Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the role of a revolutionary hope in dealing with the experiences of violence, precarity, and uncertainty among Turkey's Kurdish and left-wing activists and critical thinkers in two interconnected contexts: Turkey under an authoritarian regime and political refugeehood in Greece.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2015, war and political violence in Turkey have re-escalated and the oppression of dissident thinkers and activists has increased. In the face of brutal state violence, political and economic insecurity, and chronic uncertainty, shared feelings of helplessness, rage, fear, depression, and ambiguous hope/hopelessness have spread among the urban (pro-) Kurdish critics of the regime. Many of them sought ways to leave Turkey or were forced into political exile. The same European migration policies of containment of unwanted migrants/refugees in the margins of Europe on the one hand exacerbate precarity in Turkey by silencing the ongoing violence, and on the other entrap migrants/refugees in a situation of protracted transitionality and existential waiting in uncertainty in Greece. Hence, the lives of those who flee Turkey and end up in Greece continue to be profoundly precarious. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with politicized (pro-) Kurdish young people in Istanbul in 2016-17 and with Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey in Athens in 2018-19, this paper brings forth the connections and continuities in the affective aspects of the lived experiences of precariousness between the two contexts in the margins of Europe. Building on the existing anthropological literature on hope, it discusses the particular kind of revolutionary hope, present in the Kurdish/Turkish left-wing circles in Istanbul and Athens. Bounded with the notion and lived practices of "comradeship" (yoldaşlık), the revolutionary hope proved to be integral to these people's material and emotional survival in the precarious conditions in Turkey and Greece.