The settlement of Kurdistan: Özlem Göner, ‘Colonization of Kurdistan: A Basic Geographical, Historical, and Theoretical Framework’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The settlement of Kurdistan: Özlem Göner, ‘Colonization of Kurdistan: A Basic Geographical, Historical, and Theoretical Framework’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2025

05Nov25

Excerpt: Colonialism is most commonly typologized as either settler or extractive. Settler colonialism involves large-scale settlement, as seen in British North America, Australia, French Algeria, and Palestine, while extractive colonialism centers on resource exploitation without significant settlement, as in British India, the American Philippines, or the Dutch East Indies. Drawing on this framework, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan (2024) characterizes Ottoman Kurdistan as an instance of extractive colonialism. While this categorization is useful, it is also necessary to interrogate potential settlement ambitions of colonizing states and examine the relationships between these ambitions and realities and layered forms of extraction. Demographic engineering in Kurdistan dates back to the Ottoman dismantling of Kurdish autonomy. Yadirgi (2017) highlights the use of systematic exile, alongside massacres, in the destruction of Kurdish emirates in the early 19th century. These policies intensified after the Armenian Genocide, when between 700,000 and over a million Kurds were deported to Anatolia and Thrace, with many dying en route (Jwaideh 2009; Üngör 2011; Yadirgi 2017). Although large-scale settlement of other Muslim populations in Kurdistan remained limited in the following decades, such aspirations have persisted and continue today. From the 1934 Settlement Act, which incentivized the settlement of Muslims from other regions in Kurdish areas to “Turkify” the region, to the forced relocation of Dersim Genocide survivors (1938–39) and the displacement of one to two million Kurds in the 1990s, Turkey has used settlement laws to uproot Kurds and dismantle the social and political fabric of Northern Kurdistan (Jongerden 2017). Similarly, Syrian and Iraqi Arabization policies established Arab “belts” in Western and Southern Kurdistan. Between the late 1950s and 1963, Syria settled primarily landless Arab peasants, including migrants from Egypt, in the Derik and Hasakah regions of Western Kurdistan (Rojava) (Roberts 2014, Tejel 2011, Altuğ 2013). The Iraqi state also employed demographic engineering, culminating in the Anfal Campaign of 1986–88 (McDowall 2013). Successive Iranian states—from the Safavid era to the Islamic Republic—employed demographic engineering strategies, such as “dilution” and “fragmentation,” to disrupt Kurdish geographic continuity and undermine autonomy claims (Hassaniyan 2019; Mohammadpour and Soleimani 2021). Settlement ambitions persist to this day, as seen in Afrin, Western Kurdistan, where Turkey ethnically cleansed the Kurdish majority and resettled populations and militias aligned with its interests, effectively acting as a surrogate settler colonial power since 2018.^[2] Targeted settlement against key groups and families critical to Kurdistan’s social and political fabric has had lasting effects. While Kurdistan’s colonization cannot be classified as settler colonialism—since it remains predominantly Kurdish—continued attention to demographic engineering and socio-political erasure is essential to understanding the links between genocidal violence and economic exploitation.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed