The spatial imaginary and politics of democratic autonomy: a neighborhood assembly experience in Beyoğlu

Abstract

This thesis studies Kurdish Movement’s Democratic Autonomy Project both in the ways that it is articulated in textual materials and materialized in the organizational forms of the movement, as well as in the manner in which it is undertaken and put into action in Hacıahmet neighborhood, Beyoğlu. I argue that the neighborhood assembly experiment/experience in a western city of Turkey differs from the ones in Kurdish cities particularly due to different relations with the space. Migration stories, longing for place of origin, relations with the city space, and attachments to the Kurdish community define the frames of local politics and bring about conflicting forms of engagements with the space. These conflicts lead the emergence of a space of struggle for both nation state and the Kurdish movement. I trace the implementations of the self-governmental project in Hacıahmet on the basis of daily encounters with the apparatuses of nation state. I also explore the shifts in discourse of the Kurdish Movement with a textual analysis. While the movement de-centralizes and transforms itself into a complex unity of organizations via horizontal interactions with other movements (left, gender, ecological, or geographically; Syria, Iran, Iraq) it also de-centralizes and localizes mode of politics with the inauguration of assemblies. The assembly proposes new forms of attachments with space, Kurdish community and also non-Kurdish communities by deconstructing existing centralized and vertical mode of doing politics and reconstructing new ones.