The Kurdish question in Turkey: state assimilation policies as an obstacle to autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan

The Kurds are an ethnolinguistic community of about 30 million people, known for living in the mountains, and who nowadays mainly inhabit the territories of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. During your long and tragic biography, this group has always suffered massive oppression and never achieved a modern state status. As the Kurds are subjugated, denied access to politics and rights because they are considered illegitimate and do not represent the nation, they initiate nationalist movements that struggle for autonomy, demanding a redefinition of borders and a redistribution of political power. By challenging territorial integrity, since the borders of the state do not correspond to those of the nationality, they challenge the ideal of the modern nation-state, which prizes well-defined borders to establish its sovereignty and avoid chaos. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the specific case of the Kurdish question in Turkey, where the Kurds have been facing a massive campaign of annihilation by the Turkish state in order to "Turkify" them. That means, to impose a homogenizing citizenship in its national territory and put an end to the Kurdish claims that threaten its security and territory integrity. To this end, Turkey promotes policies of cultural assimilation or extermination among its Kurdish citizens through a standardized national educational system, mass communication, and a set of common laws. In this sense, this paper seeks to ask whether Turkey's cultural assimilation policies undermine the quest for autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan. We argue that the policy of “Turkishness”, although failing to erase the Kurdish identity, was successful in curbing the emancipation of Kurds in Turkey, by violently repressing them and integrating part of the Kurds into their culture through their massive ethnic cleansing policies over the last century. In order to do so, we will conduct a review of the literature on the topic, performing a systemic approach to historical processes and a critical evaluation of the bibliographic sources on the subject. We sought to work with a bibliography that highlights a historical and constitutive view of Kurdish national and identity formation, as well as to analyze the public policies toward the Kurds in the last century, focusing on the current Erdoğan government. Also, we will do this from a perspective of studies on nation and nationalism, especially regarding the territorial prefigurations of nationalism.