This study addresses the changing forms of ‘Kurdishness’ that the Kurdish movement in Turkey has constructed since its emergence in the early decades of 1900s. Drawing on the insights Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe provide concerning the construction of collective identities, I examine the ways through which the Kurdish movement offered changing definitions of a ‘we’ and a ‘they’ in different periods, and how these definitions appealed to different segments of the Kurdish people.
I demonstrate that Kurdish mobilizations offered four distinct collective identities to highly heterogeneous Kurdish people by constructing four different we/they oppositions under changing socio-political conditions in this long period. Although Kurdishness has always become dominant on the ‘we’ side of this opposition, it acquired distinct meanings in different periods both due to its articulation with the credible signifiers of each period, and due to the demarcation of a ‘they’ in different ways. While Kurdishness had signified in the 1910s a modern and civilized identity against the ‘backward’ traditional tribal and religious identities, it turned in the 1920s and 1930s into an affirmation of tribal and religious Kurdish identities, along with the modern ones, against the new Turkish state that attempted to exclude the whole Kurdish way of life from the new socio-political system established in 1923. In the period from 1960s to 1990s, Kurdishness signified not only an ethnic but also a class identity due to its construction against not only ethno-nationalist politics but also capitalist structure of the Turkish state and its Kurdish ‘collaborators’. Finally, from the 1990s onwards, Kurdishness has been predominantly articulated with human rights and democracy themes against the anti-democratic structure of the Turkish state. Signifying divergent meanings in these four different periods, Kurdishness appealed to and mobilized highly different segments of the Kurdish population in each period.
