Join Ronay Bakan, Max Weber Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, as she presents her research in the RSC Seminar Series
Counterinsurgent Urbanism explores the social underpinnings of counterinsurgency and its violence through the dynamics of spatial control. Spatial control refers to the ongoing practices of destruction, (re)construction, and decay in the lived environment of ostensibly unruly populations, to prevent insurgent formation.
Focusing on the 40-year-long civil war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state, this seminar traces a layered set of state policies and interventionist actions, including heritage-making, urban planning, and urban renewal, as part of the broader security strategy. It examines these processes across the Bağlar, Kayapınar, and Suriçi districts of Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish-majority city in Northern Kurdistan/Southeast Turkey.
The traditional literature on civil war and counterinsurgency suggests that establishing permanent territorial control is essential to combating insurgencies. Drawing on a multi-year, multi-method ethnographic study, the presentation shows how counterinsurgency campaigns produce multi-layered topographies of control in urban landscapes, including heritage sites, urban slums, and gated communities. These processes are conceptualised as counterinsurgent urbanism.
The seminar explores how counterinsurgent urbanism reveals the heterotemporal constitution of counterinsurgency and its associated violence. In this framework, past conflicts figure into the material and symbolic construction of security infrastructure in the present to annihilate existing insurgencies while preempting and preventing future ones. The book identifies three core mechanisms underpinning counterinsurgent urbanism: legal-institutional restructuring of land, policing of the urban landscape, and selective development. These urban policies become a key part of the counterinsurgent campaign to shape a people’s relationship with space which, in turn, reconfigures everyday life and state–society relations in civil wars.
The discussion will also draw on empirical examples from Diyarbakır. In the Suriçi district, the state deployed an urgent expropriation decision to destroy six neighbourhoods in a UNESCO World Heritage site, resulting in large-scale depopulation following the 2015–2016 urban war. State-led heritage preservation projects later reconstructed a Turkish-Islamic past in the area. In the Bağlar district, the ambiguous presence of state security forces targeted Kurdish political organisation while tacitly allowing drug trade, accelerating urban decay. These dynamics contributed to the emergence of gated communities among Kurdish residents in Kayapınar.
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