SCB State-building and Control in Borderlands

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My research project, "State-building and Control in Borderlands (SCB)," is the first that aims to understand and explain formal andinformal control mechanisms through an examination of people's territorial experiences in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey. In thisinnovative and interdisciplinary research, I use the case of Turkey's borderlands with Iraq, Iran, and Syria to explore everyday practicesof state-making at the local level in war-torn borders and borderlands. The question of state control through networks aroundterritoriality addresses the complex imperatives of political, economic, cultural, demographic, and judicial practices of state-buildingover the property regime of land. It does this through examining state practices such as land registration and cadastral procedures onthe promotion of settlement policies, border policies, displacement, new village creation, and landscape nationalization. Thequestion, therefore, is: How are the Turkish state's authority and legitimacy in its borderlands shaped by the complex relationshipsbetween territorial control measures, competing claims over authority by different groups, and people's everyday experiences? Usingmixed methods, including process-tracing, multi-sited ethnography, and qualitative interviews with villagers, internally displacedpeople, activists, lawyers, and state officials in Turkey's Kurdish borderlands, the SCB unpacks people's territorial experiences byunpacking the narratives of, and emotions about, land and property. In particular, the gendered dynamics of the relationshipbetween the state, people, and land will be mapped, filling an important gap in the existing literature. This innovative topic adds vitalscholarship to political science and diaspora studies, both in its methods and its subject. Such an empirically rich study will beimportant for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners committed to peace and conflict studies.