Producing Territory, Resisting the State: Embodiment, Discourse, and Symbolism in Street Demonstrations in Iranian Kurdistan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the Iranian Kurds’ production of territory during two rounds of street demonstrations in October 2014 and September 2017. Findings from semi-structured interviews and qualitative online data indicate that Kurdish demonstrators produced imagined territory by employing embodied discourses and symbolic practices. Situating the demonstrations within the context of the Iranian state’s securitisation of the Kurdish space, the article shows that the demonstrators deployed such discourses and practices as co-constructed tactics of resistance to avoid violent confrontation with security forces. The state’s oppressive power and its securitisation of space, therefore, had the ironically productive effect of prompting demonstrators to articulate and produce imagined territory through embodied, discursive, and symbolic tactics. Expanding on research that has focused on the territorial struggles of minoritized populations, the article makes a broader point that marginalised yet persistent collective geopolitical imaginations – in this case, Kurdistan – simultaneously inspire and are reproduced by minoritized peoples’ alter-geopolitical resistance.