Governing Kurds through spatial design Turkey in Afrin

On 20 January 2018, Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch, which was a cross-border military operation conducted in the Syrian Kurdish majority city of Afrin (also called Afrîn/Efrîn). Lasting two months after, which Turkey and its allies gained control of the city, the latter set out to the dissolution of the Kurdish self-administration structures. This article argues that Turkey’s activities in Afrin exemplify the expansion of the country’s long-standing Kurdish policies through spatial design beyond the state. For around a century, Turkey has tried to forge the nation along ethnonationalist lines using governing its population through space. Turkey’s (post-)military engagement in Afrin shifts the spatiality of the country’s Kurdish policies from the domestic (national) to the international level. Turkey undertakes a wide range of discursive and material practices that aim to exclude the Kurdish ‘Other’ through the reconstruction of space. There are two spatial strategies with which the extraterritorial spatiality of Turkey’s Kurdish policies has operated as a transformative force in Afrin: displacement and settlement; and discursive reconstruction. These strategies have significant effects in and beyond Northern Syria.