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Understanding Insurgency: Popular Support for the PKK in Turkey
No insurgent movement can survive without some degree of popular support, but what does it mean to support an armed group? Focusing on the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which has come to global attention in recent years for its efforts in resisting ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but has been present and active in the region for much longer, Francis O'Connor explores the first three decades of the PKK's insurgency in Turkey. Looking at how the relationship between armed groups and their supporters should be conceptually understood, how this relationship varies spatially and what role violence has in their relationship, he draws on Civil War, Social Movements and Rebel Governance literatures to outline how the PKK survived a military coup in 1980 and slowly won popular support through incipient forms of rebel governance, the targeted use of violence and a nuanced projection of its ideology and objectives. In doing so, it provides an historical narrative to an organisation which has managed to successfully resist NATO's second largest army with limited weapons for decades and has become a key player of Kurdish rights in the wider region.
- GenresHistory
340 pages, Hardcover
Published August 26, 2021
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January 9, 2025
4.5*, rounded up to 5 for Goodreads.
This is an extremely high quality book. It is largely taken as a truism that insurgencies cannot survive without a degree of popular support. So Mao says: the guerilla is the fish, the people are the sea. While not a sufficient quality in itself, popular support is certainly necessary for the long-term viability of an insurgent movement.
Anyway, the book is not just simply proving that popular support matters, but it highlights the fact that the actual theorisation of how insurgent groups construct and maintain constituencies of support, and how these constituencies are effected by both insurgent and state violence. Pretty much all pre-existing literature on this topic focuses on rebel governance, but this really only covers the small percentage of insurgencies that ever achieve stable territorial control. The PKK, like most insurgent groups, never achieved this, yet still were able to build and maintain a strong constituency of support through the strategic use of violence, through a repertoire of social interactions and 'moments of contact', and by exerting some forms of pseudo-governance that did not rely on long-term territorial control. Through this, insurgent groups build a 'constituency', a network of support unto which the group 'extends' its repertoire of behaviour-selective violence, pseudo-governance, public services, dispute resolution, etc etc-and thus reinforces its social embeddedness in its broader environment, e.g., in Turkey and Bakur Kurdistan. It is conceptually and empirically rigorous in its synthesis of rebel governance and general insurgency literature (the two sub-fields remain strangely isolated at times-one of the many problems of modern academia) to create a novel framework for how insurgent groups, using the case study of the PKK, both shape and are shaped by the social space in which they operate, and how they accordingly build and reproduce constituent bases of support within diverse social environments through a process of mutual interaction, learning, and bargaining.
It differs from more 'rationalist' approaches to insurgent-civilian interaction, e.g., as most famously proposed by Kavylas in his 2006 book The Logic of Violence in Civil War, in that it provides a complex and strong understanding of the importance of emotion, ideology, and identity in both rebel mobilisation, cooperation or opposition to insurgent actors, and supportive interactions without outright mobilisation (that is, what O'Connor calls 'constituency').
Theory and empirics are continuously co-referenced and understood well and this really serves to better one's understanding of civil wars and rebel groups as a whole as well as the case study in question of the PKK.
The book is semi-chronological, detailing the group's emergence up until Ocalan's arrest in 1999, but also is split spatially, with three sections covering the rural insurgency, the struggle in the cities, and the PKK's actions in Western Turkey separately.
I wish the book had continued through into the 21st Century, even if it had made it longer, given that this would allow an evaluation of O'Connor's framework that also covers periods of acute weakness after its initial rise from 1984-1993 and its subsequent stagnation-but-not-collapse. Today the PKK is in a very weak position in the Qandil Mountains, and similarly from 1999-2004 it was fairly moribund, having to declare a unilateral ceasefire to regroup. How well does this theory cover these periods? Nevertheless, it's outside the scope of the book, so I cannot really fault it for that even if it's unfortunate. There is very brief coverage of this period in the conclusion (literally 5 pages) but there wasn't really the space given to elucidate on it enough to be useful, unfortunately.
In terms of issues actually within the scope of the time period, there are a couple of minor ones, but they take away from the book only slightly. To be nit-picky, I will say O'Connor is objectively wrong when he talks about the communalist system of the KCK groups, particularly in terms of its actual implementation (even if flawed) in the AANES. He writes that participation is involuntary (e.g., coerced), but this is untrue. Participation in the communes is voluntary, as is evidenced by the fact that actual rates of participation across the AANES (and even within Kurdish-majority areas) vary significantly, with some unfortunately being broadly neglected and failing to function in practice while others maintain a vibrant local bottom-up democracy in which democratic confederalism/communalism as envisaged by Ocalan and/or Bookchin really exists, albeit within the inevitably messy context of civil war and social revolution.
Still, that is a single sentence in the conclusion. Another minor issue would be the under-theorisation of the importance of the legal (though often banned) Kurdish-interest political parties: HEP->HADEP->DEHAP->DTP->BDP->HDP->DEM. I feel these parties, particularly since 2015 but also in the relevant period of the 1990s, had an IMMENSE impact on Kurdish politics and on the PKK itself, both positive and negative, yet it is not given much time in the book and it's only written in the context of the PKK in West Turkey despite the fact that these parties are strongest in Bakur Kurdistan itself. This doesn't ruin the book or anything, it's just a slight disappointment.
The closest thing to a major issue the book has, and the main thing that puts it down from a 5* to a 4.5* (and almost to a 4*, to be honest, if it wasn't for the great strength of the theoretical framework) is that it doesn't really fulfill its promises in terms of the scope of the book. The period from 1984-1993 is covered in immense detail, but the subsequent period of stagnation and decline up until 1999 is covered comparatively lightly. It's seldom talked about why the PKK declined in this period despite many of the causal factors given importance in the book supposedly staying the same. Either the definitive factor was NOT that of the book, or the author simply doesn't give a sufficient account of how the PKK's constituency shrunk or became distant from it.
The book does mention this a bit, to be fair, in terms of the dislocation and fragmentation of the PKK's rural constituency during the mass displacements of the late 80s and 90s, but this is talked of more so in terms of *relocating* the constituency rather than its destruction or reduction.
But overall it's a superb book and you MUST read it.
This is an extremely high quality book. It is largely taken as a truism that insurgencies cannot survive without a degree of popular support. So Mao says: the guerilla is the fish, the people are the sea. While not a sufficient quality in itself, popular support is certainly necessary for the long-term viability of an insurgent movement.
Anyway, the book is not just simply proving that popular support matters, but it highlights the fact that the actual theorisation of how insurgent groups construct and maintain constituencies of support, and how these constituencies are effected by both insurgent and state violence. Pretty much all pre-existing literature on this topic focuses on rebel governance, but this really only covers the small percentage of insurgencies that ever achieve stable territorial control. The PKK, like most insurgent groups, never achieved this, yet still were able to build and maintain a strong constituency of support through the strategic use of violence, through a repertoire of social interactions and 'moments of contact', and by exerting some forms of pseudo-governance that did not rely on long-term territorial control. Through this, insurgent groups build a 'constituency', a network of support unto which the group 'extends' its repertoire of behaviour-selective violence, pseudo-governance, public services, dispute resolution, etc etc-and thus reinforces its social embeddedness in its broader environment, e.g., in Turkey and Bakur Kurdistan. It is conceptually and empirically rigorous in its synthesis of rebel governance and general insurgency literature (the two sub-fields remain strangely isolated at times-one of the many problems of modern academia) to create a novel framework for how insurgent groups, using the case study of the PKK, both shape and are shaped by the social space in which they operate, and how they accordingly build and reproduce constituent bases of support within diverse social environments through a process of mutual interaction, learning, and bargaining.
It differs from more 'rationalist' approaches to insurgent-civilian interaction, e.g., as most famously proposed by Kavylas in his 2006 book The Logic of Violence in Civil War, in that it provides a complex and strong understanding of the importance of emotion, ideology, and identity in both rebel mobilisation, cooperation or opposition to insurgent actors, and supportive interactions without outright mobilisation (that is, what O'Connor calls 'constituency').
Theory and empirics are continuously co-referenced and understood well and this really serves to better one's understanding of civil wars and rebel groups as a whole as well as the case study in question of the PKK.
The book is semi-chronological, detailing the group's emergence up until Ocalan's arrest in 1999, but also is split spatially, with three sections covering the rural insurgency, the struggle in the cities, and the PKK's actions in Western Turkey separately.
I wish the book had continued through into the 21st Century, even if it had made it longer, given that this would allow an evaluation of O'Connor's framework that also covers periods of acute weakness after its initial rise from 1984-1993 and its subsequent stagnation-but-not-collapse. Today the PKK is in a very weak position in the Qandil Mountains, and similarly from 1999-2004 it was fairly moribund, having to declare a unilateral ceasefire to regroup. How well does this theory cover these periods? Nevertheless, it's outside the scope of the book, so I cannot really fault it for that even if it's unfortunate. There is very brief coverage of this period in the conclusion (literally 5 pages) but there wasn't really the space given to elucidate on it enough to be useful, unfortunately.
In terms of issues actually within the scope of the time period, there are a couple of minor ones, but they take away from the book only slightly. To be nit-picky, I will say O'Connor is objectively wrong when he talks about the communalist system of the KCK groups, particularly in terms of its actual implementation (even if flawed) in the AANES. He writes that participation is involuntary (e.g., coerced), but this is untrue. Participation in the communes is voluntary, as is evidenced by the fact that actual rates of participation across the AANES (and even within Kurdish-majority areas) vary significantly, with some unfortunately being broadly neglected and failing to function in practice while others maintain a vibrant local bottom-up democracy in which democratic confederalism/communalism as envisaged by Ocalan and/or Bookchin really exists, albeit within the inevitably messy context of civil war and social revolution.
Still, that is a single sentence in the conclusion. Another minor issue would be the under-theorisation of the importance of the legal (though often banned) Kurdish-interest political parties: HEP->HADEP->DEHAP->DTP->BDP->HDP->DEM. I feel these parties, particularly since 2015 but also in the relevant period of the 1990s, had an IMMENSE impact on Kurdish politics and on the PKK itself, both positive and negative, yet it is not given much time in the book and it's only written in the context of the PKK in West Turkey despite the fact that these parties are strongest in Bakur Kurdistan itself. This doesn't ruin the book or anything, it's just a slight disappointment.
The closest thing to a major issue the book has, and the main thing that puts it down from a 5* to a 4.5* (and almost to a 4*, to be honest, if it wasn't for the great strength of the theoretical framework) is that it doesn't really fulfill its promises in terms of the scope of the book. The period from 1984-1993 is covered in immense detail, but the subsequent period of stagnation and decline up until 1999 is covered comparatively lightly. It's seldom talked about why the PKK declined in this period despite many of the causal factors given importance in the book supposedly staying the same. Either the definitive factor was NOT that of the book, or the author simply doesn't give a sufficient account of how the PKK's constituency shrunk or became distant from it.
The book does mention this a bit, to be fair, in terms of the dislocation and fragmentation of the PKK's rural constituency during the mass displacements of the late 80s and 90s, but this is talked of more so in terms of *relocating* the constituency rather than its destruction or reduction.
But overall it's a superb book and you MUST read it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review