Hello, um I'm Ali Behdad, the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies and on behalf of my

colleagues at the center, I would like to welcome you all to this

zoom conference on Politics and Practices of Resistance in the Middle East.

This conference has been made possible in partnership with MESA's Global Academy, which as many

of you know is an interdisciplinary initiative to sustain essential research collaborations and

knowledge production among MENA focused scholars from the region

and their counterparts outside the region.

We are delighted to be part of to be a partner of this great project and I would like to

thank my very dear colleague professor Aslı Bâli for her vision and leadership role in

making this program possible and for making us a partner.

Aslı, as many of you know, is an incredible scholar and academic leader with deep commitment to human rights

and civil rights and we are truly grateful to have her as a colleague at the CNES. I also wish to thank

Mimi Kirk, the program manager of the Global Academy, as well as our own

program manager Johanna Romero and program coordinator Christian Rodriguez for their logistical help and support.

Finally. I wish to give special thanks to our colleague Can Açıksöz for his incredible work in planning and

organizing of this conference. Without his help, this would have been a much more challenging task to organize,

this conference. Now before I turn the virtual podium to my colleague

Aslı, I would like to say a few words, just a few words about CNES for those of you who may not be familiar with the work we do.

CNES is a research hub where over 100 faculty from humanities, social sciences, arts, and the law school

collaborate in a variety of research and pedagogical projects.

Founded in 1957, it is one of the oldest and most distinguished U.S centers for interdisciplinary research on the MENA region.

We provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and the dissemination of information within and beyond the campus,

offering cutting-edge research and fresh perspectives on the challenges and

cultural richness of the Middle East.

The Center supports graduate and undergraduate instruction in over a dozen academic departments,

research by faculty, students and visiting scholars, interchange among scholars from around the world and vital public programming

on the challenges facing the MENA region as well as their many cultural and

social achievements.

Please check our website where you will find all the events and and programs of our center as well as

recorded and programs from the past. Now I would like to welcome my colleague Aslı– Professor

Aslı Bâli to the podium. Thank you so much Ali for that very generous opening statement and for all the

information that you provided as well.

It is my absolute pleasure to be here today. This conference has been a long time in the making.

I remember our first meetings discussing the possibilities of organizing a conference with this distinguished set of scholars

and uh, it is really a true honor for me to have been able to participate in conceptualizing this

together with Can Açıksöz. And the idea of engaging on the questions of

politics and practices of resistance in the Middle East is especially timely, I think, at this moment as we ourselves are confronting a

year in which practices of resistance have been so much in evidence on the streets uh

and in the cities of this country. There is so much that we can learn actually from

grounded empirical work, qualitative work, and then analytic work

addressing the ways in which people's publics of the region in the Middle East have long engaged in these practices and have long

sought to subvert the very kinds of structures of systemic inequality and injustice that this country is is very much

enmeshed in here but also has purveyed internationally. And so there is a

terrain of subject matter that has long been the

sort of central preoccupation, if you like, of people working in the social sciences in particular on the Middle

East, but that now is a bridge, much as the MESA Global Academy project itself,

hopes to be a bridge that enables us to really strengthen the partnerships between scholars that are based in the region

and scholars that are based in North America that make the Middle East the focus of their research. Um so too

this conference enables us to see the bridges between the subject matter,

analytic perspectives, conceptual frames, and basic empirical observations from the field that we have

long grappled with in the region and its deep connections to the struggles

of publics here in the United States. So it's an especially timely and important topic

and we are really blessed to have a set of uh scholars here who are exceptional in their capacity to shed light on these

questions.

Um, I will just say uh, briefly one addendum to our uh, program which is that Serra Hakyemez will

be joining us in the second panel of the conference today, um which is also an enormous pleasure. We would have very much

loved to have had Dr [...] amongst us and uh we look forward to having her present

in future at the Center for Near Eastern studies. So I just second the words of my colleague uh, the Director of

the Center for Near Studies, Professor Ali Behdad in inviting you to check our website and keep your eyes out for both

[...] future uh presentation and also our broader programming which is

very rich and addresses similar topics and themes over the course of the year.

But we are so fortunate to have uh Professor Hakyemez here as well amongst us whose own field

work uh is very much in the same terrain and grappling with similar issues to those that [...]

would have been addressing today.

So we once again have a complete program very much in keeping with what we had

originally conceptualized um for today.

We're extraordinarily fortunate to have that and with this I want to turn the

floor to my uh dear colleague Can Açıksöz, professor of

anthropology here at UCLA whose own book is an award-winning book from MESA which was published uh this past year

and which received the Mernici award for MESA, "Sacrificial Limbs." I very much

commit it to your attention but uh for today Professor Açıksöz is here not to discuss his book

although I look forward to future book panels where we can engage

um the book uh here and elsewhere, but um he will be opening the conference um with some remarks about the theme that we'll be

engaging with today, thanks so much Professor Açıksöz.

Uh, thank you Ali and Aslı for these introductory remarks.

I am also honored to be a part of this conference

uh and I will be basically introducing our speakers, uh so bear with me for a couple of minutes as I

go over uh their their uh remarkable achievements.

Uh so I will start by introducing our panelists and uh our discussants.

Uh our first panelist is Haydar Darici. Haydar is a postdoctoral fellow in Kurdish studies at American University.

He has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan.

His research focuses on youth politics of resistance in Kurdistan. His work has appeared in Turkish and English

in journals including Theory and Events, New Perspectives on Turkey, International Journal of Middle East Studies

and you have also co-authored a book with Leyla Neyzi in Turkish as well as many other

publications. Unfortunately, I have a short video that doesn't do justice to your uh publication history uh but overall

Haydar Darici is a leading scholar uh of uh Kurdish youth in in Turkish and and Turkish-Kurdistan and beyond.

So uh that was our first speaker and our second speaker is Serra Hakyemez, who is an assistant

professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. Serra has a PhD in anthropology from

Johns Hopkins University. Based on her archival and ethnographic research on terror trials in Diyarbakir,

Turkey, her dissertation "Lives and Times of Militancy" examines what the political looks like within the space of law

where Turkey resumes its war of terror against the Kurdish movement through myriad judicial and penitentiary

technologies.

Based on this dissertation Dr. Hakyemez currently works on a book project, "Laws of Terror: Becoming Political in Criminal Courts"

which approaches the political vulnerability of Kurds before the law as generative of a grammar of defense

that is at once aspirational, corporal, and collective.

Laws of Terror argues that the vague and arbitrary execution of anti-terror laws

not only fail to discipline Kurdish revolutionaries into citizen subjects but also gives birth to an intimate space in which the terror

suspects work together to redraw the lines between hope and despair, politics and criminality, and heroism and tourism.

Hakyemez's research has been awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies,

National Science Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Her publications in peer-reviewed journals and opinion pieces draw on the literature

on ordinary ethics, political community, and human rights to examine the implications of law

and violence in Turkey's war on terror.

And our discussant is Melissa Bilal also from UCLA.

Uh Melissa Bilal is distinguished research fellow at UCLA's Center for Near East Studies and also a Lecturer in the Department of

Ethnomusicology. She previously taught at the University of Chicago Columbia University, Boston University

and the American University of Armenia where she still serves as a member of the core team developing the Gender Studies program.

Dr. Bilal received her B.A. and M.A. degrees in sociology at Boğaziçi University and earned her PhD in music from the University of

Chicago. She was a Mellon Post-doctoral Teaching fellow in music at Columbia University and post-doctoral research fellow at the Orient-Institut

Istanbul.

She has published numerous pieces in journals including Dialectical Anthropology, New Perspectives on Turkey. Uh her

uh she she is right now uh currently co-authoring a book on Armenian uh Feminism which is uh which is under contract with

the Stanford University Press co-hosted with Lerna Ekmekcioglu. So she, and has a numerous, she has numerous other

publications in Turkish and English. But welcome to our panelists and our discussants.

Okay um my presentation is about uh revolutionary youth politics in Cizre, the Kurdish town near Turkey's

border with Iraq and Syria. I will focus on the transformation of this youth struggle from insurrectionary protests to armed

self-defense in the context of the formation of self-governance in Kurdistan.

I will argue that this transformation occurred through a fetishistic mechanism by which the youth became

both the locus and agents of the structuring of political desire.

Cizre youth protested almost every day from sunset to sunrise often for no apparent reason at all.

This insurrectionary practice was premised on clashing with the police and disrupting

daily life, a common tactic of anti-colonial struggles.

To trigger to trigger police, intervention, protesters would erect barricades,

block roads, and chant slogans. What followed was the tit-for-tat engagement with the police.

Protesters would attack the police with uh the ammunition they produced by repurposing

mundane objects such as stones, cans, pieces of wood, empty alcohol battles, and and fireworks.

Though these acts certainly made the protest seem violent, such homemade weapons couldn't damage either armored vehicles

or the rifled police in sight.

The police nonetheless retaliated to such imaginary or or or symbolic violence with actual

violence sometimes using lethal ammunition but more often by transforming not non-lethal ammunition

into lethal ones. Tear gas for instance is meant to be fired into open areas areas to scatter

protesters. However the police directly targeted the bodies of protesters with the with the hard aluminum canisters in

which tear gas is stored.

Shooting protesters with these canisters would consequently wound and even kill young militants.

The protests generated a political spectacle for adult residents who watched from doors left ajar

or windows with a mixed sense of [..].

The youth, aware of this spectacle of their own creation, acted as both participants and spectators of the

protests.

Using smartphones smuggled from Iraq they regularly photographed and videotaped scenes of clashes to upload

to social media platforms offering immediate access to broader publics.

Since images frequently appeared in mainstream Turkish print and broadcast media, if unvaryingly with a negative and

scandalous tone.

Such a degree of visibility fashioned an image of a youth protester that people could recognize and identify with.

Reaching the status of an image, uh Rosalind Morris argues, is the basis of political subjectivity in the age of

mass media and digital circulation.

Furthermore, it is also the grounds for political collectivity especially after

the displacement of political parties and labor-based organizational structures by horizontal

networks of solidarity.

Morris argues that protesting crowds, I quote, must become visible to themselves as the basis of necessary

objectification. And they must become visible to others to elicit the recognition that that will reinforce that objective status.

Visibility was an ambivalent phenomenon

for youth insurrectionaries.

It was a necessity, it was necessary to cultivate a sense of being political within a collectivity.

Yet visibility also made the youth made the youth prone to surveillance by the police, the consequence of police surveillance

injuries perhaps more dire than in other places. Uh, when the youth were identified they were accused of committing a terrorist crime.

This has become especially the case since the Turkish police began videotaping protesters

and using visual data they gather to identify individual protesters through their clothing.

Moreover, rumors of the Turkish police deploying spies to infiltrate the youth struggle abounded.

I heard countless stories from my interlocutors about such spies.

One of the most common tropes is of a young is of a local young woman falling in love

with a police officer whose secret purpose is to use her as an informant.

In one story, a young woman intentionally or uh unintentionally, and there are different words, provides

an officer with information about her brother leading to her leading to his arrest. Another trope includes a person

who fascinates everyone with their extensive knowledge of the Kurdish struggle, their loyalty courage and sacrifices

only to be revealed only to be revealed to be a spy.

The governing idea of these stories is that apparent appearance can be deceiving.

Even more perplexing however is the unavoidable proximity of the enemy.

Spies were often revealed to be once family members, friends, and even comrades. This structure of expectation

saturated political life in Cizre with paranoid suspicion.

If supplies were were within the intimate circle of protesters, they would be able to recognize

protesters by identifying the markers of their social identities such as name, face, gender, body size, posture, voice

dialect and so forth. To achieve anonymity and reduce the risk of arrest youth protesters developed various concealment tactics including

sartorial transgression and impersonation.

They were compelled to appear in public space only as someone else by assuming the attire of attire of another gender, speaking the dialect of

another tribe, and impersonating imaginative characters.

So they did, so the youth did what they believed the spies were doing.

They appeared as who they were not. The necessary set objectification as the ground force as the ground for political subjectivity

would therefore be premised on one's premised on one's appearing as another,

that is on one's non-identity. Mimetic practices of sartorial transgression and impersonation shouldn't be considered merely imperatives for the

avoidance of arrests.

They also indicate a desire to become another, a desire that Walter Benjamin attributes to the notion of play.

In fact the desire for self-surpassing was already embedded in youth insurrection.

The youth protesters expressed absolute devotion and selflessness uh to the guerrillas who they sought to join.

They iconicized the guerrillas as living martyrs who decide who disowned their lives before joining the armed struggle.

Therefore joining the guerrillas meant becoming a new person.

Many protesters indeed made an [..], that made an [...] meaning joining the guerrillas before and during my field work.

Even before ascending to the mountains, this trajectory was evident in the code names used by protesters as a tactic of

concealment. It was common for them to appropriate the code names of the Guerrillas that they admired.

Consider "[...]" that means warrior, a typical guerrilla code name which would originally also include a second word functioning as a

surname, often a placement, for instance like [...] of Cizre. Protesters experience such

freedom of becoming another without necessarily making making a more permanent [...] exit.

One element of this experience comes from sartorial dissimulation for which they again follow them follow in the footsteps of the

guerrillas.

For instance when temporarily assigned to Cizre, they need to be inconspicuous and dress in black burqas. The youth slightly modified this

practice of this dissimulation.

For instance, woman protesters wore sweaters um.

I forgot to show you pictures actually.

Um, yeah um. The youth slightly modified this practice of this dissimulation. Um woman protesters wore

sweaters and a type of baggy pants typically worn by men.

Some women still wore skirts focusing on more on covering their breasts with loose sweaters. In contrast, men

assumed loose dresses or skirts. that's unlike the attire of the guerrillas which was to make its wearer

blend into the crowd, Protesters instead turned themselves into a spectacle. They gave them they gave themselves uh they gave

themselves to be seen by the crowd, the camera, and the police.

Of significance was the elevation of revelation of the fact of concealment itself

not of the content concealed content for the police often new

from [...] randomly assembled attires full of [...] that the protesters were performing

sartorial transgression as camouflage.

This fact that they knew it incited an uncontainable desire for unmasking uh unmasking to reach the surface. That attire

the attire then attested to its own fabrication, fixing its wearer between visibility and

invisibility.

Nonetheless the surface was originally misrecognized to be young men due to

their exclusive association with protests. This led my interlocutors to speculate on how the police might have viewed

female protesters wearing skirts to instead be male protesters disguised as female protesters.

There were also elements of corporeal and linguistic dissimulation observable

in the altered posture, gait, and and speech of protesters.

Speech was a personal identifier as much as a marker of a tribal affiliation as there was a publicly recognizable speech and dialect

variation across the tribes of Cizre.

Able to speak multiple Kurdish dialects, protesters could adopt their speech to pretend to be a member of another tribe.

Some protesters went so far as to role-play imaginary or other characters.

One such character was Marcos. At first, I assumed it was a reference to Marcos of the Mexican Zapatista movement

as a gesture of solidarity with a political struggles elsewhere. However it turned out that the impersonator was what imagining this

character to be an Armenian [...]. Another protester assumed the character known as doctor.

He used to wear one of those white doctor's coats during protests. He also found what he called

a doctor's bag and stocked it with molotov cocktails, fireworks, and blast bombs.

The doctor also included first aid supplies in his bag and assisted those with minor injuries injuries with rudimentary medical

knowledge he had acquired over time.

Fellow protesters and even the police from the megaphones of armored vehicles referred to this

protester as doctor.

That the police called the doctor by his assumed identity is an indication of their recognition of and participation in

gameplay. Another sign of this game playing is the negotiations between

protesters and the police to take a break when they were tired or hungry.

Just like the just like at the end of the first half of a soccer game um as one protester remarked following

the break agreed to buy both parties the violent game would resume. Given that the police always remained in

armored vehicles, youth protesters perceived the vehicles as their homes as the police's homes.

Over time the protester learned to read the police's police officer's physical condition, emotions, and state of mind by

simply observing the vehicle's movements. When the, I quote, when the vehicle slowed down

and protesters related, we know that the police are either tired or hungry.

The police were like an opposing team, opposing team without whom the protesters couldn't play this

deadly game. For this reason, in rare cases,

when the youth took to the street and erected barricades but the police didn't show up, a protester who called the police [...] and

complained, requesting police intervention in the ongoing protest.

Whether or not the police responded it can be assumed that the police were aware of the

intentions behind such cause as Cizre residents as Cizre residents would never call on the police to

intervene in a political gathering.

Such protests occur in a repetitive mode. Benjamin suggests that the impulse to repetition is another fundamental

quality of play with a function that transforms a shattering experience into into habit.

From a semiological reading, but in a similar direction, Gregory Bakerson sees him playing a metacommunication

practice that uh sees in play at metacommunicative practice detaching uh detaching the signifier from its normative relation to the

signified.

He therefore defines play not as an action but as a meta-communicative frame in which actions denote what they would not do in another frame.

Nevertheless both thinkers attribute a world creating capacity to the notion of play which gave rise to a politically mediated deeply trans-creative

world of insurrection in Kurdistan.

Even though its deadly consequences made it difficult to differentiate between what is play and what is not, the intensity of such politics erase

ordinary life by limiting temporality to the now of insurrection.

How many minutes, I have sorry.

Sorry to interrupt, only two minutes left.

Only two? Oh I have, probably I won't be able to talk about the um, the second part then. uh, self-defense. Uh this moves um

um. Sorry, time moves so fast in protest that protesters lose track of time as

they clash with and run away from the police. One interlocutor once spent over 15 hours protesting before

realizing he had not eaten anything the whole time because you lose yourself.

You do not care about hunger or thirst. You just focus on the corner of the street, whether the police

vehicle will appear there or not. Another interlocutor couldn't even find the right words to describe his intense protest experience except to

mark on what was not.

There is, I quote, there is something we call weeping. There is something we call laughing. But what is in the protest is

different from emotions.

He nonetheless recounted how absorbing protest moments made him distance

himself from the constraints of of everyday life. I quote, you put your real life you put your real life

aside. You forget about your troubles. it doesn't matter if you are in love. It doesn't matter if

your dad pressures you to go to work and bring money.

This insurrectional practice was unable to transform political structures but it generated a fleeting space of freedom for young protesters in so far

as it unfolded in the mode of play. In other words, the repetitive and transgressive nature of play was merged with the intensity of

protest experience to generate a play world that freed the youth from the strictures of a daily life lived as a burden.

I don't, I have a few pages more.

Should I just stop here because I was playing through it.

It would be good to stop here and maybe you can incorporate some of your your uh

remarks on on uh self defense in the in the Q and A if there are questions addressing them.

Thank you so much. So our second speaker is Serra Hakyemez. It's your turn and you have 15 minutes as well. Thank you.

Thank you for do– um so I want to thank Can for his kind invitation, kind introduction and I also want to um not um tell the ones who just joined us

that [...] was not able to make it today and I will be making a presentation um on the work that I'm currently doing.

And um this this presentation will focus on the latest war in Turkish Kurdistan, like like Haydar's. And um I will move uh us from the insurgency to the

digital to the digital space where this insurgency was represented. And I will move us from Cizre to Diyarbakır.

And I think there are some resonances between Haydar's analysis and mine. And maybe we will get a chance to talk about it during the Q&A.

So let me start. Turkish security forces hit Diyarbakır by gunship helicopters, armored tanks, and troops for 100 days from December 2015 to March 2016.

The heavy artillery targeted Sur, the oldest town of Diyarbakır which served as a cultural tourism site for a brief period of time when the armed

conflict between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state had come to a stalemate

in 2013 and 14. The cease-fire between the conflicting parties did not last long though.

Politically active Kurds inspired by their counterparts in [...] established self-defense units in their inner neighborhoods to ignite an uprising for

autonomy in Kurdish cities.

Under the threat of losing territorial sovereignty, state-appointed governors declared

indefinite curfews in these cities where security forces carried out sweeping military operations.

The operation in Diyarbakır lasted the longest and attracted the attention of national and international media outlets.

A large number of footages was uploaded to the digital space during the curfew in Sur.

Turkish security forces recorded live what they called [...] operation

as made as they made advances from the other borders of Sur district to [...].

These recordings were broadcasted on mainstream news channels, uploaded to the online portals of

newspapers, and shared on social media.

Saturated with violence and reinforced by technological advancement, they expanded the battlefield to the digital space

where fear and terror were reinforced through viral circulation. It was not only the Turkish security forces who were

involved in recording. Those witnessing the operation recorded on their smartphones what they considered grave human rights violations.

If the recordings of security forces meant to recruit viewers to support state violence, the individual recordings of the letter

attempted to show the tragic effects of that violence on the city and its residents.

The digital space was thus crowded by three figures which not only countered

but also reproduced each other,

Heroic Turkish soldiers, heroic Kurdish guerrillas, and innocent victims. The tension between

these three figures is neither peculiar to the war in Turkish Kurdistan nor nor reconcilable through its migration

to the digital space.

War images operate through scenic affirmation of sovereignty and scenic abnegation of

enemy.

Rather than disclosing a hidden truth, they conscript viewers inside into the trajectory of bullets and

missiles by turning video cameras into the weapons of war, a phenomenon that Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein have

labelled digital militarism.

Situated within a vicious circle of verification and denunciation, heroic soldier [...]

an innocent victim gained traction within their own publics.

Devoid of evidentiary capacity to establish guilt or prove innocence, this paper is not

interested in the truth value of these war images.

It is rather interested in the production of the phantasmic through the montage of these images.

By bringing together different elements, montage produces something extra, a surplus that produces a state of generative

instability where each part transforms and takes on new

shapes within the wider constellation.

Among the images' montage this paper focuses on the diary of resistance in Sur.

It examines the visual aesthetics, narrative structure, and the rhythm of the diary of

resistance in Sur video to show how it pictures the specters of Kurdish fighters

who disrupt this excellent accelerated rhythm of social media by disclosing spatial

and temporal discontinuities between the viewer

and the viewed. I argue that in its commemoration of the dead,

the surplus that this video produces speaks to the complicity of the viewers of this video in the tragedy that was depicted in it.

The consumption of the surplus effect is contingent upon the aesthetic tools deployed and the pace in which the tragedy is represented.

In the aftermath of the Sur operation, the Diyarbakır

governor banned the public commemoration of dead guerillas and forced their families to bury them

at midnight outside of the city center.

The Kurdish movement paid the [...] to the approximately 70 guerrillas died in Sur through print, broadcast, and social media.

At the center of commemoration activities lies a diary, at the center of commemoration activities lies a diary written amid the

clashes.

Upon his commander's request, an injured Kurdish fighter who went with the nom de guerre, [...] took the daily notes on a thin graph

paper notebook describing the debilitating conditions under which the guerrillas were fighting against the

heavily equipped armed armed and army and air forces of the

Turkish state.

[...] was killed on the last day of the Sur uprising, yet one of his friends was able to

smuggle the diary out of the curfew site and bring it to the guerrilla headquarters in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Kurdish journalist Dogan Cetin acquired a copy of this diary to prepare it for publication and visualize commemoration.

Diary as a genre often entails the disclosure of one's inner world to oneself and others.

Although diary is written by Kurdish guerrillas for their personal archives could deploy an

intimate and personalized voice, the ones written with the purpose of publication tend to have a documentary-like

character containing information about the precise dates and locations of armed confrontations and full names and detailed memories of

martyrs.

Published guerrilla diaries are not necessarily stripped of all feelings, but rather concentrate on those that are felt collectively

after an operation ranging from thrill to sorrow to anger. Authorship in most of these diaries is considered to be collective,

since the writing process involves many guerrillas,

some of whom narrate their stories orally while others transplant transcribe them into diaries. The editors of Kurdish publishing houses and news

media take the last cuts to give a final shape to such diaries.

A selection of [...] diary entries was published in five parts in the europa-based

Kurdish journal [...] Politica.

In early September 2016, the major Kurdish news agency DIHA announced the upcoming diary series with the headline the resistance diary of Sur misleads

its readers.

Similar to other epistolary narratives, the diary as a medium of representation

creates an illusion of presence that transforms the addressee from an absent figure into a presence which hovers in the

text's interspaces.

Despite the time lag between [...] writing of the diary and his meeting with readers, the latter is kept in lingering in the former's diary

through the use of certain visual images and framing structures.

A picture of the first page, let me keep the slide. A picture of the first page of the diary circulated on

social media to reinforce a spatial contiguity between the writer and his potential readers.

An illusion of temporal continuity was generated by editorial notes which captioned the words of the late [...] of Cirze

which says "Whatever happens, the end will be glorious."

While the published diary notes give insight into what had happened in Sur, the editor

took up the task of showing that the end has indeed been glorious through his selection of headlines

and subtitles, insertion of editorial notes, and guerrilla pictures. This diary was made public not only in a written form but also

through a digital video.

As opposed to the visuals produced by Turkish security forces, the producers of this visualized diary did not have

close-up shots or drawn images that could open a new field of vision to represent Sur's ruination in an authentic fashion. Instead, they

obtained from Kurdish journalists some footages about the operation consisting of scenes of the Kurdish Youth mounting barricades by piling up

sandbags and paving stones and storing up life weapons for the upcoming war.

The producers of this video combined these footages with the ones taken haphazardly by the residents of the

Diyarbakır on their smartphones.

Others recorded by cctv cameras of Sur's shopkeepers and those the police shopped and shared on television channels.

The diary video speaks from multiple perspectives, moving from that of Kurdish journalists to the Diyarbakır residents to the police.

There is neither temporal nor spatial contiguity between these two things.

Instead of using digital technologies to overcome abrupt transitions between those, the producers of this video

highlighted the visual rupture by marking each transition with a drum backing.

While serial drum beats emphasize the feeling of a rupture, a cacophony of multiple sounds embedded in the video

conveys a sense of pulsating danger.

As these sounds are mixed with each other, a trained anchor woman's voice over reads [...] notes in a highly

professional intonation and an Istanbulite Turkish accent.

The juxtaposition of her distant voice recorded in a studio [...] cacophony of noises emanating

from the footages renders the destruct the disjuncture between the viewer and the views perceivable at the audio level.

This misalignment of voice and sound not only casts doubt on the identity of the speaking subject but also questions the capacity of the

viewers to comprehend the war in its entirety. Montaging these images from different sources with their irreconcilable perspective,

the video performs first and foremost the impossibility of having a full spectrum of war.

While the written diary generates the illusion that readers meet those who fought in Cirze, the visual diary

reveals the illusion concealed in this meeting namely the death of the referent.

Drawing on Barthe's notion of the punctum, I suggest that this video wounds the reader through the montage of

images disclosing the sign's loss of the referent. The line of light

traced by a punctum enables the viewer to apprehend that which has been there but is no more.

The producers of the diary, the the visual, the video of the diary, wanted to convey the message

of the guerrillas immortality and the resistance victory.

Although they [...] this intention by reproducing larger than life portrays of the guerrillas like you can see here,

the montage brings to the surface the lives and spaces lost in real time. In the video – by the

way Serra, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Thank you.

In the in this video these portraits are projected onto the citadels and basalt stone walls of Sur.

The camera guides viewers through the old streets of Sur where they confront this purpose pictures of guerrillas who

look as if they are guarding the streets. Yet, as the camera continues to move the guerillas who looked almost alive a

second ago becomes still photographs. With each move, the camera leaves a guerrilla behind only to run into another one. While these

scenes convey a sense of recuperating what was lost in the war, the contrast between the stillness of the photos and the moving footage

indicates that the recuperation promised in the written diary would soon be lost again in the visual one.

Is it possible to conceive of this punctum of time and

death as generative of a space of non-indifference that compels a different way of inhabiting social media?

When the written and visual diaries were released, some twitter users shared the internet links of these diaries.

The video was later uploaded to youtube. Yet the commentary section was disabled to protect it from verbal attacks.

The empty white page underneath the youtube page can be seen as a forced silence which may still direct the viewers attention

to the diegetic space of the diary, crawled crowded with disrupting voices.

The sharing of the youtube video was further slowed down to its due to its length. Although the

video was divided into five parts, the viewers would face legal sanctions if they shared it

using their real names or downloaded it onto their cell phones or computers.

Resisting the digital media's militant adherence to sharing, reproducing, and circulating images,

the visual diary appears as though it was a product from the times of mechanical

reproduction claiming the current space of digitalization.

This disjuncture between the diaries disengagement from the cultural

aesthetics and digital piece of speed of social media and its reproduction of the footages found on social media is

what imbues this video with the potential to create a counter-hegemonic memory of war.

I will end here. Thank you so much Serra. So I turn to our discussant, Melissa Bilal.

Thank you Serra and Haydar. Uh I find it meaningful to be a discussant of this panel that brings Serra's and Haydar's researches together.

Not only because I'm a citizen of Turkey myself who does not quite fit into the official definitions of the Turkish national,

and whose life has been defined by this position of being a suspect citizen in the eyes of the state but also because as an Armenian, I represent

the very identity, the denial of which the nation-state has been constituted on.

As a scholar conducting ethnographic and historical research on the impact of

state and collective violence on my native community of Armenians in Turkey,

I find situating my relationship with Serra and Haydar's work significant because, first of all, I'm interested in

problematizing the colonial relationships reproduced in anthropological practice in Turkey.

Both papers urge me to address the question of politics of anthropological research on the populations that have been made

vulnerable by the Turkish state.

Uh, the first thing I want to point to then is the very nature of Serra and Haydar's research.

Being acquainted with the background of these works and the processes that shaped them

especially that of Haydar's, as a colleague and a close friend, make me think about the ways in which the knowledge,

anthropological knowledge, we produce is

in dialogical relation with the responses we developed

as human beings within the political and emotional conditions we have been pushed in uh by the Turkish

state.

The second reason why I find commenting on these papers meaningful but also

rather traumatic for me is that uneasy relationship between my lived experience and my scholarly work. Uh as an Armenian

of Istanbul, a descendant of genocide

survivors, from different parts of the

Ottoman Empire, my presence here adds I guess another level to this discussion.

While my citizenship has been defined by the epistemology of denial, during the formative years of my political self,

the Kurdish critique to Turkish nationalism and sovereignty and their extension in cultural

exclusionism and erasure has been crucial.

Kurdish experience and political expression provided me and uh my whole my generation of friends uh are very [...] of protest.

In the late 1990s when I was getting organized with a group of Armenian women on Boğaziçi University campus, I was reading Kurdish feminist journals and

using their formulations of being Kurdish and woman to give voice to my own position as a minority woman in Turkey.

And in in 2000 when a neo-liberal imperialist nostalgic multiculturalist discourse started being fashioned in Turkey, especially targeting the

non-muslim communities among many other things, uh it was among many other things it was the exclusion of Kurds from this discourse that provided

me with the clarity of seeing how the borders of that culture-talk were strongly sealed uh by nationalism.

As we criticized neoliberal multiculturalism in Turkey that had become a way of covering up for denialism and

not working through the past in Turkey, we were further traumatized by the orchestrated racist murder of

[...] and uh later in 2013 and especially 2015-16 as Serra explained we found ourselves in a state

where violence became the unreserved, unashamed response of the government to any attempt at co-existence and survival.

In April 24th uh 2015 I was in Diyarbakır Sur district um for the 100th anniversary commemoration

of the Armenian genocide where I witnessed perhaps the closest attempt uh thus far in Turkey to the recognition of the Armenian genocide and genocide of

um Syriac and Greek peoples.

In a public address by HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş who is as you know now victim of unlawful imprisonment.

A few months after the speech and in April of 2015, Sur was an urban war zone as Serra explained.

Over the past two months while witnessing the horrors of the war in Karabakh Artsakh from afar, I had flashbacks to the

horrors of 2016 2015-2016. Besides because of many obvious reasons such as Turkey sending Syrian mercenaries to fight

against Armenians, but also because of the rising ultra nationalist pan-turkish discourse in Turkey in response to the war,

and I'm not discussing the similarities or differences between the two cases, [...] and um and the Kurdish war against Kurds,

but focusing on turkey's foreign policy.

Uh in my personal and political experience from my standpoint, my situated knowledge

resulting from my biography and my research, I had the immediate reaction of connecting Karabakh to

northern Syria, especially the company uh and after resistances.

As an Armenian historian and through my research over the past decade, I came to learn the

interconnectedness of Armenian and Kurdish histories as well as the Kurdish memory of the

Armenian genocide both as perpetrators and as rescuers.

I began to understand the connection between the Armenian genocide as the original unpunished crime

and the unending cycle of violence that has been going on in Turkey from Dersim genocide of 37 38 to up 6 7 September 1955 pogrom against

non-muslims from the expulsion of Greeks uh '64, '74 to '78 Maraş massacre, a 1980

military coup, disappearing of political prisoners to assassinated peace activists,

from the full-scale military and police operations against Kurds to the near

complete suppression of political dissent in Turkey today along class ethnic

religious, gender, and sexual orientation lines.

There's a growing literature on this relationship of cohabitation, conflict, domination, oppression, betrayal

and or peace and solidarity between Armenians and Kurds in the past. There is also growing work on the collective memory of places

and people that manifest itself in songs and stories.

The more I do research and learn about my own history, the more I can detect the historical continuities between strategies of

Armenian encouraging self-defense forms of struggle, genres of resistance. That's why

Haydar's work also resonates um with my uh work. I can see how the genocidal structure,

to borrow a native scholar Patrick Wolf's formulation, is constantly reminded to us by the state through unending violence to reaffirm its sovereignty.

So the question I want to raise and this is the question

inspired by my conversation with [...] last week, the question is this where do we go wrong

in fighting against a state apparatus that is constantly turning one population against the other by generating fear

and where do we fail in our attempts to build solidarity to dismantle this ubiquitous violence that shapes our past, present, and future in this

post-Ottoman region, uh a region where turkey's domestic and foreign policy has been that of

destruction of populations, it's defined as enemies to its national sovereignty.

And I'll leave it here. Thank you so much Melissa.

Uh so I'll turn to our speakers to see if they have any uh comments on uh our speakers' comments.

Can you hear me? Yes, um I forgot to unmute myself and Melissa was presenting but um thank you for thank you for your

reflections Melissa. Um, I think I think your question is is extremely important

uh to think with because I don't have of course, I mean, I don't have any answer to

it but I think it's such an important question to ask like where do we, we know how, I mean we constantly analyze

how the states, the mechanisms of violence that is inflicted by the Turkish state, but perhaps it's time to

turn back to ourselves to ask where do we fail.

Where do we fail so badly that uh we keep seeing uh different episodes of the same violence and um I,

I yeah I really like um your question and um your invitation to think about where do we fail. And perhaps

in in my presentation I was just um trying to say in a um in a way that um the whole idea of um, representing a war that is not

representable can be a good way to start about this failure because um Haydar started with the

beginning of this insurgency war and I tried to explain how it was,

it was represented. But the representation itself was

was a failure because it was inviting the viewers to feel like they are with the

with the guerrillas who are already dead and who were asking for some help but they couldn't get any help when the war was unfolding.

So perhaps we should also think about the impossibility of representation

and what what comes afterwards or what what should be done when the entire apparatus of representation fails us.

Haydar, do you have anything?

Yeah, thank you very much Melissa. I was actually going to uh mention that part, like why we failed to transform you know political

structures.

And I think um relying on fetishized images is one of the um deadlocks I think of political struggles today you know. When you

cannot really establish um a revolutionary program and you cannot really, you know um, create a different uh more radical uh

you know social sociality, then you then you find yourself you know just uh mobilizing um you know the people or and through

just this um through fetishes. Um yeah that's.

Uh so we are coming to the end of our time.

So I'll turn to uh Aslı and Ali for closing remarks but before doing so

I want to personally thank you all for this great session and thank you to all our

conference uh participants and attendees.

Yeah I'll echo uh Can by thanking everyone who participated and

and this you know excellent second panel was really uh fantastic to participate or watch,

to learn from let's put it that way. I want ultimately to step away from this with a kind of positive idea and I do think that you have really

demonstrated that there are uh there's much to be recovered from this moment even as it's also a moment

to uh mark loss uh and you know tremendous both loss and trauma.

But there's also many there are many things not just to be recovered but to be built upon and that's the beginning

of a different conversation I think and maybe one we can think about in another phase.

Um but it's really uh it's been a great pleasure, everything we could have hoped

for and I'm just going to turn the floor finally to uh Ali Behdad to to close us out.

Thank you very much. I cannot uh thank you enough for this wonderful

panel. uh all these speakers were just, the presentations were great, Serra's and

Haydar's and Melissa's and Massoud and Dilsa and Kevan and of course and the great leadership

of both Can and Asli in making this possible. And we're delighted actually to to to collaborate and to work with the

global academy. We're very fortunate to be part of it and I hope that this is just the beginning of

a long conversation that we will have in the future. So uh please um

you know, let us stay in touch and we look forward to having more

discussions about these very important and timely discussions. So thank you all thank you all the audience

for um you know listening today and all the

panelists.

I'm really delighted and and grateful to all of you.