Joost Jongerden contributed with two chapters to the book “A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments” edited by Alp Yenen and Erik-Jan Zürcher and published by Leiden University press. One of these chapters, “The Return to the Village: Turkey’s State-Building in Kurdistan” discusses Turkey’s efforts to change the rural settlement structure in the Kurdish East and Southeast.

As part of its counter-insurgency strategy to reclaim the countryside in southeast Anatolia from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), the Turkish Armed Forces evacuated and destroyed rural settlements on a massive scale in the 1990s. According to official figures, 833 villages and 2,382 small rural settlements, totalling 3,215 settlements, were evacuated and destroyed in fourteen provinces in the east and southeast of Turkey. Several plans for resettlement or the controlled rural return of Kurdish villagers had already been made and discussed when the evacuations took place. It took until 2001, however, for a comprehensive plan to be released, one that, as it turned out, was more concerned about the settlement structure in Turkey than with the forced migrants, and this must be seen against the background of the Kemalist elite in Turkey, which has been preoccupied with the production of places and people as bearers of Turkish identity since the establishment of the Republic.