The Concept of the Kurdish Political
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088220966345 |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220966345
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 512 –530
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088220966345
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The Concept of the Kurdish
Political
Jason Dockstader
and Rojîn Mûkrîyan
University College Cork, Ireland
Abstract
Recently, some have read Turkish political developments from the perspective of Carl
Schmitt’s political theory. This paper aims to modify aspects of these readings and
offer in response a Schmittian answer to the Kurdish question. By applying Schmitt’s
conceptual framework, this paper argues that the Kurds, especially in their struggles for
autonomy and independence, can be viewed as fulfilling Schmitt’s criterion for tellurian
partisanship and forming an at least nascent constituent power. We argue that Turks
and Kurds are enemies in Schmitt’s explicitly political sense. They constitute a threat to
each other’s political existence. The Kurds exhibit the behavior of a Schmittian people
or nation. They fight, against Turks, for their political existence. They aim to govern
themselves, and so instantiate the de facto attributes of state sovereignty. They thus
seek to constitute themselves as a free and independent people, thereby achieving a
genuine political existence in the Schmittian sense.
Keywords
Kurds, Turkey, Carl Schmitt, Partisan, constituent power
The concept of the Turkish political
Recently, some have read Turkish political developments from the perspective of Carl
Schmitt’s political theory (Burç and Tokatlı, 2019; Jovanović and Didić, 2018; Kutay,
2019; Şahin, 2017). These readings focus on viewing modern Turkey’s constitutional
issues from a Schmittian perspective. In particular, they look at roughly the last decade
of constitutional changes initiated in Turkey by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice
Corresponding author:
Jason Dockstader, Department of Philosophy, University College Cork, 4 Elderwood, College Rd, Cork,
Ireland.
Email: j.dockstader@ucc.ie
966345IPT0010.1177/1755088220966345Journal of International Political TheoryDockstader and Mûkrîyan
research-article2020
Article
Dockstader and Mûkrîyan 513
and Development Party (AKP). The transition from a parliamentary democracy to an
executive presidency through a series of exploited crises and electoral events has led
these commentators to view these changes as a gradual descent into illiberal and authori-
tarian rule, a kind of rule often associated with Schmitt. They see Schmitt’s thinking as a
clarifying lens through which to view Erdoğan’s utilization of anti-government protests,
corruption scandals, and a failed military coup to entrench his personal power as a near-
dictatorial president. Exploiting a state of emergency, Erdoğan purged and confronted
perceived opponents, declaring them enemies of the state, and went on to consolidate an
unlimited and discretionary presidential power that resembles in form Schmitt’s recom-
mendation that the president of the Weimar Republic use article 48 of the Weimar con-
stitution to become essentially a commissarial dictator in order to resolve the crises
facing Weimar in what were to be its final years (Schmitt, 2014: 180–226).
For example, Şahin (2017) argues that one could read Erdoğan’s recent moves as a
transition from a Hayekian understanding of the rule of law and democracy as the appli-
cation of rules and procedures promulgated in advance to a Schmittian understanding of
the need to suspend the norms and normality of the rule of law and the associated prin-
ciples of liberal democracy because of the perceived presence of a genuine existential
threat to the state. For Şahin, viewing Turkey’s slide into a delegative, authoritarian
democracy—and thoroughly away from an already fragile liberal, supposedly Hayekian,
constitutionalism—allows us to see that Erdoğan has, from a Schmittian perspective,
exemplified his notion of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception”
(Schmitt, 2005: 5). By taking extraordinary measures during apparently extreme politi-
cal disturbances, Erdoğan has exhibited a Schmittain decisionism whereby he and his
people alone, however construed, have had the power to declare and act within a state
of emergency for the sake of preserving the Turkish state from primarily internal threats
like the Gülen movement, critical journalists and academics, and, most importantly for
this paper, the Kurds. As we will see, while Erdoğan’s hysterical overreaction to the
imagined ubiquity of the Gülenist and other establishment threats has led to many
unlawful purges and arrests, it is Erdoğan’s violent response to the Kurds, through
severe attacks on both the Kurdish-led People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), that will enable us to flip the Schmittian script and
view Turkey from a similar, yet inverted existential political perspective, as the enemy
of the Kurdish people.
Jovanović and Didić (2018) have likewise interpreted the emergence of a presidential
system in Turkey in a Schmittian manner. With the aid of the Copenhagen School of
security theory, Jovanović and Didić claim that Erdoğan’s eventual obtaining of an exec-
utive presidency started roughly around 2011 with his gradual conflation of state security
with regime survival, and the regime itself with his popular support rooted in his sup-
posed political charisma. For Jovanović and Didić, this again resembles Schmitt’s point
about sovereignty, namely that in states of emergency the one who can successfully
declare enemies and overcome them identifies himself with the state’s very existence,
indeed, with the nation that is the constituent power of the state.1 Along with Erdoğan’s
usual hyperbole about the Gülenists and journalists, Jovanović and Didić emphasize his
call for national mobilization against the PKK and their allies in Syria, the Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF). Strictly speaking, unlike the Gülenists, journalists, or other
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