In Kurdistan, the Middle East, and North Africa, I have seen markings on women’s faces, hands, and arms: engraved memory in the form of small lines, dots, and symbols made from breast milk and ash. Known in Kurdish as deq, these tattoos bear ancient history, identity, protection, beauty, pain, and belonging. 

Traveling through Kurdistan, I met Fatê Temel, a deq artist in Diyarbakir (Amed), and spoke with her about the art of deq, its gradual disappearance, and the efforts to bring it back to life.

For the past several years, Fatê has been running a small deq studio in Diyarbakir, where she works to preserve and revive the tradition of deq – hand-poked tattoos primarily worn by women throughout Kurdish history. Often placed on the face, hands, or arms, these markings are composed of dots and simple geometric forms, each carrying spiritual, cultural, and personal significance. 

Besides being a deq artist, Fatê is also a researcher, traveling throughout Kurdistan to learn from the women who wear deq and from the people and places connected to its history. 

In our conversation, she reflected on her connection to deq, her efforts to sustain it as a living cultural practice, and the layered meanings these body inscriptions continue to hold today.

Read the full interview by Joost Jongerden with Fatê Temel in The Amargi here: Deq: tattoos made of breast milk and ash

Joost Jongerden

Introduction
Diyarbakir’s historic Hevsel Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has fed the city for centuries, face growing threats from pollution, monoculture farming, illegal construction, weakened municipal authority, and changes to the Tigris River.

Hevsel Gardens in Diyarbakir (Amed), Kurdistan in Turkey, have long been characterized by a “thrown togetherness” of agriculture, ecology, and everyday urban life. For generations, farmers cultivated a diverse range of vegetables and fruits in relatively small plots, supplying the city with fresh produce. Now, this historically layered landscape, shaped over many centuries, is undergoing profound transformation. 

Water management, shifts in agricultural practices, illegal construction, and the weakening of municipal authority to protect the area are all placing the gardens at risk. What was once a mosaic of diverse cultivation practices and shared use, sustaining ecological quality, is increasingly marked by monoculture, declining biodiversity, and pollution.

This article by Kamuran Akin for the special issue Rural Protest and Contentious Politics edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden analyzes the governance of northern Kurdistan through the framework of colonial governmentality. It argues that, for over a century, the Turkish state has administered the region through exceptional legal regimes, coercive policies, and military interventions. Drawing on historical practices such as the General Inspectorates, the 1925 Reform Plan for the East, the Law on the Maintenance of Order, and the 1934 Settlement Law, the article highlights how dispossession, forced displacement, and violence have constituted enduring mechanisms of rule. While acknowledging competing scholarly perspectives that interpret the Kurdish issue through lenses such as nation-state formation, minority politics, and underdevelopment, the article contends that a colonial perspective remains analytically valuable. Building on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it proposes “colonial governmentality” as a flexible framework that captures the evolving, heterogeneous, and adaptive nature of state power. Focusing on fortified outposts (kalekol) and checkpoints, the article argues that these are modern extension of earlier colonial-style governance tools. They function as spatial instruments of control, similar in purpose to earlier institutions like General Inspectorates or emergency rule zones and embody a permanent security presence, reinforcing surveillance and rapid intervention capacity in rural Kurdish areas.

read more here: https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.70049

This article by Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou is written for the special issue Rural Protest and Contentious Politics edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden. It explores the meanings of refugeeness among Kurdish residents of the self-managed Lavrio refugee camp in Greece in the aftermath of the 2015 reception crisis. Focusing on how Kurdish camp residents make sense of their political identities and on how they distinguish themselves from those they call ‘non-political refugees’, the article (a) shows how the 2015 reception crisis triggered a broader ideological shift from a ‘refugee’ to a ‘migrant’ crisis, producing the figure of the undeserving migrant; and (b) argues that Kurdish camp residents reclaim their refugeeness as a permanent political condition rooted in collective memory and the Cold War archetype of the persecuted political refugee. Doing so, they mobilize refugeeness as a political resource to distinguish themselves from the depoliticized ‘2015 refugee’, secure the legitimacy of their presence and assert their right to remain amid the threat of eviction from the Lavrio camp.

Read more here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sena.70050 

The article by Ayşegül Aslan for the special issue ‘Rural Protest and Contentious Politics: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure in Kurdistan’ edited by Francis O’Connor and Joost Jongerden has been published.

The article examines the kinopolitical dimensions of Kurdish seasonal agricultural labour mobility in South-eastern Turkey and extends across various agricultural areas. Focusing on rural transformation and climate change. Using Nail’s (2015) kinopolitical framework, the article argues that labour mobility represents a structural circulation within an unstable agrarian regime rather than mere economic migration. For Kurdish workers, this motion functions as an enforced flow, driven by structural shifts that limit agency and reinforce precarious conditions. The study synthesises extensive secondary data sources, reinterpreting existing reporting through a kinopolitical lens to reveal systemic displacement patterns within traditional migration statistics. This approach identifies these workers as mobile subjects within broader struggles, clarifying their socio-environmental vulnerabilities. In Turkish regions with chronic infrastructural neglect, climatic pressures act as structural multipliers of vulnerability. Movement emerges through the convergence of ecological instability and institutionalised dispossession, making labour circulation a functional necessity for agrarian accumulation. The research emphasises vulnerabilities resulting from the intersection of environmental crises and systemic socio-political forces, including restrictive labour policies. Focusing on kinopolitical dynamics, this study highlights the ecological and structural factors contributing to the ongoing marginalisation of Kurdish seasonal agricultural workers. Consequently, labour circulation serves as a stabilised circuit for cheap labour supply, driven by the inescapable intersection of environmental crises and structural inequality in Turkey’s destabilised agrarian environment.

See https://doi.org/10.1111/sena.70045Digital Object Identifier (DOI)