Abstract
This study tries to explore the relationship between soft-line governmental policy interventions of Turkey andthe responses of the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party) by using time series data from 1995 to 2010. The negative binomial specifications for two models, the number of incidents and the number casualties are used. The aggregated impact of soft-line policies on the level of violence is found to be positive and significant. In one hand, Turkey’s EU accession process had a decreasing impact on PKK inflicted violence. On the other hand, the Active Repentance Law increased the violence in the short run. It was found that defiance based governmental policy interventions of Turkey had an increasing impact on the PKK-inflicted violence.
Highlights
Terrorism is one of the most complex social phenomena in the age of globalization and the September 11 is considered a turning point in the development of counter-terrorism policies throughout the world
When we look at the details of these reform packages, we can see that there are several regulations that were intended to eliminate the Kurdish conflict such as the legalizing of the Kurdish language in public, allowing official and private Kurdish TV and radio broadcasting, Kurdish language courses, and releasing from prison four former deputies of the pro-Kurdish Democracy Party (DEP), including Leyla Zana (Dagi, 2006)
H1: The defiance-based policies implemented by Turkey would increase the number of incidents inflicted by the PKK during the democratization period in Turkey
Summary
Terrorism is one of the most complex social phenomena in the age of globalization and the September 11 is considered a turning point in the development of counter-terrorism policies throughout the world. The basic premise of the Defiance theory ( known as Legitimacy Theory or soft-line approach) is that if policy interventions carried out by governments towards terrorists or their sympathizers are perceived as legitimate and fair by them in ethnically divided society, they are more likely to be effective in reducing violent incidents, especially in a long run (Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley 2006; Sherman 1993; Ünal 2011) Another argument raised by the advocates of defiance based policies (Crenshaw 1995; Wilkinson 2011) is that hardline counterterrorism policies to combat ethnicity based terrorism have a potential to create of mythologies of martyrdom, to strength group solidarity, and to increase public support for the militants. In the context of defiance and desistance based governmental policies to eliminate public support for terrorists/militants, democratic, social, and political reforms initiated by governments play vital role. Byman (1998) considers the implementation of democratic reforms or policies as crucial component of defiance based policies for promoting psychological disintegration between militants and sympathizers
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