Government-sponsored gendered development projects are taking on an important role in Turkey's efforts to pacify regional conflict in the predominantly Kurdish Southeast region. A growing number of women's state education centers housed in laundries and mosques in crowded urban centers throughout the Southeast constitute important mechanisms for the socioeconomic integration of the region. These projects recently have been linked in public governmental dialogue to larger militarized security concerns dealing with Kurdish separatism, however. National security therefore is broadening its conceptual and methodological scope to incorporate unconventional populations (women and children) and spaces (home and school) as important elements of a political and territorial stabilization project. These are the sites where the translation of behavior, values, and the engagements with law and rights underpinning a state consolidation project unfold. This doctoral dissertation research project will seek answers to the following questions: (1) How does the Turkish state formally define "national security" and the relationship of "national security" to socioeconomic development goals in the context of Southeast Turkey? (2) How is the household politicized as an arena of state concern by development affiliates (doctors, lawyers, and teachers) and education practices? (3) Do development participants and their family members frame their everyday choices about family within the larger security concerns of the state, and how might their experiences vary across generations and genders? The doctoral candidate will conduct an extended ethnography of development activities and home life. A series of interviews with development participants, their family members, and workers also will be conducted to measure if and how individuals frame their choices about home, work, and recreation within a larger geopolitical project of state-building.
Considering the heightened preoccupation of the state with security in the 21st century in a number of global contexts, the results of this project will reveal more broadly how an abstract concept like "national security" become manifest in policy and negotiated by regular citizens. From a regional perspective, the Kurdish situation in the Middle East often is oversimplified in popular media and political commentary as a broad issue of cross-border competing nationalisms. Kurdish women, in particular, represent a minority group that has received very little attention in scholarly research. Taken together, the disparate stories of Kurdish migrant women and their children as well as community doctors, lawyers, and teachers will reveal how a policy of national security works within a larger politics of state and national belonging. At this scale, single-plot geopolitical narratives about ethno-nationalism, political affiliation, and physical boundaries are complicated by real and important decisions about family and neighborhood welfare and life choices and values. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. This project is jointly supported by the NSF Geography and Spatial Sciences Program and the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.
