Focusing on the 40-year-long civil war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkey, this book project traces a layered group of policies and interventionist actions such as heritage-making, urban planning, and urban renewal as part of the broader security strategy across three districts in Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish-majority city in Northern Kurdistan/Southeast Turkey.

Drawing on Ronay Bakan's multi-year, multi-method ethnography, the project argues that the counterinsurgent state establishes spatial control through material practices of destruction, (re)construction, and decay in the lived environment of ostensibly unruly populations, rather than through a single moment of territorial control. Bakan terms this set of processes counterinsurgent urbanism and argues that counterinsurgent urbanism reveals heterotemporal constitution of counterinsurgency and its violence. In this framework, the past conflict figures into the material and symbolic construction of security infrastructure in the present to annihilating existing insurgencies, while preempting and preventing future ones through. This leads to coexisting temporalities of immediate, gradual, and future-looking violence inflicted on racialised/ethnicised human bodies and their everyday environments. 

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