Modern Turkey: Opportunities and Challenges. The Kurdish Diaspora and Europe’s Gatekeeping After Kobane

Abstract

While the armed forces of Kurdish guerilla and militia fought first against isis forces on the Şengal Mountain in iraq and then against assad's army for the control of Kobane, a part of the territory of rojava in northern syria that became a symbol of Kurdish autonomy, the media presented this struggle as a fight for survival of all Kurds . at that time, the large Kurdish diaspora showed heretofore unprecedented levels of unity, launching a very modern, multimodal and multilevel campaign that focused on raising civic awareness through large-scale publicity events, collection of funds to aid victims of violence, and extensive lobbying . one of their aims was the removal of the Kurdistan Workers' party (pKK) from the list of terrorist groups . The young generation of the Kurdish diaspora, Europe-born and well educated, consciously used opportunities provided by social media and their network of relations to build up the image of Kurdish military groups as trustworthy partners in the fight against isis, simultaneously trying to undermine and shame the turkish government, already criticized for their management of the syrian conflict .

The Kobane Generation: Kurdish Diaspora Mobilising in France

“…Simultaneously, there seemed to be a broader change in Kurdish diaspora activism across Europe in the sense that diasporic claims were increasingly made to the European policymakers, building on the already-existing alliances and networks that Kurdish political actors had in Brussels (Casier 2011;Eccarius-Kelly 2017). Indeed, diaspora actors simultaneously addressed EU-level interlocutors as well as local actors to raise awareness of the ongoing conflict.…”

“…This was strongly opposed by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who equated the Syrian Kurdish forces with the PKK, which, as well as being listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU and US, was outlawed in Turkey. Regardless, the siege of Kobane and the visibility it received led to political outcomes (Kardaş and Yesiltaş 2017) and provided Kurdish political actors with the possibility to interact with high-profile European politicians, thus granting more legitimacy to Syrian Kurdish political organisations (Eccarius-Kelly 2017).…”

Diaspora as socio‐material assemblage: Political agency in the Kurdish freedom movement's representations of homeland

“…Additionally, the Syrian conflict brought the KFM under the media spotlight, due to its role in fighting against the Islamic State group and the large support mobilization within the diaspora (Schøtt, 2021;Toivanen, 2021), especially after the resistance of Kobane, in 2014 (Başer, 2015b;Ciordia, 2018;Eccarius-Kelly, 2017;Savran, 2016;Kardas and Yesiltas, 2018). Furthermore, the KFM political philosophy is a characteristic type of libertarian communal stateless democracy, known as democratic confederalism, conceptually developed by Colasanti et al (2018), Dinc (2020), Gerber and Brincat (2021), Hammy and Miley (2022), Jongerden and Knapp (2016), Knapp et al (2016), Matin (2021), Öcalan (2011Öcalan ( ), Schmidinger (2018, and experienced at the maximum degree in Syria.…”