Public Life across Competing Axes of Solidarity and Difference

An understanding of the ideological processes underlying the construction and contestation of axes of social differentiation is central to our analysis of how people identify and evaluate social differences in public life. Gal and Irvine (2019) identify three interrelated ideological processes that are important in understanding how axes of differentiation are meaningfully deployed in interaction: rhematization, fractal recursivity, and erasure. An analysis of how these processes unfold in Mardin and Antakya (Hatay) is useful in understanding the dynamics of public life in Turkey's divided borderlands, as they provide us with a robust semiotic framework to track the shifting ideological axes of interpersonal and intercommunal solidarity and differentiation as they are made and remade in mass politics and everyday social interaction.

In this semiotic framework, rhematization—sometimes called iconization—refers to an ideological process wherein an indexical relationship between signs (i.e., a relationship based on temporal concurrence or spatial contiguity) is recast as an iconic relationship (i.e., a relationship of resemblance), such as when the linguistic qualities of an accent or register of speech become viewed as essential qualities of an individual, group, or place. For example, locals commonly conceptualize Mardin proper—the capital of Mardin Province—as a trilingual city where Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic all feature prominently. However, this popular ideology is complicated by a further pair of contrasts: whereas speaking Kurdish and Arabic is often taken as a sign of a speaker's ethnicity—a common example of rhematization wherein an individual's linguistic practices become taken as an innate quality of social personhood (i.e., “ethnolinguistic identity”)—speaking Turkish is normally perceived as a more neutral, formal, or official linguistic medium, or the language spoken by outsiders, and therefore generally not taken as a sign of local communal affiliation at all. Within this ideological matrix, therefore, two primary linguistic axes of differentiation are operative: one between Kurdish and Arabic, and the other between Turkish and both Kurdish and Arabic as autochthonous “local” languages. This allows, as Engin Sarı (2010) documents, people to continue to conceive of their city as divided into Arabic and Kurdish-speaking zones, with commonplace distinctions made between an Arabic-speaking city center and a Kurdish-speaking periphery, or between an Arabic-speaking old city and Kurdish-speaking new city—even as Turkish has become increasingly common in public life across all parts of the city in recent decades. In this “semiotic ideology” (Keane 2018), perceptions about the linguistic practices of neighborhood residents—in practice diverse and shaped by complex sociolinguistic factors—are naturalized as essential qualities of these neighborhoods and their residents themselves (e.g., as “Kurdish” and “Arab” neighborhoods).

A further ideological process occurs when the same set of qualitative contrasts appearing at one level of social life is reproduced on another. For example, while a Kurdish-Arabic binary is routinely used to divide Mardin into spaces belonging to “rival” ethnic communities—a particularly salient opposition given tensions stemming from the ongoing war between Kurdish militants and the Turkish state and significant influxes of Kurdish-speaking migrants from surrounding rural districts to the once predominantly Arabic-speaking city in recent decades—the same ideological contrasts that are commonly deployed to describe this boundary are also used to make group-internal distinctions between different kinds of Arabs and Kurds. Once, at a dinner during fieldwork in Mardin, for instance, Patrick witnessed a Kurdish acquaintance defend an Arab friend from half-serious accusations by another dinner companion that “Arabs are pro-state” by distinguishing an established, wealthier Arab community that had historically dominated politics in the city and more recent Arab Mhallami migrants who, like Kurds, had suffered discrimination and hardship and who were more likely to sympathize with the demands of the Kurdish movement. During the same conversation, another Kurdish friend from the nearby district of Qoser (or Kızıltepe in Turkish) interjected that some wealthy Kurds in Mardin have come to look down on poorer rural Kurds much in the same way as Arab elites had done in the past. In these two examples, the local Kurdish-Arab axis of differentiation is reproduced as a distinction between “pro-state” Arab elites and “pro-Kurdish” Mhallami migrants, or between middle- and upper-class urban Kurds, and lower-class Kurdish villagers or migrants. In both examples, moreover, an analogous set of opposing qualities to the one used to contrast Arabs and Kurds in Mardin—for example, “pro-state” versus “anti-state” and “wealthy urbanites” versus “poor villagers or rural-to-urban migrants”—are reproduced in descriptions of internal divisions within these same communities. The continual reiteration of one ideological axis of comparison at multiple scales of social life is an ideological process that Gal and Irvine (2019) term fractal recursivity.

A still further ideological process serves to downplay a Kurdish-Arab axis of differentiation by aligning both sides of this binary around commonly shared qualities. Local politicians and language activists in Mardin, for instance, often celebrate mixed family origins and the phenomenon of Kurdish-Arabic bilingualism, thereby seeking to position the use of both languages against the use of Turkish, and by extension, to align local speakers of these languages as members of a common polyglot speech community in opposition to Turkish state monolingualism (Lewis 2020). However, this form of solidarity simultaneously allows for other axes of social differentiation to become salient. Z. Özlem Biner (2010), for example, observes how Syriac Christians sometimes contrast the “unifying, humanistic, and peaceful effects of Christianity” on their own culture with the violent ideology of Islam represented by both Arabs and Kurds—a social division given great weight by memories of the 1915 genocide and its legacy in the province (2010: 80). In this case, an alignment between Kurds and Arabs is produced by drawing attention to another axis of differentiation: between Christianity and Islam, an axis that highlights a history of intercommunal violence and dispossession between Christian and Muslim communities living in Mardin. In the context of a growing environment of nativism and xenophobia following the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, moreover, local ethnic and religious differences are sometimes elided through their projection along a further axis of differentiation: the distinction between citizens of Turkey and Syrian “foreigners.” For example, one of Patrick's neighbors in Mardin—a Kurd originally from the Syrian city of Qamishlo just across the border from Mardin—once complained to him that many locals of all backgrounds viewed him primarily as a “Syrian” (Suriyeli in Turkish) although he could speak all three local languages (Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic) and had relatives from the province, had graduated from the local Turkish state university, and was himself in the process of obtaining citizenship. And in the public discourse of some local feminist organizations, an overemphasis on intercommunal divisions obscures a dominant gender hierarchy that negatively impacts all women living in the city, and by extension, erases the ongoing reality of patriarchy and male chauvinism as shared features of social life. The ideological selection for common qualities in a way that downplays other meaningful differences is what Gal and Irvine (2000) call erasure. While often a ripe target for ideological critique, however, erasure is also central to the construction of solidarity, insomuch that it functions to align people around shared values or interests while minimizing other social differences.

The same ideological processes that shape how people in Mardin and Hatay distinguish between different qualities of social personhood, and by extension, give meaning to social identities, are also encountered—like in the distinctions between “Arab” and “Kurdish” neighborhoods in Mardin discussed above—in the way that people compare different social spaces and identify with places in meaningful ways. In Hatay province, for example, both “Antakya” and “Hatay” operate as contrasting spatial imaginaries informing local modes of identification, thereby making competing ideological formulations of this contrast especially salient in public life. To understand why, this case requires basic familiarity with the modern history of the province.

Before the creation of the province of Hatay, its modern provincial territory fell within the Ottoman Sanjak of Alexandretta, a district of the Aleppo Vilayet, centered around two major cities—Iskenderun (Alexandretta) and Antakya (Antioch). Unlike the rest of Turkey, however, these territories did not join the Turkish Republic at its founding in 1923, instead falling under the control of the French Mandate of Syria. It remained a part of the mandate until 1938 when this territory was declared an independent republic following Turkish state pressure and given the Turkish name “Hatay”—an allusion to the ancient Hittites then popular in Republican nationalist imagery—before being annexed by Turkey the following year. As attempts by the Turkish state to reorient public life in Hatay around identification with the Turkish nation-state intensified following annexation, local Arab Alawites, Sunnis, and Christians living not only in the vicinity of Antakya but across the wider province—from the nearby coastal district of Samandağ to the larger port city of Iskenderun 50 km to the north—came to reimagine “Antakya” as a place existing in opposition to “Hatay.” From this perspective, Hatay can signify the formal designation for the province as an administrative territory of the Turkish nation-state or evoke qualities of Turkishness as a form of ethnoreligious identification (Duman 2016). Antakya, in contrast, is perceived to possess either the qualities of a post-Ottoman cosmopolitan space in which all its autochthonous religious communities—Christians, Alawites, and Sunni Muslims—“coexist peacefully,” or from a different perspective, the qualities of an “Arab borderland” (Stokes 1998) on the periphery of the Turkish nation-state. In this ideological constellation, the contrast between Hatay and Antakya is constructed along three primary axes of differentiation (between Turkishness and Arabness, the national and local, and between cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity) and these axes are selectively erased, deployed, or superimposed onto one another by different social actors to different ideological effect. As we outline below, however, these are not the only axes of differentiation through which this spatial contrast can be enacted. Turkish state border policy following the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War and the influx of Syrian refugees to Antakya has recharged ethnic-religious boundaries in the city and larger province over the past decade (Can 2020). In this context, a contrast between Sunnis and non-Sunnis has become more prominent and politically salient in recent years.

In describing the ideological processes through which axes of differentiation become meaningful in these borderlands, we are not seeking to construct ideological typologies¹ but rather to draw attention to salient modes of identification/differentiation through which people consciously and agentively construct relationships of solidarity. In this perspective, ideology neither deterministically structures nor transparently reflects social relations. As a field of competing metrics through which people evaluate social life, rather, ideology conditions the latent semiotic possibilities inherent in every form of meaningful social action. Ideology is useful in seeking to understand how people build relationships not because it can necessarily tell us what any individual really thinks or feels about the various dimensions of their identity or their relationships with others. Nor are we primarily interested in ideology as a starting point for ideological critique, although, as we show, ideology is central to forms of reflexivity that enable people to engage in and evaluate instances of conscious, intentional action—a capacity for reflection and critique not limited to academic discourse but encountered everywhere in social life. Instead, our focus is on how people in Hatay and Mardin deploy ideological axes of solidarity and difference in efforts to affirm or contest the values underlying public life.

As a practical concept in politics and everyday life, solidarity organizes a constellation of ethical affordances (Keane 2015)—defined by dynamic process of social interaction involving everything from individuals’ emotional responses and affective attachments to the discursive invocation of normative and explicit metrics and categories through which political parties, state institutions, and everyday people evaluate social relationships. In drawing attention to the ideological processes of differentiation, we are primarily focused on solidarity as it is produced at this “explicit” level. When invoked in political discourse, solidarity normally functions as a substantive value animating explicit normative distinctions determining who and what is worthy of solidarity. As an analytic in the social sciences, in contrast, solidarity often refers to “in-group” cohesion—a perception of unity or common purpose that informs one's sense of belonging to a social collective (e.g., a kin group or ethnolinguistic community) and whose use as an analytic category stretches back to Émile Durkheim's work on organic and mechanical solidarity, if not to Ibn Khaldun's theorization of asabiyyah or “group feeling.” Our approach to solidarity is different. As is clear in the examples from Mardin and Hatay above, solidarity can also be projected across social boundaries and reorient relations of social difference around a common horizon of value. In the narrower analytical meaning of this article, therefore, solidarity refers to the sundry types of social alignment existing between people or communities based on a perception of common social qualities and shared interests and values. In choosing to focus on the ideological dimensions of solidarity and difference, we are simultaneously interested in exploring the metrics through which people evaluate and experience social relationships, and by extension, the systems of categorization and values around which they organize public life.

In this analytical perspective, not every instance of solidarity must be politically desirable or accord with our values. As seen in the examples above, some forms of solidarity reinforce existing hierarchies of power and exclusionary boundaries of belonging. Nor must every invocation or instantiation of solidarity be genuinely felt or even politically successful to reveal something about the ideological metrics underlying solidarity in society more generally. We do not intend for our emphasis on solidarity to detract from the ongoing history of state and intercommunal violence in Mardin or Hatay. Rather, we aim to better understand how even in the face of such a history, and under conditions of prolonged precarity, political and social movements, together with ordinary people, struggle to reimagine and remake the social worlds they inhabit. Consequently, we seek to complicate commonplace depictions of public life in Mardin and Hatay as being primarily characterized by conflict between different ethnic “groups” or unfolding in relation to a singular, essentialized Turkish-minority binary. Rather, following Rogers Brubaker (2004), we seek to understand how social differences—ethnic, linguistic, religious, class—become meaningful in public life without assuming that human societies are divisible into rigidly bounded groups.

This is not to argue, however, that people's confessional affiliations or their participation in speech or language communities are unimportant. Confessional affiliations influence individuals’ family ties. Individuals’ linguistic practices, moreover, are shaped by where they live, study, and work, and with whom they spend their time. However, neither worship in a confessional community nor participation in a speech or language community necessarily map onto an individual's politics. Nor do they provide a coherent metric for understanding one's stance toward or responsibility for large-scale forms of state violence or intercommunal conflict—although they are often imagined to do just that, sometimes with terrible social consequences. Neither, necessarily, do family ties, as Ahmet Türk, a prominent Kurdish politician and opposition leader from Mardin, joked in an interview in the run-up to the 2019 local elections:

So, [the provincial chairman of the ruling party] comes out and says, “we won't surrender [Mardin] to separatists.” But we are a party that receives 60 percent of the vote here. Do you consider the will of 60 percent of the voters to be an expression of separatism or terrorism? . . . Well, the other day I went and did a little research. In his own village, among his own relatives, we received 260 votes and he only received 140 votes. In his own village! How can a political perspective that considers one's own relatives to be terrorists and separatists be a project that will bring the people together?²

Türk's remarks were intended as a comical critique of the central government's hyperbolic discourse around the dangers of pro-Kurdish politics in Turkey, and the fact—evident in local election results—that this discourse has little credibility in Mardin, even in the village of a local party boss. But his joking can also serve to reinforce our larger point: people's political and social alignments are always a function of an unfolding process of identification encompassing sundry social acts from the explicitly political, like voting or party affiliation, to everyday, intimate relationships between family, friends, and neighbors. In our analytical framework, therefore, communities are conceived of as ongoing social and political projects in which social relations are institutionalized relative to some larger horizon of value (Graeber 2001). This is not to argue that people's patterns of ethnolinguistic or religious identification are not long-standing or reproduced across generations. Many people in Mardin and Hatay possess a stable sense of belonging to an ethnolinguistic and religious community, and ethnoreligious and linguistic distinctions are central features of local politics. Rather this is to suggest that the social meanings that imbue this sense of belonging with force in public life are always a function of identification in relation to competing forms of solidarity and across variable axes of social differentiation, and that people purposely and reflexively shape, and do not simply passively inhabit, the categories through which they live human relationships and ascribe meaning to social life.

Below we present two case studies from Mardin and Antakya/Hatay. Each case study explores how people in these provinces construct alternative spatial imaginaries whose values contrast with or de-emphasize competing national projects (Turkish, Kurdish, Syrian) in favor of cultivating local forms of solidarity. Each case study draws attention to how competing articulations of pluralism enact manifold forms of alignment, thereby arguing for the central role of transnational border regions like Mardin and Hatay in shaping the debate about cultural and political pluralism in Turkey in the context of the country's larger “multicultural” or “pluralist” turn (Dağtaş 2014; Tambar 2014). In turning our attention to the ideological construction of solidarity and difference as it emerges in public life on the border, we seek to complicate state-centric accounts of public culture in Turkey and to draw attention to how alternative modes of public identification respond to and are reflected in competing political and social projects and diverging horizons of solidarity.

Mardin, Capital of Mesopotamia

In April 2014, Kurdish parliamentarians and municipal leaders from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), then Turkey's major Kurdish opposition party, gathered in Ankara to mark their formal transition into a new political organization—a pan-Turkey, leftist, and pro-minority umbrella party called the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Among this new alliance's most distinguishing features was its explicit rejection of a monolithic Turkish ethnic identity as a foundation of public life in the country (Güneş 2018; Kaya 2019). The project was conceivable in large part owing to the historically dominant position of leftists in Turkey's Kurdish movement—a position that allowed Kurdish leaders to credibly mediate between Turkey's politically diverse Kurdish movement and the country's factional left. But this project has also been shaped by internal tensions within the HDP, not least around efforts by leaders in the Kurdish movement to transform their diverse and shifting political coalition, constructed primarily around identification with Kurdish nationhood, into the dominant bloc in a pan-Turkey party rejecting nationalism and other exclusionary forms of identity politics.

This ambivalence is likewise captured in new discourses within Kurdish politics—and in Turkey more broadly—to discuss people's political and social identities and new ways of positioning oneself and others in social space. This was in evidence, for instance, at the same 2014 meeting, in a remark made by then co-mayor of Mardin, Ahmet Türk, in response to an invitation from then co-mayor of Diyarbakır, Gültan Kışanak, for the assembled politicians to meet again in her city. Türk, pointing out the close association between Diyarbakır and Kurdish politics in Turkey, suggested that perhaps Mardin would be an equally if not even more appropriate venue for a future gathering of HDP leaders, saying: “We have no objections to Diyarbakır. Diyarbakır is the capital of Kurdistan. But Mardin is also the capital of Mesopotamia.”

Türk's comments played well as a political quip about a neighborly rivalry between two cities (Mardin lies approximately 90 km southeast of Diyarbakır) as well as between two mayors. And there was certainly some humor in the attempt by Türk to one-up the co-mayor of Diyarbakır, the symbolic and institutional capital of Kurdish politics in Turkey on a question of political precedence (with a population of over one million, Diyarbakır is also roughly five times larger). However, Türk's quip also drew a larger contrast, between “Kurdistan” and “Mesopotamia” (Mezopotamya in Turkish and Kurdish), and in locating his hometown within Mesopotamia, Türk was simultaneously locating Mardin within an alternative spatial imaginary and gesturing toward different modes of social and political identification—modes of identification that, he seemed to suggest, had become even more relevant with the assembled politicians’ collective decision to align themselves with the political project of the HDP.

To better understand how Türk's contrast between Kurdistan and Mesopotamia functions, we need a better grasp of the social values that this contrast has animated historically and of the ideological work that invocations of Mesopotamia do in both Kurdish politics and in public life in Mardin. A complete overview of the different spatio-semiotic ideologies that have informed the use and reception of Mesopotamia in either Mardin or Turkey, however, is beyond the scope of this article. Rather we want to highlight three primary ideological perspectives—the “civilizational,” “national,” and “post-national”—that, while mutually influential in practice, imbue Mesopotamia with distinct sets of values and emphasize competing ideological axes of sociospatial differentiation. At the same time, we consider how these three perspectives interact with a fourth: a locally popular ideological perspective that positions Mardin as an exemplary “Mesopotamian” space.

In the early civilizational discourse of the Kemalist Republic, Mesopotamia is celebrated as part of Turkey's historical geography and many prominent Turkish scholars and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s even proposed an unsubstantiated Turkish origin for Sumer and Mesopotamian civilization at large (Aytürk 2004). In this “civilizational” perspective, Mesopotamia is a historical space defining a shared cultural heritage—a potential point both of national pride and transnational solidarity. However, Mesopotamia can also signal salient forms of difference. Following the re-emergence of mass Kurdish politics in Turkey beginning in the late 1960s (Gündoğan 2011), Mesopotamia was increasingly adopted by different actors within the Kurdish movement as a covert term for “Kurdistan”—at least in part because any use of the latter in public settings was almost invariably prohibited by the state, whereas the use of the former was already common in public discourse. As a result, the term has become akin to a political shibboleth for organizations aligned with Turkey's Kurdish movement. In some Kurdish political discourses, by extension, Mesopotamia is now contrasted with “Anatolia” (Anadolu in Turkish; Anatolya in Kurdish) along an axis of national differentiation in a way analogous to a distinction between Kurdistan and Turkey. In this “national” perspective, Mesopotamia's qualities and values are aligned with those of a contemporary national project lying within a common geographic territory—in a way not dissimilar to how Mesopotamia was used by the Baathist government in Iraq to shift public identification away from Pan-Arabism and toward an Iraqi wataniyya beginning in the 1970s (Baram 1983, 1994).

In contrast to these first two perspectives, there also exists a third “post-national” perspective through which people evaluate the spatial qualities of Mesopotamia. This perspective became increasingly important in the Kurdish movement following efforts by leaders of the movement to rethink the question of Kurdish national liberation in relation to a broader, regional project of socialism and anticolonialism premised on transnational and interethnic solidarity. But it came to the forefront of Kurdish political discourse in the context of a series of interrelated domestic and regional developments occurring around the turn of the millennium, and it became explicitly articulated in the context of the Kurdish movement's project to reconceptualize the relationship between political space and national belonging in this period (Akkaya and Jongerden 2013). Thus, whereas earlier Kurdish political discourse tended to deploy Mesopotamia as more or less synonymous with Kurdistan, Kurdish politicians, activists, and public intellectuals increasingly used invocations of Mesopotamia to “[move] from the idea of Kurdistan as a classical nation-state toward a project for autonomy, within its philosophy of a democratic society, and, at the same time, [to open up] a political space of its own by means of performative political acts” (Casier et al. 2011: 417). For example, in the inaugural issue of a political journal entitled Socialist Mesopotamia, launched in 2003 by actors close to Turkey's Kurdish movement, the editors argue for the necessity of developing “a new language for understanding the dynamics between the peoples of Mesopotamia” and a “fundamental rethinking of categories and concepts” that would allow for the “willful creation of a new organic identity” bringing the Kurdish national movement into an alliance with a larger working-class coalition of all ethnic backgrounds in a common struggle for socialism and democracy that could also extend beyond Turkey's borders into neighboring countries.³ The piece is insightful in the way that it captures the changing values ascribed to Mesopotamia in Kurdish political discourse. It is also significant, moreover, in that it again shows that many political actors clearly already understand what we are arguing explicitly, namely that solidarity is always the function of an ongoing process of identification across multiple horizons of value.

In this new ideological constellation, Mesopotamia has become deployed in efforts to build new alignments between the Kurdish movement and other social and political constituencies in Turkey, as well in neighboring communities in Syria and Iraq. In Mardin, however, the articulation of Mesopotamia as a spatial imaginary is best approached not as the ideological project of a single organization or party but as a dialogical process involving differently positioned social actors and shifting constellations of political interests and ideological perspectives. As is clear by the influence of Mardin-born writer Murathan Mungan's The Mesopotamian Trilogy in introducing the city and province to a wider national audience in the 1990s (Biner 2007), moreover, Mesopotamia was already an important point of identification for different communities in Mardin before the “Mesopotamian-turn” in the Kurdish movement's official discourse. And in the public statements of local pro-Kurdish politicians, Mesopotamia operates in ways that both exemplify and complicate this discourse.

On the one hand, Mardin has served as a widely cited model of the Kurdish movement's turn toward cultural pluralism and its emphasis on equality between different ethnolinguistic and religious communities. After winning control of Mardin's provincial government following the 2014 elections, political actors close to the Kurdish movement implemented a series of initiatives designed to recognize Mardin's cultural diversity, including a quadrilingual language policy that provided for the use of Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Syriac on municipal signage—thereby seeking to remake the province's “linguistic landscape” (Cenoz and Gorter 2006)—and a policy of institutional inclusion that also sought to promote non-Kurds to positions of political leadership, leading to Mardin's 2015 HDP parliamentary delegation being celebrated as one of Turkey's most ethnically diverse and a model of the Kurdish movement and the HDP's larger Mesopotamian project.

On the other hand, Mesopotamia also functions in local politics in ways that serve to align Mardin's different ethnolinguistic and religious communities around a shared regional identity in a manner that—as in Türk's contrast between Mardin and Diyarbakır—distances local politics from the prerogatives of competing national projects. Mehmet Ali Aslan, a local teacher and activist from Midyat, a district of Mardin, who became the first self-identified Mhallami Arab elected to the Turkish parliament as part of the aforementioned HDP provincial delegation elected in 2015, frequently exemplified this form of alignment in his public discourse, emphasizing Mhallamis’ shared cultural heritage and common kinship with the province's other ethnolinguistic and religious communities. In an Arabic-language interview in 2013, for example, Aslan spoke proudly about the role of Mhallamis in Arab history before moving to differentiate Mhallami identity from Pan-Arabism, telling the interviewer that “[the Mhallami] count as Arabs, but Arabs of the Tur Abdin (a plateau covering most of the east of Mardin Province), Arabs of Mesopotamia” (hənné yənh_.esbuwn ereb, bəs ‘ereb Tur ‘Abdin, ‘ereb Mesobotamya) who had their own their own “unique dialect” (lehjet khas_.s_.a).⁴

If Mardin and Mesopotamia function as spatial imaginaries distinguishing locals from outside national projects, they can also be made to function as an aspirational horizon against which to evaluate all public life in Turkey and the wider region. When Aslan was attacked by Turkish nationalists shortly after being elected to parliament for swearing his oath of office not, as normally stipulated, in the name of the “Great Turkish Nation” (Büyük Türk Milleti) but in the name of the “Great Nation of Turkey” (Büyük Türkiye Milleti), some pro-government figures began to circulate rumors that his family was of Armenian origin. Aslan responded to these critics in a public letter, pointing to Turkey's multicultural composition and arguing that the HDP, like “Noah's Ark,” was bringing together all of Turkey's “races, religions, and languages in one place,” before calling on Turkey and the entire Middle East to “become more like Mardin” (Mardinlileşsin)—a city where, he noted, “the call to prayer, [church bells] and Melek Taus, as well as Armenians, Syriac Christians, Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and Mhallami all live together in brotherhood.” Aslan added that while his maternal grandmother was a Syriac Christian, he did not have any Armenian ancestry, although he would be proud if he did.⁵

Such celebrations of communal pluralism are not limited to political discourse but are also commonly encountered in everyday life, in the ways that people identify with the city and one another. In Mardin, many Arabs and Kurds alike place a high value on Arabic-Kurdish bilingualism, which, while not an ability possessed by most in the province, is a point of local pride (Lewis 2020). Turkish-Kurdish-Arabic multilingualism, moreover, is a locally recognized and accepted feature of Mardin's speech community, as well as a meaningful sociolinguistic matrix through which people identify themselves and others. However, speech acts not merely reflect a person's social identity (although they can be taken to do so by others). Such acts also consciously position an individual in relation to others and therefore serve as a primary medium for negotiation of social difference and solidarity. This is how, Hatice—a native of Mardin from a mixed Arab-Kurdish family, and a graduate of Turkey's first Kurdish-language university department founded in the city in 2009—described to Patrick her pleasure at encountering an Arab shopkeeper speaking in Kurdish:

For example, the other day I was out with a friend in the Souk, in upper Mardin, and he was buying tobacco, and the seller was Arab. But my friend spoke in Kurdish, and he responded in Kurdish; I mean, it was obvious he was an Arab. But I really enjoyed that he was someone who was Arab, but he was speaking in Kurdish. Many of the esnafs know Arabic and Kurdish, and many families are also like this. Like I said about my family, and a lot of families are like that. Their mother is Arab; their grandfather is Arab, their father. And there is such an exchange between families that they have some Arabs and some Kurds. And that's what Mardin is like. It's colorful. I really love it. (personal communication)

Of course, not every attempt at crosslinguistic interaction in Mardin is as convivial as the experience described by Hatice, and in some contexts linguistic differences can be made to mark salient social boundaries.⁶ But in most cases, probably the overwhelming majority, such differences either pass unnoticed or become opportunities for routine enactments of social solidarity. For Hatice, for instance, a willingness to practice and celebrate Arabic-Kurdish bilingualism indexes local patterns of Arab-Kurdish kinship and intercommunal unity.

If Mesopotamia can serve as a metric through which locals in Mardin can frame their participation in the larger political project of the Kurdish movement as well as their identification as members of an interconfessional and polyglot speech community, it is also popularly deployed in efforts to brand the city and wider province, and by extension, to convert Mardin's “cultural richness” into a new source of economic value. In the public discourse of local pro-Kurdish politicians, this developmentalist discourse has frequently merged with political claims in a manner that allowed for it to assume manifold and ambivalent meanings. In February 2014, for instance, Mardin co-mayor Ahmet Türk gave an interview⁷ to a Kurdish-movement-linked press agency in which he discussed the importance of Mardin as a “Mesopotamian” city that was both a model for the Kurdish movement's new political project of local autonomy as well as a future leader in a new regional economic order. Mardin's status as a multireligious and multilingual city “carrying all the colors of Mesopotamia,” Türk claimed, made it a candidate to become the capital of the Middle East as well as an attractive site of investment for new projects around business and tourism.

As a developmentalist trope and marketing tool, talk about Mesopotamia has been everywhere in Mardin in recent years, bringing together local actors from across the political spectrum in cooperation with state development agencies, major Turkish NGOs, and EU-supported initiatives. As Biner (2020) notes in her work on cultural heritage projects in Mardin, efforts to valorize Mardin's cultural diversity in the form of economic development have frequently obscured the ongoing political conflict between the Kurdish movement and the state. If Mardin's Mesopotamian qualities can be mobilized to align locals around a political project of local autonomy, it can also function to align an even larger set of constituencies around regional development while erasing ongoing political and social conflicts—a process analogous to Arda Bilgen's (2019) observations about the developmental discourses of the Turkish state's Southeastern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP). In fact, beginning in 2018, the GAP agency itself officially launched its own “Mesopotamia”-branded project to encourage tourism and investment in Mardin and the wider southeast region.

In its novel political and developmentalist valences, Mesopotamia has emerged as an important if ambivalent spatial imaginary through which people talk about and evaluate the rapid changes that have taken place in Mardin over the past several decades—decades marked by both the political ascendancy and subsequent state-directed suppression of the Kurdish movement, as well as by a new wave of development that has reshaped Mardin's urban fabric. As a set of metrics through which people understood and talked about these changes, Mesopotamia has emerged as the common designation for a new “spatio-temporalizing process” (Munn 2013) through which locals define and assess Mardin's values in competing but connected ways. Since the turn of the century, significantly, Mardin has undergone a whole-scale urban transformation, marked by a doubling in size of Mardin's New City and the opening of a new airport, university, and state hospital campus, as well as several museums, conference centers, shopping malls, and dozens of new hotels, boutique shops, touristic restaurants, cultural organizations, student dormitories and cafés. Over the same period, Mardin's national profile has been greatly augmented by its newly recognized status as an important historical and cultural center popularly celebrated in international and Turkish mass media (Çağlar 2021). All of this has imbued Mardin's “Mesopotamian ambiance” (Mezopotamya havası as one of Patrick's interlocutors jokingly called it in Turkish) with a sense of novelty that informs its use as a metric for understanding Mardin's cultural heritage, as well as its status as a forward-facing chronotope informing a host of ongoing social and political projects in the city and wider province.

Today, however, Mardin remains one of the poorest provinces in Turkey and was especially hard hit by the closure of the Syrian border in 2013, as well as the after-effects of several destructive state military operations launched against Kurdish militants between 2015 and 2016. The pro-Kurdish provincial government that initiated many of Mardin's cultural and language policies, moreover, was removed from office by government fiat in 2016, only to be re-elected in 2019, and removed again. But some changes have proved enduring. Despite serious public doubts over its legitimacy and widespread accusations of graft and mismanagement, Mardin's new trustee administration has allowed some of the Kurdish movement's language reforms to remain in effect. And even with the Kurdish movement's project of local autonomy indefinitely deferred, and in an environment where local intercommunal tensions are exasperated by wider forces of social and political polarization, Mesopotamia continues to serve as an axis of local identification and solidarity in Mardin, albeit one whose value is also increasingly the target of state and market capture. As a spatial imaginary whose most powerful public resonances derive from a qualitative contrast with the nation-state—either as a contrast between competing national projects or a contrast between national and pre/post-national space—Mesopotamia grounds forms of identification that challenge the ideological hegemony of national identification, bringing political claims from the periphery into larger national debates about pluralism, difference, and the foundations of public solidarity in Turkey.

Antakya, Hatay, and the “Garden of Civilizations”

The interrelated domestic and regional crises that have reshaped Turkish politics over the last decade have also had significant effects on public life in Hatay. Local tensions over the Turkish state's response to the Syrian Civil War and the influx of Syrian refugees have strained intercommunal relations, with the sectarian axes of distinction shaping the conflict in Syria—for example, between Sunnis and Alawites or between supporters of the Syrian regime and the opposition—becoming mapped onto existing ethnolinguistic, religious, and political divisions in the province (Can 2017). Public polarization in Hatay further increased following the 2013 Gezi protests, during which the province experienced widespread unrest and a violent crackdown by state security forces, resulting in hundreds of injuries and arrests and the death of at least two young Alawite protesters, deepening divisions between local Sunni supporters of the AKP government and the province's large Arab Alawite community (Duman 2020; Üşenmez and Duman 2015). At the same time, however, competing political projects in the province have sought to align, in distinct but connected ways, Hatay's diverse communities and political constituencies around shared values and common qualities. For example, voters from all ethnic and religious backgrounds, including large swaths of local Alawites, propelled the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) to victory in both the 2014 and 2019 local elections. Over the same period, on the other hand, AKP redistricting policies in the province have allowed the ruling party to entrench its control over the city of Antakya and to sell its own brand of cosmopolitan “Antiochianness” (Antakyalilik) to its local constituencies. In this political context, increasing social polarization has been accompanied by competing invocations of intercommunal solidarity and contested claims to both Antakya and Hatay as contrasting spatial imaginaries.

As outlined in the first section, the salience of this spatial contrast derives from an enduring social and political dissonance between the “myth of the unification” (Matkap 2009)—a discourse celebrating annexation that is reproduced in the official discourse of both major political parties in Hatay (Coelho 2021)—and the ways that many of Antakya's autochthonous ethnolinguistic and religious communities remember the annexation as a history of religious persecution, assimilation, and social trauma provoked by separation from Syria. Consequently, many locals identify Hatay as a Turkish national space in opposition to Antakya's cosmopolitan history. In the context of larger attempts to rethink Turkish national identity in relation to its “cosmopolitan” Ottoman past—a diffuse ideological constellation often discussed under the label of Neo-Ottomanism—this contrast has increasingly been complicated by contested claims to Antakya's history and the values that these claims animate. In Turkish Republican ideology, as Martin Stokes (1998) contends, the partition of Hatay from Syria was imagined as a chronotopic realignment that shifted the province away from an Arab past and toward Turkish modernity as defined by the standards of a modern and secular Europe (1998: 268). The contrast between an Arab Islamic past and a Turkish secular modernity, however, was complicated by local Republican policies that constructed its secular modernization project onto existing communal boundaries in ways that locally preserved elements of the Ottoman millet system and its emphasis on the peaceful existence between different religious communities (Doğruel 2009, 2013). For many locals, therefore, the qualities of the Ottoman past and Republican modernity were not necessarily opposed but rather superimposed in ways that allowed for competing forms of identification.

These forms of identification both respond to and distinguish themselves from outside projects to rethink Turkey's national identity. In a recent analysis of the government's Neo-Ottoman discourse, for example, Edward Wastnidge (2019) detects three major tropes “(1) the image of the Ottoman Empire as the cradle or apex of civilization; (2) the image of the Ottoman Empire as an Islamic Empire; and (3) the image of the Ottoman Empire as a liberal, multicultural empire” (2019: 8). Prevailing forms of local identification and popular discourses about belonging in Antakya, notably, rely on an analogous set of qualitative metrics. However, these metrics are not deployed to contrast the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic but to draw a distinction between Antakya and Turkey—a distinction that is locally reproduced as a contrast between Antakya and Hatay. In this schema of contrasts, Antakya is aligned with “civilizational” and “liberal multicultural” values against the national homogeneity of the Turkish nation-state. Rafael encountered this ideological perspective frequently in conversations with interlocutors in Antakya. When asking about what it means to be Antakyalı (“from Antakya” or “Antiochian”), for example, his interlocutors emphasized their families’ autochthonous origins as old Antiochians or invoked the values of peaceful civilizational coexistence and respect for cultural differences. This is how Demet—an Arab Alawite teacher in her thirties living in Defne—invoked the values of peaceful civilizational coexistence and respect for differences in describing the qualities of Antiochianness:

First thing that makes me feel Antiochian is my culture, which is my Arab Alawite heritage. Being from Antioch, for me, reminds me of a homeland where different civilizations coexist and where we live together in peace without experiencing [mutual] scorn or conflict because of our differences. For me, Antakya means being a part of this unity and beauty.

In connecting her own heritage as an Arab Alawite to the values of intercommunal “unity” and cultural “beauty,” Demet was projecting an axis of ethnoreligious distinction onto another locally salient axis of differentiation—between Antiochian values of coexistence and outside projects of sectarian division—thereby extending identification with an ethnoreligious community to identification with the values of a multiethnic and pluralist society.

Local discourses of Antiochianness tend to either erase axes of religious differentiation entirely or, in other contexts, to negatively contrast Sunni majoritarianism with local values of interreligious solidarity, thereby either downplaying religious difference or actively contrasting Antiochianness with the sectarian values of Sunni hegemony promoted by the central government. Nor is this perspective only deployed by non-Sunnis living in the province. For example, Ahmet, an Arab-Sunni tour guide, explained to Rafael that although he was a Hataylı (from Hatay) from Yayladağ—a mountainous district to the south of Antakya on the Syrian border generally considered an Arab-Sunni majority area—he felt himself Antiochian, since his ancestors had lived in Antakya since before the annexation and counted themselves among Antakya's autochthonous communities.

In this last example, too, we see how a primary spatial contrast between Antakya and Hatay is recursively mobilized in the construction of further contrast: between Antakya on the one hand and Hatay and Yayladağ on the other, wherein the latter two are aligned against Antakya through a shared quale of Sunniness. Such contrasts, however, are not so much essential facts of social life as potential axes of social differentiation whose salience and meanings are contextual and subject to contestation. As Ahmet makes clear, people from Yayladağ can also identify as Antiochian.

This recursive iteration of the contrast between Antakya and Hatay in the construction of other kinds of spatial contrasts is a central feature organizing semiotic ideologies of place and belonging in the province. In tracking how ethnoreligious boundaries are mapped onto social space in Antakya, for instance, Dağtaş (2014) observes how the city's districts and neighborhoods serve as important focal points of local identification whose borders are discursively and materially negotiated in everyday interactions across different sociospatial contexts. In the analysis that follows, we are likewise interested in tracking how competing political projects seek to animate competing dimensions of social solidarity and difference, paying particular attention to how the ideological metrics informing the contrast between Antakya and Hatay are redeployed in the articulation of further axes of sociospatial differentiation.

In 2012, the AKP government passed Law No. 6360, transforming Hatay into a metropolitan municipality and introducing redistricting policies that redrew political and administrative boundaries in the province (Adıgüzel and Karakaya 2017). As a result of the change, Hatay was unified under a single, province-wide municipal structure, and the former district of Hatay Center (i.e., the city of Antakya) was split into two subdistricts: the municipality of Antakya, encompassing a majority of the city proper as well as most of the surrounding towns and villages, and the newly created and smaller district of Defne, extending southwest from the city of Antakya along the Orontes River toward the sea and encompassing both urban neighborhoods of Antakya as well as outlying semi-rural settlements predominantly inhabited by Arab Alawites and a smaller population of Arab Christians (see figure 2). The political implications of the AKP's transformation of Hatay into a metropolitan municipality and its corresponding provincial redistricting policies—akin to electoral gerrymandering (Duman 2020)—became clear following their full implementation during the 2019 local elections. Whereas the main national opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) significantly increased its total vote share in Hatay, solidifying control of the metropolitan municipal government in the face of Turkey's ruling party's growing unpopularity in the province, the AKP's redrawn electoral map allowed it to remain firmly in control of Antakya and to place first in Iskenderun, while those towns and neighborhoods whose residents opposed the government were separated and attached to the newly created districts of Defne and Arsuz, respectively, where voters tended overwhelmingly to support either the major opposition CHP or more left-wing parties. This also allowed the AKP to take control of the newly created district of Payas, which has been primarily carved from the district of Dörtyol, where the right-wing National Action Party (MHP) maintains a deep base of support. The redistricting policies not only shifted the electoral map, they also infused these new political and administrative boundaries with the qualities of other sociospatial divisions that, while already present in social life, were given further impetus and new meanings, increasing anxieties about sectarian favoritism and the fair distribution of resources in the province (Can 2020).

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Hatay Metropolitan Municipality's provincial boundaries region. Map drawn by the authors.

Citation: Conflict and Society 10, 1; 10.3167/arcs.2024.021502

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For people living in Defne, the government's redistricting policies were understood to be motivated by sectarianism, and in particular, a desire to detach Arab Alawite and Christian districts from Antakya and to place them into a separate ethnoreligious enclave. Rafael's interlocutors described to him how, for example, Sunni villages near the Alawite town of Harbiye (now a part of Defne) were attached to the Sunni-majority municipalities of Altınözü and Yayladağı despite the villages’ proximity and social and commercial ties with Harbiye. Others observed how Defne was created through the deliberate amalgamation of rural Alawite and Christian villages—like Harbiye, Değirmenyolu, Yeşilpınar, Gümüşgöze, Tavla, Balıklıdere, Aknehir, Sinanlı, and Bahçeköy—and the predominantly Alawite- and Christian-populated urban districts of Sümerler and Armutlu. For many people living in Sümerler and Armutlu, too, the redistricting policies were understood to be intentionally sectarian. One Arab Alawite civil servant from Armutlu, for example, recalled to Rafael how during the Gezi protests the district had been transformed into an “Arab zone” (Arap mıntıkası in Turkish) in contrast to the pro-government, Sunni Turkish parts of the city, thereby reproducing the qualitative contrast between Antakya and Hatay along Arab/Turkish and non-Sunni/Sunni axes of differentiation to draw a further contrast between Armutlu and Sunni Turkish districts of Antakya.

As we argue above, this multiscalar spatial contrast is a generalizable feature of public life in Antakya—an ideological process whereby the same qualitative schema deployed in contrasting Antakya and Hatay are recursively redeployed in other spatial distinctions, such as are drawn between predominantly non-Sunni districts and AKP-controlled parts of the city. And just as Antakya grounds a local axis of solidarity, identification with districts like Sümerler and Armutlu is often presented by neighborhood residents as a pillar of communal solidarity. Some residents of these districts, for example, stress the importance of intercommunal solidarity between Arab Alawites and Christians living together in these neighborhoods, arguing that, owing to their small numbers, it is only in coalition with Arab Alawites that local Christians can feel safe and make their political voices heard.

The AKP redistricting policies not only gave once informal social boundaries official status. They also increasingly conflated and codified distinct if related forms of social differentiation—such as place of residence, ethnoreligious background, and political orientation—under a single spatiopolitical regime that altered the ethnic, administrative, and political boundaries in the province. When speaking about these changes with Rafael, some locals dismissed the new district of Defne as something akin to Hatay, that is, as an administrative invention of the Turkish state lacking popular resonance or identification and whose significance only became apparent during elections. Other residents of the new district, however, voiced concerns over how the inclusion of “Defne” in the place of “Hatay” on their official state ID card has allowed for others, even those outside of the province, to identify their probable ethnoreligious background or political views. At the same time, Defne's greater municipal independence and the electoral dominance of the CHP and other leftist parties in the district have resulted in the introduction of official public celebrations of Arab Alawite identity within the district, typified by the implementation of cultural initiatives around Arab-language education and public commemorations of Alawite holidays such as Ras-el Seni, the Julian-calendric New Year. Historically, celebrations of Ras-el Seni were semi-private affairs between extended Alawite kinship networks, or more recently, semi-public events put on by local Alawite cultural organizations. In Antakya's new spatiopolitical constellation, however, elements of local Alawite identity like Ras-el Seni are increasingly evident in the political domain, in forms like public municipal commemorations and CHP political propaganda celebrating the holiday. Such changes are also encountered at the provincial level in the policies of the CHP-run Hatay metropolitan municipality and are evident in other Alawite-majority districts in the province, pointing to a larger attempt by local actors in the CHP, as we discuss below, to align local Alawites with the project of Turkish Republicanism, and by extension, to shift local perceptions about Hatay in ways that bring it into an ambivalent alignment with Arab Alawiteness.

From the perspective of the local AKP government, too, the redistricting policy has had both practical implications for elections and wider ramifications for local ideologies of place and belonging. In laying claim to Antakya, the AKP has sought to position its own political project as the true guarantor of the city's multicultural values. It has sought to accomplish this by incorporating the values of Antakya's cultural diversity within its own project of Neo-Ottoman pluralism—a project built on the twin ideological pillars of Islamic solidarity and Turkish-Sunni hegemony. Local AKP politicians, for example, routinely emphasize Sunni Islam as a local axis of interethnic solidarity between Sunni Arabs and Turks. At the same time, the AKP-run municipal government frequently deploys token representations of the city's Christian community in its official publications and municipal propaganda.⁸ In a phenomenon comparable to that observed by Biner (2020) in Mardin, this tokenization of Christian heritage allows local AKP actors to appropriate the discourse of multiculturalism while de-emphasizing more politically salient axes of ethnic and religious distinction, such as between Sunnis and Alawites or Turkish citizens and Syrian refugees, and by extension, to discursively and cartographically erase these communities from Antakya. In creating the majority Alawite districts of Defne and Arsuz, moreover, the AKP has sought to recursively recast the contrast between a “multicultural Antakya” and a “Turkish Hatay” within a new set of spatial oppositions. For example, by aligning both Iskenderun and Antakya as predominantly Sunni cities in opposition to a new Arab Alawite zone consisting of three contiguous Alawite-majority districts—Samandağ and the newly created districts of Defne and Arsuz—AKP provincial redistricting seeks to reorder, in a new context and with new meanings, an older contrast between the Turkish Republic and Antakya as an “Arab borderland.”

For many locals in the new district of Defne, unsurprisingly, the AKP's political project in Antakya has been perceived less as a reflection of the city's values of intercommunal harmony or peaceful coexistence and more as a force of ayrım (division). In the 2019 local elections, more than two-thirds of the district's voters backed the main opposition CHP, while less than 7 percent supported the AKP. This was due as much to anger with the AKP's refugee policy as with support for the CHP, although the latter successfully deployed xenophobic tropes when attacking government policy—a political tactic designed to align citizens of Turkey of all ethnic backgrounds in Hatay against Syrians refugees living in the province. Today, many Arab Alawites and Christians voice concerns around the growing number of Sunni Syrians amid wider fears of violence from radical Sunni jihadists (Can 2020). For some voters in Defne, support for the CHP and its provincial leader, Lütfü Savaş—a Sunni Turk and former AKP mayor who shifted his allegiance to the CHP before the 2014 election—was driven less by enthusiasm for the CHP's provincial party platform and more about a rejection of the AKP's attempts to entrench local ethnoreligious divisions. And even among Alawites who continue to vote for the CHP, there are many who do so more out of electoral pragmatism than genuine political conviction.

Dissatisfaction with the CHP among Antakya's Alawites is significant enough that, despite the critical role the Alawite districts played in their victory in Hatay's provincial election, the total share of votes won by the CHP fell twelve points in Defne and eighteen points in Samandağ between 2014 and 2019, with around a quarter of the total vote in each district going to the Democratic Left Party (DSP). In the 2018 parliamentary elections a year earlier, moreover, voters in Defne and Samandağ supported the pro-Kurdish HDP in even larger numbers, accounting for close to half of the party's total votes in the province, and revealing a still further possibility for solidarity between Alawites in Samandağ and Defne and Kurds living in the north of province and cities like Iskenderun and Antakya.⁹

Therefore, while the CHP's recent electoral success has relied heavily on its ability to align itself with the values and interests of Antakya's Alawites, its project to inculcate Turkish Republicanism in these communities does not go uncontested. A small but prominent minority of Alawite political actors in Antakya openly identify as Syrian Arab nationalists who call for the liberation of the province from Turkey and its reunification with Syria. And a degree of sympathy for the Syrian Arab Republic and its Alawite leadership is common in Alawite districts of Antakya. But prior to the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, explicit reference to Alawite leadership of the Syrian government or military, or to sectarian distinctions more generally, were strictly “taboo” (Aringberg-Laanatza 1998). However, this situation has changed markedly over the past decade, as the Syrian government began openly championing itself as a defender of Alawites and other minorities in the region, and the ideological metrics shaping identification with the Syrian state among Antakya's Arab Alawites increasingly shifted from a horizon of Arab Syrianness to Alawiteness (Can 2019). Whereas prior to the conflict, Turkish and Syrian Republicanism functioned as competing ideological positions that recruited Antakya's Alawites as either potential Turks or Arab Syrians, both actors close to the CHP and Syrian nationalists in Antakya now also seek to recruit them explicitly as Alawites.

Alongside Syrian and Arab nationalism, revolutionary socialism also serves as an alternative political horizon to that of Turkish Republicanism, even if there are significant instances of mutual ideological influence in practice. A popular Arab Alawite journalist and politician Sevra Baklacı, for instance, writes for several well-known leftist newspapers in Turkey as well as serving as a Turkish-language presenter on the Syrian state's official news agency (SANA) and a former candidate from the Turkish Communist Party (TKP) for Defne's city council. And the successful parliamentary campaign of Barış Atay, also an Arab Alawite from Defne, was backed by the pro-Kurdish, leftist HDP in alliance with Atay's Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP)—itself a successor party of the TKP that emerged following an earlier intraparty conflict (animated in part by disagreements within the TKP over solidarity with the Kurdish movement). This is also suggestive of how Alawite politics, and left-wing Alawite politics especially, is marked by a still further distinction: between those Alawite socialists who identify with a pan-Turkey revolutionary project (in a sometimes-fraught alliance with Turkey's Kurdish movement) and those who identify more closely with the political project of Syrian or Pan-Arab socialism.

In Defne and other Alawite-majority districts, these political divisions have also given rise to a more generalized axis of differentiation that contrasts those who identify with the project of Turkish Republicanism and those, like both leftists and Syrian or Arab nationalists, who are more critical of the Turkish state and its ongoing efforts to assimilate Arab Alawites into a Turkish-Sunni majoritarian culture—yet another example of the recursive redeployment of the qualitative contrasts between Hatay and Antakya at a further level of social life (i.e., as an internal distinction among Alawites themselves). Recent attempts by the CHP to explicitly politicize Alawite identity as part of its larger vision for a multicultural Hatay, moreover, are generating new anxieties in Defne around the role that these political performances play in aligning the Alawite community with a Turkish Republican project—in a way analogous to Kabir Tambar's (2014) discussion about the politically ambivalent effects of new forms of public visibility in domesticating Alevi identity for national consumption. However, these anxieties not only reflect Alawite concerns around their representation in Turkey's public culture or their status as a national minority. Leftists in Defne, for example, commonly critique the CHP as a party that represents the interests of the state bureaucracy and the secular middle and upper classes, superimposing a class distinction onto processes of political and ethnolinguistic differentiation among Antakya's Alawite community.

Like in the example of the commodification of Mesopotamia in Mardin discussed above, the values of cultural diversity are also mobilized by differently positioned social actors in efforts to market Antakya to a wider national and international audience in a way that seeks both to commensurate and diminish ethnoreligious differences in the service of larger political and economic initiatives (Dağtaş 2014). This phenomenon is exemplified in the Hatay Expo 2021—a marquee project of the CHP-run Hatay metropolitan municipality and the mayoralty of Lütfü Savaş to host a major global Expo in the province. According to the organizers, the name of the Expo, “Garden of Civilizations,” was designed to highlight to the province's status as the historical site of multiple civilizations and a place where different ethnoreligious communities live together in peace. However, whereas official discourses promoting Hatay Expo 2021 drew on a widely circulating schema of qualitative contrasts used by locals to compare Antakya with Hatay, they did so by ascribing many of the stereotypical Antiochian qualities to Hatay itself, now contrasted with Turkey. In this ideological conjecture, Hatay is positioned as an integral part of Turkey whose status as an exemplar of cultural diversity and intercommunal coexistence makes it distinct from, and consequently valuable to, the country as a whole—a value horizon intended to bring a diverse constituency of local business interests into alignment with domestic and foreign capital.

The catastrophic February 2023 earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria killed thousands in Antakya and left hundreds of thousands more homeless. Massive internal displacement, coupled with ongoing struggles around reconstruction efforts, have imbued the ideological politics of place, solidarity, and difference in the city and wider province with a new urgency. The May 2023 presidential elections, moreover, confirmed the increasingly sectarian nature of Hatay's new territorial divisions: while President Erdoğan eked out a narrow victory in the province as a whole, his rival Kılıçdaroğlu won over 90 percent of the vote in the Alawite-majority districts of Samandağ and Defne, his second and third highest vote shares in the whole of Turkey. While both events occurred after this article was written, and their long-term effects are still unknown, it seems highly likely that the ideological contrast between Antakya and Hatay will continue to inform the politics of place and belonging in the province, albeit perhaps in new and still unforeseen ways.¹⁰

Conclusion: Identification and Categorical (In)commensurability across Scale and Context

In drawing attention to the common ideological processes underlying how axes of differentiation become meaningful in Mardin and Hatay, we have been careful to show how categories of identification common to both provinces—like “Kurd” and “Arab”—are evaluated through different ideological metrics and shaped by distinct political contexts. However, we have also sought to trace how local forms of identification reflect and respond to large-scale institutionalized ideologies (like those that underlie the myriad ways that people identify with the Turkish nation-state). In both Mardin and Hatay, for instance, identification as Arab or Kurdish reflect the history and context of each place. At, the same time, however, Kurdish political mobilization across Turkey over the past half-century has rendered identification as Kurdish with national and transnational significance, imbuing it with a set of broadly legible social and political meanings that can abstract it from its meanings in the local contexts of both provinces¹¹—an example of an ideological process that S. Jeyaraja Tambiah (1996) termed “transvaluation.”

Powerful institutions—for example, state bureaucracies, political parties, social movements—play important roles in shaping the ideological field that determine when, where, and how forms of identification become meaningful. In contrast to the situation of the Kurdish national movement in Turkey, notably, no analogous movement currently exists promoting Arab national identity in the country, and outside of the work of a handful of linguistic and cultural entrepreneurs, there is no large-scale social project seeking to orient Turkey's autochthonous Arab communities around a single political or cultural horizon. In both Mardin and Hatay, “Arab” is an important practical category of identification through which people understood themselves and their relationship with others. But beyond referring to a perception of shared ethnolinguistic background (i.e., as Arabic-speakers¹²), the primary qualitative contrasts through which this identity becomes meaningful in social life in each province are very different.¹³

At the same time, we also argue that social life always holds possibilities for new ideological alignments, and we describe how these alignments are reproduced, again through processes of transvaluation, in different social spaces and across multiple scales of social life. But this analysis also requires that we recognize the unevenly distributed power of ideologies across social space. In Istanbul, for example, in contrast to both Mardin and Hatay, the designation of Arab—to the extent that it can be said to evoke a stable set of qualities at all—is likely now more often invoked by local “native” citizens of Turkey (the majority of whom are also themselves migrants or the descendants of recent migrants to the city) to describe the growing numbers of tourists and investors from places like the Arabian Gulf, Levant, or North Africa whose influence in Istanbul has become more visible over the past decade, and who are often aligned in the popular imagination, especially among critics of the AKP, with government initiatives to attract foreign investment. In the xenophobic discourses emerging from the ongoing “migrant crisis,” moreover, the designation Arab can expand to encompass Syrian refugees as well as unwelcome foreigners of all ethnic or national backgrounds (e.g., Iranians, Afghans, and Pakistanis), while popular talk of Türkiye'nin araplaşması (the Arabification of Turkey) now frequently equates Arabness not just with an ethnic or national identity but with a threatening foreignness connoting cultural backwardness, poverty, and crime. Doubtless this ideological perspective reproduces elements of an earlier “Occidentalism” (Ahiska 2003) that seeks to align Turkey with the modern values of Europe and against a Middle East mired in traditionalism. But the migrant crisis of the past decade has imbued this older ideological constellation with renewed social and political salience and imparted new ideological features.

The prevalence of this ideological framing of Arabness in contemporary Turkey, not only in Istanbul but across the country at large, means that many Arabs from Antakya and Mardin now struggle even more than before to translate local forms of identification for national consumption. Communities in both places distinguish between Arabs from Turkey and foreign Suriyeliler (Syrians), albeit probably with more nuance than the rest of Turkey. Here too, however, the war in Syria and the corresponding migrant crisis has affected how locals formulate and enact this contrast. This is evident in the changing ideological metrics through which local Arab Alawites living in Antakya identify with Syria since the start of the conflict.¹⁴ It is also evident in the increasing salience of an ideological division within Antakya's Christian communities between those who identify as primarily Arab on the one hand, or “Rum” (i.e., Orthodox, Eastern, or Byzantine Christian) on the other.¹⁵ In conversations with Rafael, for instance, several of his Christian interlocutors in Antakya stressed their Rum (as opposed to Arab) identities, and Rafael has personally observed how debates over the question of which identity to emphasize in the public discourse of local Christian civil society organizations sometimes turn acrimonious. While this ideological division has both older roots in Antakya's Christian community and much wider uptake among Christian communities in the Middle East (Sabra 2006), growing tensions around the growth in the numbers of Muslim Syrian refugees over the past decade has come to imbue the ideological emphasis on Christian difference with renewed social salience. It remains an open question whether or not this perspective will continue to gain traction among Antakya's local Christian communities and what the potential consequences of this will be for capacity of Arab identity to serve as an enduring horizon of solidarity between (historically Arabic-speaking) Christians, Alawites, and Sunnis communities in the province.

To stress the point again: local forms of identification, while often distinct in valence, nevertheless respond to (as they are also implicated in) larger-scale ideological processes of identification unfolding in Turkey and the wider region. Christian identification in Antakya occurs through local categories, as well as more widely available axes of differentiation that also function (sometimes with different meanings) on the scale of the Turkish nation-state or Middle East Christendom and its European and American diasporas.

Outside of Mardin or Antakya, local categories of identification undergo interrelated processes of cultural translation and sociopolitical transvaluation. When members of local Arab communities in these provinces visit or migrate to western cities like Istanbul, or when they seek to express a sense of communal identity in terms legible to a wider Turkish national audience, they routinely face misapprehension and resistance, encountering situations wherein the salience and meaning of their primary identity categories shift and wherein the principal axes of social differentiation, as well as solidarity, are given new ideological valences. To offer one last ethnographic example: in the immediate aftermath of the May 2023 elections, Patrick heard the following story from Ceren, an Arab Alawite from Samandağ then working as a chef in an upscale restaurant in Istanbul. Her story concerned a discussion she had taken part in at work a few days earlier about Erdoğan's reelection and the status of migrants in Turkey. Although not surprised, she said, she was somewhat taken aback by the level of vitriol spewed by her coworkers, eventually expressing her discomfort to them about the way they were speaking about “Arabs,” especially since she considered herself one. Later that day, during a break in the kitchen, one of her dishwashers who had also participated the discussion approached Ceren apologetically, telling her something to the effect of: “I don't know if we should call it being Türk (Turkish) or Türkiyeli (from Turkey), but it's different for someone like you, sen bizdensin (You're one of us).” Ceren responded that she did not share his perspective, but also told him that she did not blame him for thinking they way he did, that she could see it was the entire media system and political atmosphere that created these feelings in people. While she told Patrick that she disagreed with the youth's political views, Ceren added that the dishwasher was a sweet and kind kid, confessing that she could not bring herself to dislike him. Although neither convinced by his reasoning nor especially comforted by this fraught attempt at inclusion, Ceren understood her coworker's words for they were: an effort to enact and extend solidarity, albeit one built on the exclusion and devaluation of Syrians and a disacknowledgment of Ceren's feelings—feelings also shared by many other Arab Alawites from Antakya. How we go about evaluating such acts of solidarity as being effective (or not) at the scales of interpersonal relationships and the nation-state, however, is a more complicated sociological question than whether such acts resonate with or sufficiently conform to an individual's preferred mode of identification, political beliefs, or inner sense of self. Solidarity as identification with others is always a process of negotiation—sometimes outright contestation—motivated by a specific context and social relationships (such as the need to maintain a basic level of harmony between coworkers in a restaurant kitchen)—a process structured by disparities in power and institutional hierarchies of value, and cut through by competing interests and perspectives.

In this article we have explored how competing ideological constructions of solidarity and difference animate public life along the Turkish-Syrian border, paying special attention to the way the contrasting social alignments map onto contested ideologies of place and belonging in two border provinces: Mardin and Antakya/Hatay. Throughout our analysis, we have argued that struggles over public identity in Mardin and Antakya are best analyzed not as sectarian competition between different ethnic groups or intractable conflicts between Turkish and minority identities, but as social and political processes of public formation that allow for manifold, flexible forms of identification and that generate possibilities for novel forms of social alignment and political engagement, as well as continuing possibilities for social exclusion and intercommunal (and intracommunal) conflict. In putting emphasis on the ideological processes underlying solidarity, we do not mean to deny its significant material dimensions, to suggest that enduring relations of solidarity are built exclusively in discourse, or to ignore how powerful institutions influence and often intervene to impose forms of social identification and set the acceptable boundaries of solidarity in public life. Rather we suggest that no economic or political relation can be socially or politically meaningful outside of such ideological framings, and that public life is always, as Antonio Gramsci contends, a battlefield of competing ideological positions structured by contingent relations of power. This theoretical approach, as Michael Silverstein (1998) outlines, “takes literally the proposition that through social action, people participate in semiotic processes that produce their identities, beliefs, and their particular senses of agentive subjectivity” (1998: 204). In this perspective, the articulation or contestation of the major axes of solidarity and difference in public life are co-constitutive ideological processes through which social actors not only unconsciously reproduce but agentively reshape the underlying values and meanings of social divisions. Consequently, they are also important processes through which both political agitation and everyday forms of social action can confront the limits of our social imagination and sometimes can, if exceptionally, reconfigure basic parameters of social identification.

Finally, we have tried to describe how people living in Mardin and Hatay imagine and construct alternative horizons of social belonging and solidarity beyond the terms of Turkish state and other nationalist discourses. And we have questioned the premise that the most socially meaningful aspects of public life along the border are always best understood in relation to or opposition with the Turkish nation-state, asking whether the nation-state itself always offers the most coherent analytic through which to understand the complex ways that people in these regions identify (or not) with state institutions, political and social movements, confessional traditions, language communities, and one another. Approaching the problem of social alignment from Turkey's national periphery, we suggest that struggles around pluralism are not solely oriented toward the nation-state as a legal-political object of identification—that is, they are not limited to or even necessarily primarily organized around demands for minority representation in Turkish national culture or minority claims to state recognition—but rather embrace a wider set of social concerns responding to everything from the destabilizing forces of global capital and interstate competition to more localized negotiations and struggles over political power, economic resources, and the quotidian values underlying relations of solidarity and difference in social life.