Curfew ‘until further notice’: waiting and spatialisation of sovereignty in a Kurdish bordertown in Turkey

This paper explores counterinsurgency strategies of the Turkish state during the 1990s and how they affected people’s experience of time and space in Yüksekova, a Kurdish border town in the south-eastern tip of Turkey. The paper takes up the perspective of children to think about how forcing people to wait indefinitely enables new forms of population and territorial control. Drawing on autobiographical and ethnographic accounts, the paper demonstrates how the Turkish state establishes and maintains its sovereignty in Kurdish borderlands by constricting space, forcing a different rhythm onto the practices of everyday life and instilling ordinary existence with a sense of uncertainty.