Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan

• In Event: Urban Politics in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Emerging modalities of warfare—such as drone-delivered ordinance—increasingly target urban landscapes, populations, and infrastructures. Yet states’ security agenda exceeds military deployment. They often use bureaucratic techniques—leveraging courts, policing, and development agencies—to achieve military control, e.g., via the reformulation of property rights during civil wars. If states have military means at their disposal and the willingness to use them, why do they employ bureaucratic strategies to target ostensibly threatening populations? How do urban planning and heritage-making serve as integral tools of warfare against populations viewed as unruly and living environments perceived as disorderly? What are the consequences of their deployment on minority populations and their built environments? To answer, I term the legal practices and developmentalist strategies such as legal-institutional dispossession; militarization of urban landscapes; and urban development that states such as Turkey employ to control and manage ostensibly threatening populations “counterinsurgent urbanism.” To examine mechanisms that drive counterinsurgent urbanism and to uncover its effects, I draw on a multi-sited 10-month ethnography of local governance and city planning in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır in 2022-2023, encompassing the UNESCO World Heritage site of Suriçi as well as the Kayapınar and Bağlar districts in the wake of urban war of 2015-2016.  

In this paper, I focus on the state’s efforts to build up touristic potential of the historical city center Suriçi as integral to its security agenda in the post-conflict era. Ironically, the unfolding of urban violence took place merely one month after UNESCO declared Suriçi a World Heritage Site, a status achieved through the collaboration of the pro-Kurdish local government and the Turkish state. In August 2015, Suriçi, the 2000-year old city center of Diyarbakır, emerged as a prominent and particularly violent site of conflict where a full-scale urban war, involving the use of heavy weaponry. Following the cessation of hostilities in March 2016, the official journal of the Republic of Turkey, reported urgent expropriation decrees across the region. Government demolition crews and security forces subsequently arrived to raze civilian dwellings in Kurdish neighborhoods. Further, instead of providing a path to return for the residents, the government aggressively built up the district’s touristic potential as a key part of its ongoing security agenda via heritage-making.  

By treating “heritage as data”, I elaborate how heritage efforts in the historical city center Suriçi become a tool to suppress perceived future threats by bolstering Turko-Islamic past as well as staging the district as an “open air mall” which paves the way for a gradual displacement of remaining residents. I draw on in-depth interviews with old and current bureaucrats, activists, and residents; firsthand observations of staged heritage by participating events in the district such as a week-long Sur Culture Road Festival organized by the government; surveys conducted with tourists; and memory walks organized by activists in the district to demonstrate the intertwinement between heritage-making, commodification, and pacification as well as resistance towards these efforts in the form of space-making and memory-making. 

Author

• Ronay Bakan, Johns Hopkins University