Zeynep Oguz*

Turkish and Kurdish studies have been moving in important directions in the past decade. Studies of the importance of space and placemaking in Kurdish issue (Gambetti and Jongerden 2015) have been complemented by sustained engagements with material culture, nature, and environments in Kurdistan, as well as how they are central to colonial practices, state violence, and resistance. Today, from the study of ruins and ruination in burial sites and ghosts and, therefore, the interaction between the material and the symbolic, one can learn from anthropological and historical studies of how forests and forest fires, water and rivers, mountains, and animals have been entangled with power and resistance in Kurdistan (See Adalet 2022, Bozcali 2020, Biner 2019, Çaylı 2021, Oguz 2021, Suni 2023).

Marcin Skupiński* & Dobrosława Wiktor-Mach**

The conflicts over the land and the environment spark all across Turkey as many local communities oppose large scale development projects, often supported by the state. Yet in the Kurdish inhabited areas of Turkey, the end of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process heavily limited possibilities of action for activists  seeking to implement their ideas of ecology and autonomy. However, even in such a hostile environment many of our interlocutors adhere to the strategy of “building a new world in the shell of the old” and are seeking to build up more sustainable structures.