Cenk Saraçoğlu, Kurds of Modern Turkey: Migration, Neoliberalism and Exclusion in Turkish Society, London: IB Tauris, 2011, 228 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-84885-468-0).

Cenk Saraçoğlu’s book is a valuable contribution not only to Kurdish studies, but also to urban studies as it is devoted to the understanding of Kurdish migrants’ living conditions in the urban context and their relationship with the local population. In the Foreword, Saraçoğlu states that the general subject of the book is “the recent increase in popular anti-Kurdish sentiments in Turkey”. To grasp this subject, he conducted a year-long field study among the middle-class in İzmir, the third largest city of Turkey situated in the Aegean coast and infamous with nationalistic incidents and demonstrations mainly directed towards the Kurds. The author aptly and meticulously defines his subject and object of study, builds up a new analytical tool (“exclusive recognition”) and demarcates the similarities and divergences of the new concept from the widely used concepts such as nationalism, racism and fascism. Moreover, he positions the whole evaluation in a three-layered context of, neoliberalism, the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish army and the Kurdish immigration into the western cities. This positioning makes the research even more valuable for it not only makes a micro-level analysis of the İzmir’s middle-class sentiments towards the Kurdish migrants in the city in particular and the Kurds in Turkey in general, but also relates finely to the macro-level issues.

The book is organised around eleven chapters. After the Introduction, Chapter 2 is devoted to the clarification of the object and introduces the concept of exclusive recognition. In this short yet dense chapter, Saraçoğlu first carefully states what the book does not do: it does not take the Kurds as a homogeneous group but examines “the processes through which middle-class people in İzmir construct the migrants from Eastern Anatolia as ‘Kurds’ and ‘ethnic others’” (p. 9). Thus, the aim of the book is to reveal the components and the process of the “ethnicisation” of the Kurds. To do this, the author defines in length, in the first place, “the subjects of the ethnicisation, middle-class İzmirlis”, in the second place, “the object of the ethnicisation: Kurdish migrants of post-1980s”, and in the third place, “the content of the ethnicisation”, that is, the main common stereotypes that are used to identify the Kurds. Saraçoğlu draws five main stereotypes from the interviews he conducted with 90 middle-class residents of İzmir: (1) ignorant and cultureless, (2) benefit scroungers, (3) disrupters of urban life, (4) invaders, and (5) separatists.

Chapter 3 details the field-work conducted with the middle-class members in İzmir while Chapter 4 makes a rich discussion about the specificity of “exclusive recognition” and its novelty in comparison to the state’s nationalist and assimilationist policies towards the Kurds. As the whole book is organised around this concept and the sentiment that it denotes, it is necessary to develop it in this review. Saraçoğlu states that this is a collective sentiment, a “social phenomenon” (p. 35), which is not a direct extension of the long-standing nationalistic discourses of the state, that of denial and assimilation. Rather, it emanates from the encounter of the middle-class İzmirlis with the Kurdish migrants in the urban context. Hence, they recognise the existence of Kurds as a specific ethnic group, but they have an exclusionary discourse about them and the book is rich of quotations from the interviewees repeating over and over the five stigmatising stereotypes stated above. Saraçoğlu convincingly builds up and historicises his concept, still, one cannot but ask whether this sentiment is really a “recognition”? That is to say, recognition by definition denotes an act of accepting, but the whole argument lies in the fact that the interviewees do not accept the Kurdish migrants as such, but make a new construction of them based on their stereotypes. This act, or sentiment, is closer to a “misrecognition” in the Bourdieusian sense, particularly when it leads to exclusion. Saraçoğlu very well underlines that the sentiment is a consequence of an encounter in the urban environment between the middle-class urbanites and the (mostly informal) working-class Kurds, but it is hardly believable that the middle-class people, in İzmir or elsewhere, had no previous pre-established sentiments vis-à-vis the Kurds. Especially, the class difference accentuated by the sentiment of superiority widespread among the well-educated Turkish citizens in western Turkey (akin to colonial arrogance) seem to have paved the way for the ethnicisation and humiliation of Kurdish migrants, identifying them as ignorant, rude, pre-modern, cultureless and gradually as disrupters of urban life and separatists.

Chapter 5 deals with the locus of exclusive recognition and analyses the historical transformation of urban social life in İzmir to demonstrate how this sentiment is “reproduced and rationalised through the experiences of the middle-class in urban social life” (p. 63). Chapter 6 links to this analysis by adding the contemporary elements shaping urban social life, particularly neoliberalism and migration. Thus, the author aptly links the fieldwork to macro-level phenomena, underlining the relationality of the İzmir case, arriving gradually to the conclusion that the sentiment of exclusive recognition is a novelty structured by the processes in the urban social life through which Kurdish migrants are recognised as a distinctive and homogeneous ethnic group in İzmir (chapter 7), they have been discursively excluded through certain stereotypes and labels that are attached to “Kurdishness” (Chapter 8), and exclusive recognition has been reinforced and reproduced by some factors that are external to urban life in İzmir, namely the recent political developments in the Middle East (Chapter 9). This minute analysis of these processes in shaping the exclusive recognition contributes greatly to our understanding of the encounter between different ethnic groups positioned in different classes and different social milieus.

The last chapter before the overall conclusion is a very important one that engages a unique theoretical debate in which Saraçoğlu puts his concept of exclusive recognition in a vivid discussion with the concept of ideology in its Marxist sense and shows that exclusive recognition is an ideological form of consciousness. Finally, in the conclusion, he evaluates this concept in light of three predominant concepts that are used in sociology to designate and qualify the sentiments and processes that construct and qualify ethnic others that he had deliberately avoided to employ throughout the book: nationalist, fascist and racist. His choice to avoid these terms in order to construct his own concept to depict a particular social phenomenon in a particular locus giving way to the creation of a very powerful and courageous book. The book, which is opening new paths of comprehension and discussion of Kurdish migration to Turkish metropolises, is to be recommended not only to students of the Kurdish question in Turkey, but also to those who are dealing with urban studies in general, and with ethnic encounters in the urban environment in particular.

A small note about the title of the book, Kurds of Modern Turkey: Migration, Neoliberalism and Exclusion in Turkish Society. I think this is quite misleading as it focuses on the case of İzmir metropolitan context and does not aim to provide a full picture of the Kurdish question in contemporary Turkey. Though the writer states that “its findings and arguments … are still significant in understanding the current state and future of the Kurdish question in Turkey and are useful in shedding light on the recent debates over increasing anti-Kurdish sentiments” (p. xiii), the conceptual framework developed in this study needs to be tested in other contexts.