A Subversive Informal Institution: The Case of Multilingual Municipalism of the Kurdish Movement

Although formal and informal institutions play major roles in socio-political life, institutional analyses have focused on formal institutions (or parchment institutions), ignoring or underestimating the role of informal institutional factors and mechanisms. Hence, compared to formal institutions, informal institutions remain relatively understudied and undertheorized in institutional literature. Given this lacuna in institutional theory, this study focuses on the role of informal institutions in socio-political life. This study first offers a new, improved typology of informal institutions, which identifies four novel types of informal institution: 1) symbiotic, 2) superseding, 3) layering and 4) subversive. The study then illustrates subversive informal institution by analyzing a case of informal institution derived from the Turkish context. The study asserts that the presence of discriminatory and exclusionary formal institutions facilitates the rise of informal institutions. More specifically, minority groups disadvantaged by the existing formal institutional arrangements might set up and promote informal institutions to challenge, contest and subvert the existing authoritarian and exclusionary formal arrangements. The current study shows that multilingual municipalism of Turkey’s Kurdish movement constitutes an illustrative example of subversive informal institutions. Municipalities controlled by pro-Kurdish political parties in eastern and southeastern regions initiated and promoted multilingual municipalism (or multilingual local governance), which is based on cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity and plurality, to contest state’s homogenizing and centralizing understandings, attitudes and policies, based on Turkishness and Turkish nationalism. This particular case suggests that informal institutions can be a strategic instrument of contentious and subversive politics, especially in authoritarian socio-political settings. The empirical analyses of this particular case are based on qualitative and quantitative data, derived from in-depth interviews with Kurdish political actors and activists, public opinion surveys and election data.