This chapter assesses the evolution of demands by the Turkish Kurdish community from secession to devolution in the context of the most recent negotiations between the Turkish state and Kurdish leaders. The chapter begins by offering background on the Kurdish community with an emphasis on Turkish Kurdistan and the priority placed on decentralization by the Kurdish leadership in that country. This context sets the stage for a close examination of the reconciliation or “peace” process in Turkey between 2009 and 2015 and the evolution of Kurdish leaders’ views on decentralization that emerged over the course of that period. In the third section, the chapter engages with the published political tracts detailing the theory of democratic confederalism that encapsulates the innovative thinking that has emerged over the last two decades among the Kurdish leadership about the potential for devolution to serve their goals of self-governance. The final section of the chapter considers from the perspective of the comparative literature on federalism and devolution the implications of Kurdish theorizing about decentralization as a form of self-determination and the potential of the political experimentation underway in Turkish Kurdistan seeking to implement those theories on the ground.

This chapter discusses and compares two different understandings of self-determination in Kurdistan against the background of administrative centralization and nationalization of populations occurring in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is argued that as a result of the intertwining of centralized-territorial state formation and nationalism a new order emerged that saw Kurds turned into a surplus population confronted with assimilation and erasure. Initially Kurdish movements responded to this new political reality by embracing the very principle by which they were excluded: the idea that a population, defined as a nation, is entitled to a state exercising exclusive territorial control. It was in this context that Kurdish national liberation movements emerging after World War II mostly declared the establishment of an independent state in which to build a postcolonial society as an ultimate goal. Towards the end of the twentieth century, and following a critique (and self-critique) on the character of national liberation struggles, a vein in the Kurdish movement started to tie self-determination not to the establishment of a state, but rather to the development of peoples’ capacities to govern themselves. These two understandings are compared and discussed as responses to the nation-statification of society.

Part III considers fixers as moral actors caught between competing expectations from local interests on the one hand and foreign reporters on the other. In the context of growing acrimony against the foreign press in Turkey and the outright murder or abduction of numerous journalists in Syria, these chapters show how fixers reconcile or circumvent conflicts in the relationships they broker, and how they save face when conflict cannot be avoided. Stories of newsmaking on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and on the collapse of peace in Kurdish regions of both Turkey and Syria in 2014–2015 demonstrate how fixers tap into expansive social networks to matchmake compatible source–reporter pairs, establish forms of reciprocity with sources that are invisible to their clients, and evade the attention of violent state and non-state actors, all with mixed success. When they fail, fixers lose clients or sources, status or trust. When they succeed, fixers create trading zones in which knowledge can be exchanged across political and cultural divides.

This chapter explains the importance of the phase of pre-conflict mobilisation for insurgent groups subsequent development. The chapter empirically presents the fallout from the 1971 coup and the tumultuous decade that followed. It explains the various violent tendencies in 1970s Turkey: the Right, the Left, Kurdish movements and the state. It tracks the emergence of the PKK from the socialist revolutionary milieu in Ankara, through its return to Kurdistan and its eventual consolidation as one of the region's most dominant revolutionary groups. It gives a substantial empirical overview of the multitude of Kurdish movements’ mobilization in the late 1970s. It lays out how the PKK overcame its weaknesses (lack of local legitimacy and resources) through a patient strategy of recruitment and calculated use of violence against local enemies. It then explains the impact of the 1980 military coup and the brutal repression of the Kurdish region. It discusses the deployment of state torture and terror and how Diyarbakir prison and the resistance by PKK prisoners became a rallying point for the weakened PKK. It finishes by outlining the PKK’s steps to prepare for the 1984 insurgency.

This chapter questions the urban/rural distinction, given that in times of conflict and demographic volatility, borders between urban and rural are diminished and events in the countryside shape those of the city and vice versa. Accordingly, it considers the impact of Turkish security forces’ counterinsurgency strategy of mass forced displacement not only on rural areas but also how it reconfigured Kurdish urban centres. It outlines the implementation of the forced evacuation of potentially millions of rural Kurds in order to deprive the PKK of its local support networks. The chapter shows the emotional trauma and the violence of the experiences, which led to the relocation of PKK support from the countryside to the cities. It also addresses the disaggregated strategies of state repression, particularly the so-called deep state that operated outside of any form of democratic accountability. The chapter also covers the state’s relationship with an Islamist movement, Hezbollah, used to target Kurdish intellectuals and politicians and to analyses how the PKK mobilised in Kurdish cities, focusing in particular on Serhildans (Uprisings), Newroz celebrations and guerrilla funerals.

This chapter argues that the some of the huge Kurdish population in western Turkey forms an Internal Diaspora. It introduces the concept of the Internal Diaspora by discussing the literature in relation to international diasporas. It then proceeds to discuss the challenges in assessing how many Kurds live outside of their Kurdish homeland in western Turkey. It tracks multiple generations of Kurdish migration, and the issues migrants were confronted with in western cities. It highlights some of the lived experiences for Kurds in the West such as poverty, racist exclusion, diminishing economic opportunities and patterns of informal residential segregation, especially in gecekondu neighbourhoods. It then proceeds to analyse how and why the PKK first mobilised in western Turkey, as well as considering how the mobilisation contrasted with that in Kurdish regions. It demonstrates that Kurdish students became the organisational core of the movement before expanding into marginal neighbours populated by destitute Kurds. It also looks at the decline of the revolutionary Turkish left and takes the case of the Gaziosmanpaşa neighbourhood as an illustrative case study. It finishes with a discussion of the parliamentary Kurdish parties and how it affected the PKK mobilization.

The final chapter summarises the book's argument that insurgent groups’ ability to maintain popular support and legitimacy is a key dimension of their success or failure. It shows that the PKK, notwithstanding its ever decreasing military capacity, has proven resilient because of the strength of its relationship with its supportive constituency. It proceeds to assess the strength of the argument, explaining the challenges in demonstrating causality in the field of conflict studies. It further assesses whether the book's framework could possibly explain the evolution of the movement in the period after the timeframe of this book. It briefly gives an overview of changes in the PKK since Öcalan’s capture in 1999, including its dramatic ideological transformation, reconfigured structures, the growth of an affiliated Kurdish civil society, the strength of Kurdish political parties and their relationship with the PKK. It also looks at the PKK’s role in Syria and how its experiences there have shaped the conflict in Turkey.

The chapter addresses the launch of the PKK’s rural insurgency in 1984; although the circumstances did not favour armed rebellion, the PKK still managed to launch an armed uprising in rural Kurdistan and survive the challenging initial years to become deeply entrenched across the region by the end of the 1980s. On the ground, the PKK exhibited much ideological flexibility when framing its political project to potential supporters. The chapter also addresses some of the strategic errors the PKK made in this period, such as failed efforts to impose conscription on Kurdish youths and the massacres of civilians associated with the state-backed paramilitary forces, the Village Guards, outlining some the heterogenous motivations for participation in the VG and some of its unanticipated consequences. It also explains how Öcalan came to dominate the movement, through the party education system and the killing of potential rivals within the PKK. It also empirically examines how the PKK obtained local support, through forms of insurgent service provision and intertwining itself into the community by building familial ties and developing a consistent local presence.

Chapter 1 lays out the main argument of the book, asserting that insurgent groups’ dependence on their support networks ensures that to a certain extent they are obliged to respect their supportive constituencies’ ideological preferences and normative expectations. Relationships between armed groups and their constituencies are not stable and change over time as conflicts develop, ensuring that insurgent groups can also lose popular support. This chapter argues that this important dimension of insurgency is sometimes overlooked in favour of structural, ideological or resource-oriented analyses of conflict. It specifies how the book uses (or not) specific terminology and concepts like terrorism and Kurdistan. The chapter proceeds to discuss the difficulties in working with data in research on insurgencies. It argues that all forms of data – quantitative and qualitative – have inconsistencies and it backs the call for greater data transparency in conflict studies. It elaborates on some of the specific challenges related to data reliability on the conflict in Turkey. It describes the interview process, discusses the representativeness of the interview sample and the challenges of fieldwork. It finishes by outlining the structure of the book.

After the historical cycle which started with the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, all of Kurdistan was affected by war and violence. Between 1979 and 2003, two structural dynamics of the Kurdish conflict, which had determined Kurdish history, have also been radicalized and militarized: the centrifugal one tearing apart the Kurdish space along the line of the state borders, linguistic and sectarian zones, partisan traditions and political cultures, and centripetal one unifying it across these many borders under the idea and ideal of ‘Kurdishness’ and by many forms of pacific or armed mobility. This tension was not an easy one to bear, but it has been managed, although at a high cost. The 1980s (and as far as Turkey is concerned 1990s) have probably constituted the darkest period of the Kurdish history with a rough estimation of Kurdish victims, namely, civilians, reaching some 200,000 people. By the beginning of the 2000s, however, Kurds’ survival as a part of Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and thus, in the trans-frontier Kurdistan, seemed to be out of any major threat.

Self-determination operated as an organizing principle for national liberation movements around the world in the twentieth century. This was no different for Kurdish political movements assuming the principle that a nation is entitled to a state which exercises exclusive territorial control. National self-determination became the grounding of the right they claimed to establish the independent state of Kurdistan. Since the constitutive power of the state relied for its justification on the existence of a self-determining nation, Kurdish political parties emerging after the Second World War framed their struggle in terms of state formation. However, in the course of the twenty-first century, the emphasis on the Kurds as a people without a state became one of the Kurds as a people beyond the state. In this chapter, these contemporary political developments are discussed within a historical context. The chapter looks at the relation of Kurds and Kurdish politics with the state as an object and objective of political struggle. In so doing, it distinguishes between two strong currents in Kurdish politics over the last decades.

“This chapter focuses on the political developments in the Kurdish regions of the Middle East during the 1970s, which was a pivotal period for the Kurds in a number of respects. The defeat of Kurdish armed struggle there in March 1975 marked the beginning of the fragmentation of the Iraqi Kurdish movement. In this period, Kurdish conflicts in the region became integrated into the regional power struggles and created the possibility of alliances, but as the experience of the Kurdish movement in Iraq demonstrated, the Kurds could not rely on these alliances as the empowerment of the Kurds was not the objective. In Turkey, after years of silence, Kurdish activists began organizing cultural and political activities and challenged Kurds’ oppression and denial of their identity. In Iran, too, the Kurdish movement was highly active and after the overthrow of the shah’s regime, it mobilized a significant section of Kurdish society around the demand of territorial autonomy. In Syria, despite the existence of Kurdish political organization, the consolidation of the authoritarian regime in Syria following Hafez al-Assad’s ascendency to power further limited the opportunities for Syria’s Kurdish movement.”

This chapter historically contextualizes the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement and analyses the trajectory of its organizational structures from 1987 to the present. It traces how the women’s movement managed to establish its own army (1995) and party (1999) within the PKK, while also establishing the co-chair system and the women’s quota in the political sphere in the early 2000s. The chapter zooms into one crucial moment of contestation between the women and men of the movement: the formation of the Kurdistan Women’s Worker’s Party (Partiya Jinên Karkerên Kurdistanê, PJKK) in 1999. It asks to what extent this and similar internal struggles can help us to gain a more nuanced understand of how the women managed to carve out the spaces for autonomous organizing within the wider movement, how the liberation of women came to feature so prominently in the movement’s ideology and how this speaks to ongoing debates around nationalism and feminism. The chapter also highlights some of the tensions and contradictions that emerge between the claim to liberation and the clear framework around the ‘free woman’.

Locating the emergence of Kurdish nationalism into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter examines the course of Kurdish nationalism and analyses the changes in its agents, objectives, vocabulary, instruments and spaces. More particularly, it provides an historical analysis of Kurdish nationalism in terms of the agents pioneered, targets pursued, discourses mingled, instruments employed and the spaces clung. It is shown that the course of Kurdish nationalism in these respects can be examined in terms of four periods: 1898–1930, 1958–80, 1984–99 and 1999–2015. The three defeats the Kurdish nationalists faced in 1930, 1980 and 1999, it is argued, generated four different periods in the history of Kurdish nationalism. The chapter ends with a brief remark on the last defeat of the Kurdish nationalist movement in 2015.

The post–Cold War era is when the formation of new states or autonomous regions based on national or ethnic identity gained a new momentum following developments in the ex-USSR and Former Republic of Yugoslavia. The UN Security Council adopted a resolution declaring that states that suppress cultural and political rights of their citizens based on communal identity lose international legitimacy. This, in turn, empowered ethnic groups who were suppressed and whose human rights were violated. It also led to the revival of Wilsonian self-determination, but in a different format, and in this period when the legitimacy of states is questioned as never before through labels such as authoritarian, dictatorial, failed or weak states. Kurdish demands for statehood gained a new momentum in this new era. As a signifier of this trend, the de facto autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq emerged in 1991 and became official in 2005 with the collapse of the Iraqi state and the formation of a federal state. Other Kurdish parties, such as the PKK, shifted their ideological ground and increased their appeal among Kurds. This chapter explains how Kurdish political actors in the Middle East utilised the new international normative framework post-1990 to frame their nationalist self-determination claims within the discourses of justice, human rights and democracy.

Chapter 3 provides the historical and regional context of water security in Syria prior to the major droughts of the 1990s and 2000s. It traces the role of water in Syrian society throughout history, first by reviewing domestic water legislation and then by examining Syria’s international riparian relations in the Euphrates and Tigris basins. Water resources have been key to the development of civilizations in Syria for millennia because of its arid climate and dependence on agriculture; there is therefore a long history of the regulation of water. The chapter contends that Islamic law codified norms around water use that emphasized social justice and environmental protection, and these norms were included in modern Syrian water legislation centuries later. Concluding the chapter is an analysis of how the management of Syria’s main transboundary rivers has been impacted by its relations with its upstream riparian neighbor, Turkey.