The Kurdish struggle is often narrated through conflict, pain, and loss. Yet beneath this history lies another story: one of joy, love, and friendship. This presentation examines the significance of friendship in Kurdish youth mobilisation in Diyarbakır during the 1990s, a period marked by intense state violence and mass political mobilisation. Rather than a decade among others, the 1990s marked a revolutionary moment that reconfigured Kurdish political life, generating forms of mobilisation and subjectivity that would go on to reshape political life in Turkey and the broader Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores how, during the 1990s, friendship constituted a ground for political subject formation among Kurdish youth.
This analysis argues that friendship is not peripheral but foundational to politics: a life-producing relation through which political life becomes possible. In a social world shaped by violence and suffocation, friendship enables the everyday production of a dignified life by sustaining joy, love, and commitment, while also offering space to confront fear, loss, and uncertainty. As a movement between self and other, and between private and public, it functions as a daily practice of recognition, care, and becoming. By centring friendship, the talk proposes that political mobilisation is not only a response to domination but also a process grounded in the production of life, whose effects may persist beyond their initial context, opening space to rethink political difference through community-building practices that move beyond predefined divisions.
Delal Aydın is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien since 2024. Her work brings together political anthropology and historical sociology to examine Kurdish political mobilisation, community-building, and the role of intimacy in shaping political subjectivity under conditions of violence. She received her PhD in Sociology from SUNY Binghamton. Her current research explores Kurdish transnational mobilisation and diaspora politics, with a focus on relational practices. She has held postdoctoral positions at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and the University of Duisburg-Essen, and has conducted research at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Zeynep Türkyılmaz received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. After holding many fellowship and teaching positions, she is currently an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her research and teaching interests include state formation, gender, nationalism, colonialism, and religion with a focus on religious non-conformity and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present.
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