UC Riverside

This dissertation broadly asks: “What is the effect of ethnic conflict on the political behavior of the Kurds in Turkey?” It contributes to scholarly knowledge in five major fields: ethnic conflict, assimilation, ethnic identity, polarization, and political behavior. To understand the effects of assimilation and heterogeneities within the Kurds, it looks at central Anatolian Kurds. This dissertation advances five main arguments by analyzing novel survey data and three years of field research.It reexamines the literature on ethnic conflict and calls for a more comprehensive definition, as how we currently study ethnic conflict fails to recognize some day-to-day or subtler forms of ethnic conflict, which profoundly impacts the ethnic consciousness of the Kurds. I call this “the political scars of the mind.” Secondly, due to long-lasting assimilation and ethnic conflict, central Anatolian Kurds express their identities in unconventional rich ways. Their path of ethnic mobilization has a breaking point that I call “ethnic awakening,” where they realize their either forgotten or oppressed Kurdishness when they are in environments where they feel safer to reclaim their identity. Third, for central Anatolian Kurds, assimilation and fear of discrimination profoundly affect the willingness of the language transfer between Kurdish parents to their children. Fourth, regardless of their geography, all Kurds bear the feeling of the trauma of being a Kurd in Turkey. However, some Kurds purposefully move away from their ethnic identities as a response to assimilation and ethnic conflict. Fifth, the literature on polarization has exclusively focused on hardened ethnic identities and looked at how the dominant and minority groups polarize due to ethnic conflict. However, this dissertation examines how ethnic conflict leads some Kurds to move away from their Kurdishness and argues that ethnic conflicts also create polarization within a minority group, what I call dual polarization. In advancing this set of claims, this dissertation also proposes new avenues for further research into ethnic identity. Assimilation of ethnic identity can take a nonlinear trajectory, and it profoundly affects the expression of ethnic identities through new and unconventional forms that we need to take into account in the study of political behavior.