Current position: JHU Department of Political Science PhD candidate

Chloe affiliation: Chloe Center Graduate Fellow

One of the objectives of the Chloe Center is to expand the study of racism beyond the US. The center has thus emphasized the global dynamics of racialization from transnational and comparative perspectives.

How does your work help us think beyond dominant frameworks for the study of racial politics?

There is a tendency in the political and social sciences in North America to understand race as fixed, essential, and pre-existing categories—often through Black, White and other forms of categorizations one finds on such documents as the US census. One of the things RIC does, and my project seeks to do as well, is to understand the ways in which these categories are produced rather than taking them as given. I look at this production through processes such as colonialism, counterinsurgency, market relations, etc. and seek to understand how these categories come into being in the first place.

One of the drawbacks of seeing racial categories as fixed according to US demographic standards is ignoring how the process of “othering” takes place in different contexts. In the context of Turkey, for example, that othering takes place through the targeting of Alevites and Kurdish peoples. In the context of the Ottoman Empire, we see the Armenian genocide as the product of the othering of non-Muslim populations. What we see is different political communities throughout the world engaging in processes of homogenization and othering as part of nation-formation—key elements of racialization—yet these processes are occluded in the dominant US-centric frames for understanding racial politics which focus too heavily on essential categories of “race” rather than the process of “racism” itself.

My research on counterinsurgency

In my research, I focus on counterinsurgency as one of the processes through which the Turkish state engages in the othering of Kurdish peoples. In that sense, there is an overlap between the Chloe Center’s goals and how I approach these issues—to trace these transnational dynamics as a product of political process as opposed to being given in advance.

Additionally, I am seeking to move beyond the Kurdish case and examine how counterinsurgency as a global political phenomenon produces similar results in comparative contexts across the world. Taking the lead of these processes and trying to understand how similarly or differently they unfold across the world helps us understand the transnational dynamics of racism, while also allowing us to build solidarities that include but also go beyond categories of race as they are discussed in the United States.