Resistance from below among racialized peoples: Exploring Kurdish understandings of power

Abstract

Understanding power and resistance dynamics from below requires focusing on the micropolitics of oppressed group existence. This involves exploring the ways members of the oppressed and resisting groups make sense of power in terms of identity, community, culture, and politics. As Kurdish researchers living in Turkey and Bakurê Kurdistan, we conducted in‐depth interviews with 16 Kurds in Van and Istanbul. We explored contemporary Kurdish epistemologies and praxis of racial critical consciousness toward contents and sources of Kurdish power. In this pursuit, we contextualized and synergized tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and anticolonial approaches. Our analysis shows that Kurdish understandings of power involve both representations and boundaries. Both themes are influenced by the multifaceted Kurdishness as an exteriority, a reclaimed racialized identity, an epistemology of existence, and a praxis of resisting in response to Turkish coloniality. Furthermore, the sub‐themes of power highlighted senses of agency, capacity, resources, community bonds, and social organization. We suggest that Kurdish power is constituted beyond a dualistic understanding of power, capable of creating subaltern strategies. We contribute to the transnational extensions of CRT and provide a contextualized account of antiracist and anticolonial resistance.

Shifting systems of racial inequity: Applying critical race psychology to advance racial justice

“…Finally, Coşkan and Şen (2024) introduce new applications of CRT in an international context, specifically examining resistance and survival among Kurds in Asia and the Middle East. The Kurdish people are a diverse minoritized ethnic group whose population has been separated by the 19th-and 20th-century borders of multiple countries within the Asian subcontinent and the Middle East, including Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria (Eppel, 2016).…”

Researching identity in the imposed boundaries of a nation-state: A meta-analytical review of identity and intergroup relations between Kurds and Turks.

“…Although more critical terminologies such as "state oppression against Kurds and Kurdish resistance in Turkey" (see Coşkan & Şen, 2023Coşkan & Şen, , 2024 have been used in some studies in recent years, which emphasize the structural inequalities inherent in the relationship between Turks and Kurds, we used the terminology of "Turkish-Kurdish conflict," which is more prevalent within the social sciences literature (see Acar, 2019;Uluğ & Cohrs, 2017a, 2017b. However, we acknowledge that this terminology does not provide a nuanced representation of the historical and political context surrounding the issue.…”