PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Despite hundreds of years of forced and violent assimilation from multiple sources, Kurds continue to exist as dissidents, progressing their ethnonational and cultural ways of being through an anticolonial resistance. Honoring the Kurdish existence by resistance, our motivation is to bring into light the "Kurdish power" that enables this kind of resistance within the Turkish nation-state borders. Guided by critical race theory and decolonial approach, we pursue Kurds' counternarratives of power to dismantle the hegemonic representations of power and oppression while exposing systematic and systemic dynamics of racism. We interviewed 16 Kurds in Van and Istanbul, and we asked their understanding of power and their political reflections. By combining counternarrative and thematic analyses, we provide a multifocal, multisourced understanding of power, shaped around the multitudes of Kurdishness against Turkish oppression and violence. Counternarrators' refusals of hegemonic oppression are intertwined with a strong belief in collectivity, a sense of nationhood is intertwined with multifragmentality, and imaginations of future are intertwined with agency, existence, and oppression.