Friendship as a Political Concept: Kurdish Youth Politics in the 1990s

Mercoledì 17 giugno 2020, alle ore 14,30, avrà luogo "Friendship as a Political Concept: Kurdish Youth Politics in the 1990s" per il ciclo Online Cosmos Talks. Relatore sarà Delal Aydin, SAR research fellow at SNS/COSMO. L'evento è organizzato dalla Faculty of Political and Social Sciences Scuola Normale Superiore presso Palazzo Strozzi.

Per partecipare: https://meet.google.com/oyw-uwmw-nce

Abstract

This talk offers an ethnography of the building of the militant Kurdish youth movement in the 1990s when Kurdish mobilization, led by the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), was at its height. Based on fieldwork, archival research, and auto-ethnography, I discuss the formation of revolutionary subjectivities against the Turkish state during the Kurdish youth mobilization in the 1990s, which was also a period marked by extreme state violence. In my analysis, I explore friendship as a human bond of joy, playfulness, and love which provides a core ground for young revolutionaries to craft themselves as political subjects who believed in their power to change the order of things. This talk suggests the need to re-think friendship as a critical political concept in the collective formation of alternative subjectivities while also recognizing the worth and uniqueness of each individual.