Deniz Cenk Demir: International Solidarity and the Kurdish Diaspora in Germany (The Otto Suhr Institute at Freie University (FU) in Berlin)

I was happy to receive the GRIP fellowship grant in 2023 to understand the intricate dynamics of international solidarity between the German political activists and figures and the Kurdish political actors in Germany and the Middle East while observing the Kurdish diasporic political activity and its transformation in the country. Due to logistical reasons and delays, I could finally begin my research in early 2024 for the duration of three months. After establishing a solid affiliation with the Center for Middle Eastern and African Politics at The Otto Suhr Institute at Freie University (FU) in Berlin, I also located my home base in Berlin for my ethnographic research across the country. While Berlin was central to my research engagement for intellectual and scholarly reasons, other cities and towns in Germany were also important locations for my short research trips.

Berlin is not only an important center for being a capital as a historic landmark of the fateful times in world politics throughout the 20th century, but it is also an important hub for several diasporic communities, especially for the Kurdish diaspora from the 1960s onward. By ethnographically and academically building my base in Berlin with the help of the welcoming support of several senior and junior scholars and authors, including both the exilic and well-established scholars of Germany, my ethnographic research has benefited a lot from the intellectual and methodologic(al) expertise and experience they had developed over times in their respective fields. My choice to be affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern and African Politics at the Institute at FU was not simply related to the regional expertise of the Center in the area studies for my research on transnational dynamics around a socio-political cause in the Middle East. It was more related to the intellectual activity and exchange by the bright scholars, also housed and coordinated by the Center regarding affect theory in politics and social movements. By developing significant theoretical and methodologic engagements, those scholars and their works have emerged as viable examples and inspirations for my theoretical framework through which I have focused on the affective community building around the Kurdish cause between international communities ––German nationals in that particular case–– and the Kurdish social, political, and cultural initiatives and organizations in the diaspora. With the help of the related debates, conversations, and sources provided by the Center, I now have the benefit of developing such critical intellectual dialogues around the affective solidarity practices around my ethnographic focus.

As a political anthropologist-in-training, I have developed my research project with certain methodological and ethical frameworks ––where ethnographic engagement and reflective data analysis are central–– around theoretical debates regarding solidarity and the history of internationalism. Although I was one of the few non-political-scientist affiliates at the Center in the Otto Suhr Institute at FU, I had the great opportunity to observe qualitative data collection practices in political science-based area studies. Meanwhile, I compared the data collection practices, ethical positioning, and reflections between the ethnographic methodologies developed in my own discipline and qualitative inquiries in the field of political science. Furthermore, my research stint in Germany during the GRIP fellowship also helped me reflect on certain ethical practices from both methodological and intellectual perspectives, question some conventional concepts that has muted certain solidarity practices, and propose conceptual interventions.

As the GRIP-backed affiliation with the FU helped me frame significant theoretical discussions around the dynamic and complex relations between German social, political, and cultural activists and the Kurdish communities, my ethnographic engagements had more in situ active research phases rather than merely theoretical exchange. In doing so, the ethnographic component of my research focuses on the international(ist) socio-political and cultural activity around the Kurdish cause. By attending socio-political and cultural, as well as academic/intellectual activities in/around Berlin (especially around certain districts in the city) for (participant) observation and connection-building, the middle phases of my research became intense in certain periods, such as the week of the Women’s Day at the beginning of March and the Kurdish Newroz celebrations around the week of the March 21st. All those were in addition to the several interviews of mixed types (semi-structed, unstructured, life- history, etc.) I made in/around Berlin. Moreover, I had to travel, sometimes very intensely, for research-related visits to conduct interviews, and made visits even to the remote places across the country, thanks to the great railway connections.

One of the biggest outcomes of the three-month tenure of the GRIP fellowship was my encounter with the earlier cohorts of internationalist figures around the Kurdish cause as well. The overlooked history of internationalism in/around the Kurdish cause also pushed me to think more about such absences of historical and anthropological inquiries, and more importantly the relations between the past and the present momentum of international solidarity practices. The first wave of international(ist) solidarity with the Kurdish cause is traced back to the late 1980s and the early moments of the end of the Cold War, all of which laid the groundwork for later waves of solidarity practices. This highly significant finding enabled me to make significant comparisons between different waves of solidarity practices, at least between two generations of political activists before and on the aftermath of the Global War on Terror. Without understanding that particular histories of internationalism and the overall history of leftist politics in Germany, as well as the Kurdish diasporic networking in the country, the ethnography of the present moment of international(ist) solidarity would remain incomplete. In doing so, I also conducted interviews and collected relevant historical sources, such as brochures and visual materials. I am in the process of working on successfully collating my data with the other sources that shed light on the historical internationalist networks, their connections with the current phases of solidarity practices, and more importantly, their political genealogies in Germany. All this helped me to bring an important missing piece to the understanding of post-Cold War internationalism from the very heart and the “borderland” of the historic Cold War and its ruinations through the angle of the Kurdish cause and its actors.