National Identities
ISSN: 1460-8944 (Print) 1469-9907 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnid20
Diasporas and homeland conflicts: a comparative perspective Francis Patrick O’Connor To cite this article: Francis Patrick O’Connor (2017): Diasporas and homeland conflicts: a comparative perspective, National Identities, DOI: 10.1080/14608944.2016.1244937 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2016.1244937
Published online: 12 Jan 2017.
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Date: 13 January 2017, At: 00:08
NATIONAL IDENTITIES, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Diasporas and homeland conflicts: a comparative perspective, by Bahar Baser, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2015, xiv + 302 pp., £70.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 4724 2562 1 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 4724 2563 8 (ebook), ISBN 978 1 4724 2564 5 (epub) In October 2014, the German cities of Hamburg and Celle witnessed mass violence between hundreds of ISIS sympathisers and Kurds concerned with the fate of their co-ethnics in the beleaguered city of Kobani in Rojava in northern Syria. It was a clear example of conflict import, whereby foreign conflicts are re-constructed at distance removed from their original location. If anyone were to have predicted even only months prior to the clashes that German police would be called upon to separate crowds of ISIS supporters, which at the time was but one of multiple Islamist factions battling the Asad regime, and Kurdish activists they would have been dismissed as fantasists. Yet, a civil war in which Germany played no part was bloodily played out on its streets, thus, highlighting the highly fluid and dynamic manner in which localised conflicts take on a transnational character. Baser’s book addresses this very phenomenon; it is therefore both timely and extremely pertinent for the immediate future of the countries which have this summer received hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing conflict zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, of course, Syria. Baser has conducted an exhaustive comparative analysis of the fashion in which the conflict between various Kurdish movements, most importantly the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party/ Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan), and the Turkish state has been internalised and reproduced by the Kurdish and Turkish diasporas in Germany and Sweden from the 1970s until the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Her book in fact engages in a multifaceted comparison along a number of axes; between Kurds and Turkish movements in Germany and their counterparts in Sweden, as well as diachronically analysing the contrasting policies of the respective governments regarding the integration of their migrant communities. The first commendable aspect of this book is its magnitude in both empirical material and theoretical engagement. Her findings are based on over a hundred qualitative interviews in Sweden and Germany, along with a range of other countries, stretching over a period of almost 10 years. She has successfully fused the literatures on migration, political violence, social movements and public policy into a coherent and accessibly written book which immediately engages the reader and provides a comprehensive overview of the experiences of the Kurdish and Turkish diasporas in the cases under examination. Her astute deployment of interview excerpts, without ever lapsing into the merely anecdotal or descriptive, succeeds in giving a vivid picture of the lived experience of the respective communities. Her conceptualisation of diaspora, which draws on the work of scholars such as Bauböck and Faist (2010) and Brubaker (2005), is non-essentialist and tends towards a minimal understanding of diaspora as a subset of broader transnational communities engaged in political projects directed towards both homeland and hostland governments. Within her focus on the Kurdish and Turkish diaspora, Baser further distinguishes between first and second generations, arguing that subsequent generations’ political outlook is more influenced by the political culture and opportunities of the hostlands. Baser is also one of the few authors who have analysed the PSK (Kurdish Socialist party/Partiya Sosyalîst a Kurdistan) and its European wing KOMKAR (Federation of Kurdish Associations/Yekîtiya Komelên Kurdistan) which was of massive importance in the 1970s and pre-dates the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party/
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BOOK REVIEW
Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) by a number of years. Her refined disaggregation of diaspora politics as chronologically and spatially varied is a useful rejoinder to certain political interpretations which simplify migrant communities as homogeneous blocks alienated from domestic politics and society while hankering back to developments in their homelands. A further laudable point of her work is that it situates the experiences of the Kurdish and Turkish diasporas in the broader literature on diasporas, discussing it in the context of the Tamil, Armenian, Ethiopian and Irish diaspora mobilisations. A final notable element of her book is her detailed analysis of the manner in which the prevailing institutions and the political opportunity structures of host countries shape the nature of diaspora mobilisation. The implication of which is that any proclivity towards more militant forms of political activism does not simply reflect imported characteristics from the homeland conflict but also derive from the reciprocally formative interactions between host state institutions and the respective movements. Baser concludes that the German state’s lack of any long-term planning regarding its migrant communities and its securitisation of the Kurdish diaspora compares rather unfavourably with the albeit imperfect, but more coherent and inclusive Swedish system. Nevertheless, as with all works of great ambition there are a number of inconsistencies and elements which could have been improved upon, especially for readers with a lesser familiarity of the Turkish–Kurdish context. It is indeed commonplace to make use of the distinction between first and second generations as an analytical dichotomy, because the former are thought to have migrated having already obtained a political consciousness while the latter are shaped by familial narratives and their experiences in the countries of their birth. As many of the first-generation migrants who arrived in the 1970s have now lived for much longer in Sweden and Germany than in Turkey, it seems somewhat unlikely that they have not also internalised elements of the political culture in their host societies. Although, not wishing to disregard what remain useful categories to a certain extent, I would argue that an over focus on this first and second-generations’ dichotomy is somewhat reductive. While Baser hints that second-generation migrants’ political outlook is also shaped by trips back to the homeland and certain negative experiences they might encounter, I believe that this demands further attention. Ongoing migration from the homeland – either family reunification, economic migration, marital links or as asylum seekers – consistently infuse households and communities with direct experiences from the homeland. It is therefore not a question of migrants from the first generation setting down and having second-generation children but rather a constant circular dynamic which undermines the distinction between the rigid categorisation of first and second generations. If one considers the recent arrival of Kurds fleeing northern Syria, returning PKK guerrillas or Turks having completed their military service, it becomes clear that an overemphasis on generational disparities might fail to incorporate important factors which transverse generational differences. Another factor that the author arguably downplays is the significance of the sub-regional provenance of the respective migrant communities and the impact this could have on their mobilisation. Although, the author does detail the importance of the fact that most of Sweden’s Turks have their origins in Kulu, a small religiously conservative town in central Anatolia, she appears not to acknowledge the massive impact the precise places of origin of the Kurds have had on their subsequent mobilisation in Europe. Such issues as the role of tribal networks or aşirets which are stronger in certain areas than others, religiosity and gender norms, the presence of other revolutionary movements and, of course, exposure to the conflict are significant factors which likely influence mobilisation in the diaspora. In light of the propensity or lack thereof of cooperation between the two communities, it would have been interesting if the book had delved more into the issue of Alevi mobilisation as an identity which bridges the Kurdish and Turkish divisions. It would have furthermore shifted the focus onto the
NATIONAL IDENTITIES
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sub-identities of the Kurdish people[s] and contending collective identities, such as Zaza nationalism, and religious minorities, such as the Yazidis and the various Christian groups. A final point in this regard is that for many Kurds, Europe is the final destination of a long gradual migration from the villages of rural Kurdistan to bigger towns in the region, passing to larger Turkish majority cities such as Adana and Istanbul before culminating in their arrival in Europe. Developments endogenous to this migratory trajectory are likely to have played a significant role in shaping their perceptions of their Turkish counterparts. The periods of living in the west of the country would have enriched Kurds with improved linguistic skills for engaging with their Turkish counterparts, but the contemporary experience of forced migration and discrimination in Turkish cities could also have engendered a further sense of grievance which would militate against subsequent openness to migrant Turks. As the final comment, notwithstanding the table with the information regarding the names and acronyms of the multiple, overlapping and confusing groups and associations, it seems likely that readers unfamiliar with the conflict in Turkey and related diaspora politics could be a little disorientated. The author could perhaps have included more substantial footnotes upon the movements’ first mention in the text detailing their political orientation and background. In conclusion, this is a tremendous book, empirically rich, methodologically rigorous and theoretically insightful. It will be of interest to all those interested in the conflict in Turkey, diaspora mobilisation in general and the migration policies of migrant destination countries. Sadly, the cautiously optimistic tone adopted by Baser regarding the ongoing peace process, little more than a few months after it was written, seems to have been misplaced. The return of armed clashes in Kurdistan and communal violence in western Turkey likely portends a return to internal displacement and mass migration.
References Bauböck, R., & Faist, T. (Eds.). (2010). Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories and methods. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Brubaker, R. (2005). The 'diaspora' diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(1), 1-19.
Francis Patrick O’Connor European University Institute & Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS)
[email protected] © 2017 Francis Patrick O’Connor http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2016.1244937
