Violence expressed: A comparative study of testimonies of violence among Kurdish refugees

Contact: Nerina Weiss

The project aims at understanding violent dynamics in post-conflict societies and how violence is processed in everyday life. The focus of the project is on pro-Kurdish activists in Eastern Turkey and in Europe. The two decades of conflict between the Kurdish Workers Party PKK and the Turkish state forces will form the basis from which to elaborate on how Kurdish people express and retell violent events, how they make sense of the violence and deal with their traumatic memories. The project will also reflect on the ambiguities of how individual narratives are encroached and often reformulated on the level of national identities and imaginaries.

Torture and political violence do not only affect certain individuals and their ability to reintegrate into social life, but through the creation of insecurity and political instability also affect the entire society, and political violence endangers the existence of the society's moral foundations. Insight in how violence is understood, coped with and expressed is an essential part of assessing and preventing violence in the first place, but is also important when dealing with the difficulties of integrating traumatized refugees in Europe. 

The project is grounded in the anthropology of violence, and based on a long-term qualitative study of pro-Kurdish activists in three different settings: ethnographic fieldwork among Kurdish migrants in Denmark, a follow-up study in Eastern Turkey to extend the ethnographic material previously collected during fieldwork on pro-Kurdish activists in Eastern Turkey.

Background