Beyond Kurdistan? The Mesopotamia Social Forum and the appropriation and re-imagination of Mesopotamia by the Kurdish movement

Through its integration in the Global Justice Movement and the establishment of its own Social Forum, activists of the Kurdish Movement in Turkey seek to contest, re-appropriate and change the 'conceived spaces' of Turkey's Kurdish Southeast.This case-study of the Mesopotamia Social Forum provides a window onto how activists assess the existing inequalities and initiate alternative politics, and how these are informed by and related to changing political discourses on the role of civil society and democratization, the latter being rethought and narrated in the ideological discourse of the movement.The region of Mesopotamia is thereby reclaimed and reproduced as a political space that is to serve as a postnationalist imaginary and consequently go beyond 'Kurdistan'. Introduction: The production of a political spaceContemporary geographers have convincingly argued for a relational approach to space and place.Indeed, any nation, region or city is also a product of relations which spread out way beyond it. 1 The local and global are actually mutually constituted, which goes against the tendency to imagine the local as a product of the global, ruling out agency. 2 In fact, the local all too often figures as a victim of globalization, consequently diminishing our understanding of the potential of local agency.The local is not simply always a victim or, conversely, a 1 Doreen Massey, "Geographies of Responsibility", Geografiska Annaler, v. 86, n. 1, 2004, p. 6. 2 Ibid., p. 10 redoubt against the global.Instead, the local can be conceived of as the moment through which the global is constituted, invented and produced. 3Space does not just 'exist', waiting to be discovered, but is created through a whole series of forms and scales by social individuals. 4 Consequently the local can seek to alter the mechanisms of the global.This may imply strategies and tactics that consciously seek to contest perceived threats of globalization (cultural homogenization, international capitalism, etc).The Kurdish movement's ideological appropriation and re-imagination of Mesopotamia may be regarded as such an attempt.It seeks to produce an alternative political imaginary and consequent political project in answer to the socio-political realities it holds responsible for existing inequalities.This paper seeks to inquire this appropriation and re-imagination of Mesopotamia (rather than Kurdistan -see below).Taking the Mesopotamia Social Forum as a starting point, an investigation is made of the regionally initiated ideological change aspired to by the activists of the Kurdish movement and (steered) by the movement's political leadership.This paper bears testimony to the ongoing project of the Kurdish Movement to re-think the spatial order of current politics, moving 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, opening up a political space of its own by means of performative political acts, such as the 2009 Mesopotamia Social Forum. "Chanke Din J Pkan E": Another World is Possible!"Wir denken, dass