Critical Studies on Terrorism

ISSN: 1753-9153 (Print) 1753-9161 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20

Identity, conflict and politics in Turkey, Iran and

Pakistan

Umut Can Adısönmez

To cite this article: Umut Can Adısönmez (2019): Identity, conflict and politics in Turkey, Iran and
Pakistan, Critical Studies on Terrorism, DOI: 10.1080/17539153.2019.1629729

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2019.1629729

Published online: 11 Jun 2019.

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CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM

BOOK REVIEW

Identity, conflict and politics in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, edited by Gilles Dorronsoro
and Olivier Grojean, London, C. Hurst & Co., 2018, 282 pp., £65.00 (Hardcover), ISBN
9781849043724.

In poststructuralist readings, security and identity have often been explored through the Other. The
Other, whether it represents a person, a religion or something else, draws not only the boundaries
of the Self but also the governance codes in a defined political authority. Thus, identity is not a self-
contained notion. It is shaped through the effect of a contingent set of relations constructed in
light of the Other. This leaves some challenging questions to be answered: How do we (re)
formulate our identity? How can we understand identity in the nexus of violent conflict? And,
how are “differentiation conflicts” transformed and redefined? In Identity, Conflict and Politics in
Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, Dorronsoro and Grojean offer a fascinating collection of chapters, each of
which elaborates these complex and interdependent questions.
These theoretically rich chapters – which draw on insights from the anthropology to the
political sociology literatures in analysing each state – are structured around three thematic
parts. The first part focuses on the formation of ethno-religious identities, a widely debated
issue within the Turkish, Iranian and Pakistani contexts, while the second centres on the
political mobilisations of these identities, mostly arising from state manipulation and chan-
ging international conjunctures. The third and last part examines the micro and meso level
transitions of these “multiple identities” into violence, underscoring that the violent turn is
built on the historical progress of the three states under investigation.
The first part, at its core, deals with the centrality of identities in the cultural, religious and
ethnic dimensions within these countries. The reader is introduced to various internal
dynamics of identity formations, for example, their “unconscious production” in Turkey vis-à-
vis different social practices among groups – which ultimately provoked intolerance between
the Sunni and Shia communities in Central Anatolia (chapter one). However, re-ordering
these identity hierarchies might be possible, at least rhetorically. This is partly related to the
emergence of “new regimes of subjectification”. In this vein, chapter two traces how Turkey’s
Justice and Development Party (JDP), with its Islamic tendencies, attempted to re-frame the
image of the Kurdish Other in Turkey with the help of popular media tools (e.g. TV series).
The third chapter looks at the governance of these identities while examining Gilan, the
culturally rich, non-violent, but autonomy-seeking province of Iran. Christian Broomberger,
shows that each identity represented in Gilan is limited to its cultural dimension, which is
being neutralised by Iran. The chapters in Part One continually contextualise the links
between identity, social stratification and their management by the centralising state autho-
rities in the wider political (and media) spectrums.
Building on this, Part Two explores the mechanisms that triggered these multiple iden-
tities to challenge their hierarchical positions and mobilise. In these accounts, the editors
make different chapters talk, debate and complement each other. In chapter four, Elise
Massicard deals with the “hidden expressions” of identity demands in two cosmopolitan
cities of Turkey, namely Mersin and Adana. She shows the various ways in which these
identity-based requests are communicated by the political parties trying to appeal to multi-
ple identities. Echoing the “internal Orientalism” of Edward Said, the following two chapters
explore the reproduction of the East-West relationship in “intercommunal” contexts. Chapter
2 BOOK REVIEW

five surveys Britain’s (dis)integration approach towards British Sikh and Muslim communities,
analysing the antagonistic relations between the groups which attach to each other various
“Othering” labels. Along similar lines, chapter six examines the ordering and re-ordering of
the Iranian Azaries’ identity hierarchy, highlighting how effective Iranian integration policies
were replaced with the “Turkish” stereotype as a practice of “Othering” in the 1970s, before
exploring the role of Azerbaijani entrepreneurs in destabilising this identity hierarchy. The
last chapter in this part conducts a macro-level analysis of the genealogy of the violent cycle
in the contemporary Middle East. According to the author, Hamit Bozarslan, the regional
turbulence in the 1970s led to a fragile environment while imposing “new political realities”.
This, in turn, facilitated a fertile background for diverse groups to adopt violent means
against the central authorities. Part two demonstrates the strength of this volume and will
be particularly interesting to political sociologists.
The third part considers various levels of identity-based violent transitions, showing that
violence can operate autonomously in certain contexts. The ever-intensifying globalisation
context, where ethnic and religious differences become “bold” identity-makers, is the subject
of chapter eight, which explores how banal identity differentiations and fragmenting sym-
bols propagate long-distance suffering among individual agents, even leading to jihadist self-
radicalisation in the UK. In this vein, drawing on the 2006 Danish cartoon controversy,
chapter nine explores how emotions articulated at different levels were spontaneously
channelled into violent acts in Pakistan, thousands of kilometres away from the incident.
Also centring on Pakistan, chapter ten focuses on the clashes between the Baluch and
Pashtun ethnicities in the city of Quetta, showing that violence, rather than being delegiti-
mised, served to redraw intergroup relations and reconfigure social life in the city. Chapter
eleven explores the impact of the religious and ethnic segregations in Karachi between 1979
and 1989 through a consideration of the evolving nature of student-led violence at Karachi
University. Finally, chapter twelve examines the value attached by different political regimes
in Iran to two ethnic minorities residing in Naqadeh: Kurds and Azaries. It argues that the Shia
Azari identity was categorically prioritised after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, while the
Sunni Kurdish identity was marginalised as the Kurds sought autonomy. The collections
examining the violent reflexes in this part greatly benefit from the systematic analysis of
identity formations and collective mobilisations laid out in part two.
Owing to the volume’s bridging thematic scopes of identity, conflict, and politics, the
relationships among competing identities, and between the state and ethnic minorities, are
remarkably well-examined. If something is missing, however, it might be the role of the state,
particularly Turkey, in (mis)managing the plural identities being performed within its domain,
which directly influence the conflict environment. In this vein, the book might have benefited
from incorporating two points. First, it is well highlighted within this volume that the states
under inspection strategically chose to intensify the ideational split between distinct ethnic
groups, such as the case of Shia Azaries versus Sunni Kurds in Iran. In the Turkey chapters,
a rich counterpart of this governance strategy, through which the same ethnic group was
divided, could have been included. For example, in the 1990s, a blind eye was turned to
Sunni Kurdish Hezbollah in order to weaken the mounting impact of the nationalist pro-
Kurdish Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (PKK). Second, the volume would have benefitted from
a consideration of the much-debated secular-religious divide in Turkey vis-à-vis its impact on
the formation of plural identities. This discussion would more powerfully bridge the first and
third thematic scopes of the volume, as well as throwing light on the diverging approaches
toward the Kurdish Question in Turkey.
Exploring each of these subjects is a dense task in its own right, especially given the limited
number of comparative studies on Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. Thus, without reservation, I can say
 CRITICAL STUDIES ON TERRORISM 3

that this book is a valuable contribution to the literature. Each individual chapter remains
historically informed and contemporary in focus. This volume will be of foremost interest to
area scholars/specialists; however, its scope and accessibility mean it would also be of interest to
advanced students of the region.

Umut Can Adısönmez

Conflict Analysis Research Centre (CARC), University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
ua31@kent.ac.uk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8198-4405
© 2019 Umut Can Adısönmez
https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2019.1629729