Reclaiming the State’s Security Promise from the Perspective of Statelessness

• Applicant: Professor Eray Cayli, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544962752

This research project centres a people excluded from statehood and from the protection of state-authored security, for whom the state’s significance to the promise of security involves not simply the oppressive presence or debilitating withdrawal of an existing state but also the absence of and desire for another yet to arrive. It focuses on security practices they have developed in response to this exclusion and in directly palpable and experienceable ways—by reshaping the environments they inhabit. What do such security practices do to and with state-authored security’s promise of inclusive protection? What do they reveal about how security, the state's significance to it, and its impact on state-society relations are being transformed in an age of multiplying crises? These questions bridge critical security studies with recent scholarship on democratic sovereignty in the neoliberal era. Recent critical security scholarship problematizes the various exclusions of state-authored security by turning to “bottom-up” and “vernacular” security instead, and thus overlooking how the state's significance to the promise of inclusive protection might be changing—not simply declining. Meanwhile, critical debates on democratic sovereignty in the neoliberal era find local and grassroots formations ranging from mutual aid to municipal rule to be particularly effective for marginalized social and political actors to organize for sovereignty by circumventing the neoliberal state—by prioritizing bread-and-butter issues neoliberal states deprioritize. Yet, this scholarship overlooks that some marginalized actors practising democratic sovereignty, whose histories of marginalization and of organizing against it stretch much further back than the past few neoliberal decades, may find value in the state-based form of democratic sovereignty and not see a contradiction in both holding on to it and developing pragmatic solutions to bread-and-butter issues. The project contributes to these bodies of scholarship by centring a phenomenon that has escaped them: grassroots security initiatives developed by the politically stateless. The paradigmatic case involves civic initiatives set up by Kurdish technical experts in Turkey (engineers, architects, planners) who worked for Kurdish-run municipalities prior to their summary dismissal during the Turkish state's recent crackdown in the name of national security. Set up by the experts following their dismissal, these initiatives campaign on food security, disaster preparedness, and environmental welfare. The project studies them using qualitative methods: collaborative action-research, thick description, participant observation, interviews, and cultural production (to reflect their material-spatial character). The main working assumption is that they do not simply complement or undermine state-authored security but rather reclaim its inclusionary promise and refashion this promise for a time of planetary environmental urgencies.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5870: The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times