Paper short abstract:

The transformation of the Kurdish utopia from independent statehood to self-rule and urban governance in Turkey brings revolutionary sacrifice into intimate contact with the messiness of the everyday life and further displaces the meaning of utopia.

Paper long abstract:

The protracted conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) slowed down in the early 2000s. The PKK's initial goal to establish an independent Kurdistan shifted to urban civil democratic governance within the Turkish system. Between 2009 and 2015, a fragile peace process took place. In this period, Kurdish activists saw something akin to the utopia of self-governance: the pro-Kurdish governors ran the municipalities, Kurdish cultural expression strengthened, and the transformation of the politics, with feminist and multiculturalist undertones, even shook the Turkish nationalist hegemony.

My eleven months fieldwork between 2011 and 2015 in Diyarbakır, a center of Kurdish politics, documents the ascent of the utopia while it also reveals a deep disconnect the lay Kurdish activists perceive between their political histories and the impending future of the Kurdish polity. I examine this disjuncture through the central value in Kurdish politics, bedel, a Turkish word meaning the price to be paid for something. I trace bedel's transformation from designating biological death to loss in life. That shift has enabled an intimate yet acute connection with the Kurdistan; the utopia previously designated as the future independent state, otherworldly because other than here and now, became the litmus test against which Kurds measured their current lives. Though infuriating and deeply unsettling, such measuring of bedel was deemed necessary in order for it to be made relevant. Such calculi also inserted a form of moral chaos into the everyday fabric of postconflict Diyarbakır with numerous affective consequences.