The Everyday Violence of Forced Displacement

In the 1990s over a million Turkish Kurds were displaced from Southeastern Turkey. By focusing on the forced migrants' stories and on their mobilization of social capital in times of illness and conflict, Geerse shows how they tried to sustain meaningful lives in urban contexts marked by political and structural violence.

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The Everyday Violence of Forced Displacement: Memory, Community and Identity Politics among Internally Displaced Kurds in Turkey is based on ethnographic research in four Istanbul neighborhoods in the early 2000s and after. Miriam Geerse focuses on individuals and families that tried to sustain meaningful lives in an urban context marked by political and structural violence. Geerse argues that forces related to, but other than war and forced displacement, instilled in many forced migrants a pressing need and desire to keep hammering home the price and pain of displacement. Much of this book then bears to the formation of an oppositional consciousness. Geerse’s analysis of the mobilization of social capital in times of illness and social conflict offers an understanding of how the dispersed community of people who shared the same stories functioned in an inhospitable urban environment. In tracing all the periods of the forced displacement, and in laying bare their interconnections, Geerse provides insight to activists striving to improve the position of Kurds, to academics studying the impact of forced migration and other forms of political violence on civilians, and to all those who argue for a more balanced view of the recent history of Turkey.