinct mechanisms of territorial control in Turkey’s Kurdish-populated and contested borderlands: border control, demographic and administrative control, nationalizing the landscape, expulsion, and securitization. This typology is the main contribution of my PhD thesis to the existing literature.
My interview data has shown that each of these control mechanisms has led to different experiences, some of which are also likely to be connected. Border control, for instance, has led to intra-group fragmentation and disruption of political space, while demographic and administrative control has led to increased economic grievances of the local population, who are predominantly Kurds. Minority reforms and other adjustments are likely to fail in the future again if Kurds continue to be subjected to violence, displacement, and loss of property, land, and dignity.
That said, my research contributes to several distinct sets of literature, such as ethnic politics, (comparative) territorial and border studies, democratization, state-society relations, and (comparative and international) conflict and peace studies.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literature does it address?
DO: My background in political theory, comparative politics, and international affairs informs my academic interests in empirical and normative debates on ethnic conflict and political violence, territoriality, borders, democracy and democratization, self-determination, nationalism, and justice.
Broadly speaking, my work engages with the existing scholarship on divided nations; democratization and violent conflict, including the impact of democratization on state-minority relations; political regulation of ethnic conflict (i.e. institutional redesign); territorial control and civil wars (i.e. causes of civil wars, geography of civil wars and territorial control, negotiated settlements and peace processes); MENA politics; border studies; and Kurdish studies (scholarship on Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and more).
I have always been interested in the questions of territoriality, territorial control, ethnic conflict, the politics of the MENA, Kurds, and Kurdistan. My first MA project was on theoretical discussions of self-determination and secession. In that research, I used the case of Kurds as a test to philosophically discuss the feasibility and desirability of some of those existing theories in the literature, such as the just-case theory, nationalism argument, and more. In my second MA project, I made a shift to an empirical approach and explored the awkward embrace of democracy with domination in the context of Turkey. When I moved to my PhD, I was looking for a promising research topic that would enable me to bring these diverse sets of interests together under one title. Meanwhile, I had the intention to approach state institutions from the margins, trying hard to find an original question, even if it could be something difficult to study. This is how my interest into Kurdish borderlands started. As a Kurdish woman coming from a politically and intellectually engaged family, I have also had personal motivations. Research has become a ground from which I could speak to my truth and challenge Turkish dominance in producing knowledge on Kurds and Kurdistan in academic circles.
Because borderlands are the zones of conflict but also interaction and exchange between several state and non-state actors, conducting research on this topic and doing fieldwork in war-torn Kurdish borderlands was an eye-opener for me, especially on identifying and understanding how territorial (re)configuration of the Turkish state has worked as a multi-staged process. The ways that Kurds have experienced territorial control in the borderlands is important not only because it is an understudied subject, but also because these experiences provide us with ample data on control mechanisms that are also mostly kept hidden by the state.
Given that my PhD examined the failures of the peace process in Turkey and developed a typology of territorial control as the primary explanation by highlighting the lived experiences of Kurds in Turkish-Iraqi and Turkish-Iranian borderlands, my work goes beyond the limits of state-centric, (solely) institutionalist analysis and adopts a bottom-up approach to the study of control. As such, it also engages with the literature on the micro-study of political violence and ethnic control. From a comparative perspective, the theoretical and empirical insights of this study can also be in conversation with the scholars interested in African, Latin American, and Asian borderlands.
The second piece of research is a book chapter I am contributing to the Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics, which engages with the scholarship on contentious politics, social movements, political mobilization, and Kurdish studies. I started to work on this subject in 2020, in the first year of my Barzani postdoctoral fellowship in Global Kurdish Studies at American University’s School of International Service in Washington DC. In the chapter I conclude that by mobilizing people’s everyday perceptions and experiences, and translating them into political engagement, the Kurdish movement shifts the scale of politics from national to transnational and local levels.
J: What brought you to this work? What was the source of inspiration?
DO: I have both personal and academic motivations. I am a Kurdish woman from Dersim (I was born and raised in Istanbul because my family had to move outside of Kurdistan in the '70s). My extended family has also gone through severe injustices, ranging from direct violence to loss of property and imprisonment. I have also experienced discrimination and harassment because of my ethnic identity. Academically speaking, the existing gap in literature on the territorial dimension of almost four decades-long conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish insurgency was so obvious and I wanted to contribute towards filling it.
J: What audiences would you like to reach, and what kind of impact would you like your research and writing to have?
DO: I think not only academics and students in comparative politics and international affairs but also practitioners and policy makers would find my work interesting and relevant, given that studying an understudied aspect of the conflict—the territorial dimension and its impact on everyday life along the contested borderlands—also means understanding the limits and prospects of a sustainable and dignified peace in the Turkish-Kurdish context. Academically speaking, this study may contribute to the debates on empirical and theoretical frontiers of subnational research in comparative politics (Snyder et al 2019); to the growing literature on comparative studies of borderlands (Del Sarto 2021; Shelef 2020; Idler 2019; Reeves 2014; Brenner 2019); qualitative research methods (Fu and Simmons 2021; Fujii 2018; Kapiszewski, MacLean and Read 2015; Schatz 2009); and more. Politically speaking, I will be happy if this work helps at least a little bit to inspire a younger generation of Kurdish academics in the long run (because the number of Kurdish academics is still low).
J: What other projects are you working on now?
DO: I am on the job market and am continuing to submit academic job applications in international and global affairs, comparative politics, and MENA research in the United States, Canada and presumably in Europe (United Kingdom included). I am also about to finish two article drafts. In the meantime, I am attending professional development workshops on academic publishing and writing, specifically on how to improve book proposal design. I have recently taught on ethnic conflict, political violence, and peace at American University’s School of International Service this term.