Mesopotamia and the Garden of Civilizations: Public Life and the Politics of Solidarity and Difference along Turkey’s Syrian Border

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of mass media to explore how public life is perceived and made by residents in Turkey’s Syrian borderlands. Deploying two case studies from the ethnically and religiously diverse border provinces of Mardin and Hatay, we investigate how people in these borderlands contest and renegotiate terms of solidarity across multiple forms of social difference, considering how this process both responds to and is reflected in larger shift s in Turkey’s politics, economy, and public culture. In addition, we explore how differently positioned actors practice manifold forms of identification and competing forms of political alignment, paying close attention to how “ideological axes of social differentiation” (Gal and Irvine 2019) are deployed in understanding and making relations of solidarity and difference.