ABSTRACT

Starting in the late 1990s, local lawyers in Kurdistan carried the issue of state terror to the European Court of Human Rights, asking for recognition of state violence and the enforcement of reparations for their material loss and psychological damage. Discourses of state recognition of Alevi and Kurdish identities take place simultaneously with an increased oppression of all those who have alternative visions of identity and democracy. This chapter analyzes the recent forms of (state) power in governing outsiders and outsider struggles in Dersim, with a focus on the anti-dam movements and the production of a collective memory of 1938. The coemergence of the environmental and political repression reveals an increasing interest in specifics of identity and history, rather than a politics based on a generalized conception of outsiderness and a consciousness of history. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and has invested in shaping not just the identities but the lifestyles of its insider citizen.