A Room for "Care" in Political Science

Twelve years later, I am back in Diyarbakır/Amed, the city I grew up in, fell in love with, and eventually left. Diyarbakır is the largest Kurdish majority city in Southeast Turkey, or what many of my interlocutors would call Bakur in Kurmanji (i.e., Northern Kurdistan). In 2015, the 40-year-old civil war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK in Kurmanji) and the Turkish state that had been fought in rural Kurdistan became urban. During that time, the 2000-year-old historical city center of Diyarbakır, Suriçi, became a crucial site of the conflict for 103 days. Instead of providing a path to return, the government declared urgent expropriation decrees in 2016, resulting in the razing of many urban centers in the region—including six neighborhoods in Suriçi—to the ground.