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5 - Theft, Violence and Banditry

from Part I - Everyday Politics of Peasants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2021

Murat Metinsoy
Affiliation:
Istanbul Üniversitesi
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Summary

This chapter concentrates on the last resort of the peasantry in the face of the high cost of living and exploitation and coercion by local state agents and dominants. Although direct confrontation was generally avoided, the peasants, when faced with no other alternative, did not hesitate to violate their oppressors. Although historians considered the Anatolian countryside calm and passive due to the rarity of open and massive peasant movements, rural unrest manifested itself through fighting for scarce resources, theft of crops and livestock, attacks on oppressive individuals and the wave of banditry that swept all of Anatolia during the period. This chapter argues that in contrast to the literature, rural crimes and banditry as the most explicit form of rural crimes were predominantly a component of peasants' struggle for survival and their resistance to social injustice rather than a tool of Kurdish nationalist groups or tribal reactions.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Power of the People
Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of Modern Turkey, 1923-38
, pp. 97 - 119
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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