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Paper short abstract

This paper links contemporary Kurdish struggles in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran to Ottoman imperial afterlives and the global partition of Kurdistan. Drawing on Ottoman, Republican, and German archives, it argues that ongoing repression, and conflict reflect enduring colonial logics.

Paper long abstract

The collapse of empires after the WWI did not yield a linear reordering of political authority. In the Middle East, imperial disintegration unfolded unevenly, often preserving imperial modes of rule within newly constituted states. Turkey represents a particularly revealing case: the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic did not dismantle imperial practices of population management, territorial control, and ethno-religious hierarchy, but reorganized them through national sovereignty, security, and development.

In this paper, I examine how these imperial afterlives shaped the governance of Kurdish regions in eastern Anatolia, focusing on the aftermath of the 1938 Dersim Tertele. Drawing on 150 exile letters written (1943-1948) by forcibly displaced Alevi Kurds, I shift attention from policy to lived political negotiation. These letters reveal displacement as a condition of uncertainty structured by the power, showing how exiles engaged the state through idioms of vulnerability and loyalty to secure recognition or return, while subtly reworking and subverting the very discourses that had rendered them governable in the first place.

I argue that the Republic extended late Ottoman strategies of demographic engineering, most violently enacted during the Armenian Genocide, into a framework that combined militarization with developmental intervention. Infrastructure projects such as resettlement schemes, policing, and boarding schools were not ancillary to state violence; they were central to the reordering of territory and population. By situating Dersim as a central node in the imperial-to-nation-state transition, I rethink vulnerability as a historically contingent terrain where power and agency were negotiated within unequal systems.