Turkey’s Military Urbanism and Neocolonial Architecture in Kurdish Cities

Abstract

This commentary focuses on how the Turkish state facilitates military urbanism as revanchist and racialized mechanisms of collective punishment to suppress grassroots mobilization, oppositional politics, and resistance in Kurdish cities. Based on an ethnographic case study in Sur, Diyarbakır, it shows how neocolonial urban policies are employed to annihilate, displace, and dispossess localities while replacing them with standardized, bordered, and financialized architectures of state security and control. Mass scale destructions, militarized policies, and coercive restructuring in Kurdish cities reveal the state’s emergent spatial strategy to recolonize the region at the urban level. The state dominates, frames, and reconfigures Kurdish urbanities so as to eliminate alternatives, opposition, and challenges to its existing and deepening hegemony.