The link between the foreign policy of states and escalating political violence: Turkey and the PKK

Abstract

In this article, I analyse the escalation of ongoing violence between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, PKK) through a new perspective. More specifically, I concentrate on the full-blown political violence in the period between 1992 and 1995, in which the Turkish state's power (and authority) was genuinely threatened in one part of the country. The central political authority employed violent measures, whereas some of the Kurds supported the violent acts of the PKK rebels in order to attain certain political goals, in the case at hand, autonomy and/or secession. I argue that the explanatory power of conventional approaches to the PKK conflict does not offer a sufficiently broad perspective with which to analyse the micro-dynamics of violence in the ongoing conflict. I offer a new causal explanation that employs a process-based perspective that considers how the ongoing violent conflict produces new opportunity structures for the PKK in a transnational conflict landscape. This approach reveals the causal link between the foreign policy decisions of the Turkish state at the beginning of the 1990s and its influence on the radical escalation of political violence.