Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican Elazığ, Turkey

Elazı, an eastern Anatolian province, became an internal border within Turkey in the 1930s, when neighboring Dersim’s historically autonomous Kurdish tribes rebelled against the Turkish state’s centralizing and assimilationist policies. The government responded with overwhelming force, destroying a third of the villages in the province, cordoning off Dersim, and forcibly evacuating survivors to western Turkey. Thereafter, travel beyond Elazı into this combat zone required special passport-like permits. Railroads, touted primarily as instruments of national integration and defense against foreign aggression, were in reality used to ferry troops into battle and Dersimis out of their homelands. New surveillance and communication technologies transformed the terrain into a highly militarized landscape. Despite formal similarities to their counterparts elsewhere in Turkey, Elazı’s state-run institutions engendered practices that reinforced ethnoreligious hierarchies. Zeynep Kezer describes this extraordinary concentration of the state apparatus between Dersim and Elazı during the early years of the Turkish Republic and explores the spatiality of borders as inhabited surfaces rather than linear formations in Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican Elazı, Turkey.