Global Politics of Image and the Making of a Legitimate Non-state Armed Actor: Syrian Kurds and ‘The Secular West’ in Kobane

Abstract

The ISIS’s Kobane offensive and the belated US decision to intervene against the former on behalf of the Syrian Kurdish PYD forces who fight the ISIS during the Syrian civil war are in many ways an instructive yet puzzling case for students of international politics and security studies. The US intervention deviated from Obama’s earlier grand strategy of pivot to Asia-Pacific and steering clear of the new Middle East conflicts, most recently, involving the ISIS. The US and European states have also risked alienating powerful regional states, particularly those alarmed after Kobane at the prospect of an emerging independent state of Kurdistan bringing together in a dramatic fashion otherwise competing Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey. How has this volte face become possible? This study argues that because it does not easily fit the contemporary geopolitical conditions in the Middle East, the implications of Kurdish struggle to retake Kobane and the following international intervention can be better understood as emanating from the politics of meaning-makings and pictorial representations. This paper investigates how ‘the secular Kurds’ and ‘the secular West’ are constituted in the Kurdish war against the ISIS. It shows how visuality and discourses of the Kobane war helped to construct self/other and humanism/barbarism in the relations between the Kurds, ISIS, and the West so as to shift political agenda and security policy in the Middle East.