Political borders appearing after World War I had a great impact on sociocultural patterns, economic lifestyles, perceptions of geography, sense of belonging, individual and social memories, and the identities of inhabitants in the region. Political borders that aim to determine what belongs to the nation-state and what does not from different dimensions were not just drawn on a certain territory, they attempted to be inscribed in minds of people as well.1 The Turkish-Syrian border was determined and drawn up during the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne between Turkish authorities and European colonial powers, within a short span time. These territories saw construction when state authorities ventured into the field in order to mark boundaries with placement of stones as border (land) markers. Following the placement of border markers, the state proceeded in border making through the placement of military mechanisms such as patrols, barbed wire fences, gendarmerie stations, border gates, and eventually landmines in the early 1950s. The state authority’s establishment of such military mechanisms resulted in a wounding of social bodies and perpetuated violence in the process to achieve its intended strengthened hegemony and exercise of power upon the margins of the nation-state. The political borders that constitute the concrete boundaries of the state’s hegemonic domain emerged as an epistemologically and ontologically exclusive, divisive, and othering mechanism and construction between the imagined communities and neighboring nation-states or colonized states. The political territorial borders which nation-states attempt to construct and preserve through various ideological and physical sanctions have been perceived contrarily by local people and have against common expectation. The local people have developed different relationships with the statist narrative and the state’s border making project.
Although studies on Turkey’s political borders and borderlands commenced in the 1990s, these studies have only begun to take center stage and becoming visible in the 2000s. One observes the deficiency in the deep lack of anthropological perspectives in these studies having been carried out by researchers hailing from fields of business administration, political science and international relations, public administration and partially sociology, and sociocultural anthropology. The number of history-, society-, and memory-oriented studies is relatively few and seems to be insufficient due to theoretical and methodological shortcomings. Therefore, the following chapter addresses the extension of this study’s framework by taking the shortcomings of borders and border regions studies into consideration.
The pivotal answers are sought in this book emerge from these questions: in what way did the Turkish-Syrian border construction process determined following a great political struggle, negotiations and significance evolved in the early decades of the Republic? What are the physical and ideological tools utilized by state officials throughout the construction period of the border? How successful was the endeavor to protect and secure the border’s safety, which was given great importance by the state authorities? What kind of relationships were forged between local state authority representatives and the local subjects? On the other hand, how was the border perceived and defined subjectively and collectively in the local memory? Which elements did the border transgress and what kind of consequences do these attempts of border transgression yield in local communities? What extent of impact did such political borders have on the local family histories? What are the elements that displayed continuity or change in historical process in social, cultural, and economic structures and which elements endured the circumstances? What kind of relationship did people establish with the landmined zones formed by the state along the border? Lastly, what are the perceptions and reactions of local people to the final phase of border making process, the recently erected Turkish security wall? How may the weak protests and silence of local peoples be interpreted regarding the erection of the security wall? What can be said of the underground tunnel phenomenon as an emergent survival tactic against the security wall and the subject in the border studies in Turkey? This book attempts to provide answers to some of these questions and in the process, reveal how political borders continue to be resisted, adapted, negotiated, and at times transformed into diverse mechanisms and domains by the local peoples of the past and present.
In this context of the history of Turkish-Syrian border, the landmined zone which can be described also as a “no man’s land” was created by the state in the 1950s in the midst of life source agricultural fields and arid lands used for herding livestock by villagers living along the border. Therefore, the state’s use, repurposing and renaming of those regions as a security zone did not reflect similarly in the lives and minds of local people. For them, these land expanses remain their own and are to be employed for their own economic needs. For this reason, the local people’s perception of the land, their relationship with the border and their remaining ties with the relatives left on the Syrian side of the border can be defined as certain forms of resistance. What they felt, thought, and constantly did are in fact a continuation of their century-old patterns of life. However, these acts could be interpreted as subversive practices against a state imagined and constructed system. It is for these reasons the no man’s land permeated with deadly landmines was eventually purposefully “violated” and occupied as an everyday life space of border peoples and animals in different ways. In this context, “smuggling” is defined as a routine of illegal cross-border trade, as an act of resistance but also as a powerful and traumatic phenomenon. Following in the line of argumentation “no matter how clearly borders are drawn on official maps, how many customs officials are appointed, or how many watchtowers are built, people will ignore borders whenever it suits them,”2 I also argue that the various resistance mechanisms emerge in local memory and everyday lives in defiance of the nation-state-imposed political status quo alongside ideological discourses and fictitious cartographic imaginations. In other words, the local existence of diverse counter-perceptions, conceptions, and memories of the place (land), history, and geographies may be understood in light of historical legacies and past experience.
This research contributes to the important studies on the formation of the nation-state, the politics of ethnicity, tribe, nation, sense of belonging, nationalism, and placemaking in the context of border and borderland studies.3 This book examines the border making processes, discourses and security apparatuses from past to the present in comparison with resistance, resilience and adaptation patterns, tactics and means that developed by local people against linguistic, psychological, and physical interventions of the Turkish state and its local apparatuses. In this regard, it is thought that the analysis and study of the incidents and procedures that took place in the Turkish-Syria border with a critical and anthropological perspective will constitute a distinctive and meaningful example in the studies on borders and borderlands in Turkey. In sum, this book is an endeavor to decipher the social, cultural, political, economic, and psychological impacts of the Turkish-Syrian political border on people living along the border.
1.1 Methodology and Ethnography
At the onset of planning for this research, the answer to the question over the ideal methodology to follow in carrying out an anthropological study around the construction, transformation, change, and ruptures experienced in the border region and on the political border is closely connected to the concept of “multi-sited ethnography.”4 While the discussions in the 1990s mainly focused on ethnographic methods in anthropology, Marcus’s article pointed out methodological anxieties and highlighted the importance of a multiplicity of agencies and sites. By defining the role of the ethnographer as circumstantial activist, he recommends to study the objects of research through particular modes and techniques such as following people, materials such as commodities, gifts, money, artwork, intellectual property, metaphors, signs, symbols, plots, story or allegory, life or biography, and conflict.5
In accordance with Marcus’s conception of multi-sited ethnography and by making use of the suggested modes and techniques, the question of how the placement of border stones, planting of mines, erection barbed wire fences, deployment of patrols, positioning of soldiers, and construction of border gates appearing in as part of a grander process within the state’s border making practice as well as the emergence of new agents is responded to, analyzed and described in light of the life stories and narratives of the border people. Later, by following the idea of “social life of things”6 developed by Arjun Appadurai and some other researchers in the context of “doing anthropology of things,” the network formed by these new agents and their existence around the border was analyzed through the local experiences and testimonies. As is known, the greatest contribution to that new ethnographic approach and pursuit of anthropology originated from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) that developed in the 1980s.7 Beyond this, a human-centered perspective and approach of classical anthropology, objects and living creatures other than humans were included in the analysis as agents.8 Following this approach, although life stories and testimonies of border people constitute the nexus of this study, the agency of other living beings (mules, donkeys, horses, sheep, grass, caper plant, etc.), objects (border stones, barbed wires, mines, etc.), and structures (gendarmerie stations, watchtowers, border gates) were also taken into consideration. In other words, these subjects are seen as significant agents in carrying out a comprehensive analysis into the phenomenon of the political border from a historical, social, and economic perspective.
The appearance of nation-state projects in the Middle East region following World War I induced division of intertwined people and communities. The damage of these enforced political projects has been the fundamental breaching factor in various social fabrics in the region. Among the societies which greatly experienced the negative repercussions of the nation-states were the Kurds along with other subordinated ethnic and religious communities. Concerning the haunting Kurds question in the Middle East, the geopolitical division of the territorial Ottoman legacy by European colonial powers partitioned the Kurds forcing them to struggle in the face of what they believed to be a destiny of oppression, triggering their resistance and troubles with assimilationist nation-state systems in the decades to come. During these ongoing armed clashes, acts of state violence and counterviolence, and terror, political borders have constituted escape points for opposing Kurdish political and religious actors not only in Turkey but also in neighboring Syria, Iraq, and Iran. For this reason, the question of security in Turkey’s eastern and southeastern borders has always been largely a political issue as opposed to an economic one in the Turkish state discourses where the existence of the Kurds was denied until recent decades.9 In other words, “Turkey’s Kurdish question has always been discussed as a problem regarding border and border security as well.”10
The scope of this study is limited to the border city of Nisêbîn (Nusaybin)11 and several other villages along the border. The main reasons for selecting Nisêbîn is a result of my familiarity with the...