Zones of rebellion: Kurdish insurgents and the Turkish state

Abstract

Earlier research on civil war has sought to reveal its fundamental causes and understand why ordinary people would resort to political violence. This line of research has offered great theoretical insights into the structural mechanisms that caused civil wars, particularly embodying grievance-based approaches (be they political, economic, or social). Yet these structural explanations have remained limited in demonstrating the timing of civil war breakouts at certain periods but not others and the persistence of civil wars over longer periods. In that regard, Zones of Rebellion seeks to bring a nuanced understanding of the emergence and persistence of civil wars by giving agency to the combatants along with their organizational and ideological choices through a detailed case study of the KurdistanWorkers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane, PKK) and the counterinsurgency efforts of the Turkish state. In doing so, the book offers process-oriented explanations within which violence transforms identities on the one hand and historically informed organizational choices of the combatants cause the conflict persist in the long run on the other hand. Rather than seeing the Kurdish conflict of Turkey as a function of preconflict ethnic grievances, this study shows that “civil wars can be viewed as incomplete groupmaking projects” (130). While the first part of the book analyzes the organization, ideology, and strategy of the PKK, the second part observes the counterinsurgency of the Turkish state along with its organization, ideology, and strategy between 1984 and 2008. The book has two main arguments. First, the combatants (i.e., the Turkish state and the Kurdish insurgency) are resourcedependent organizations. By resource, the authors refer to the crucial significance of territory and people. Depending on the degrees of civilian support and territorial control of the combatants, distinct zones of violence have gradually emerged dur-