Turkish Paramilitarism in Northern Kurdistan - by Ayhan Iş & ı & k (Paperback)

About the Book

Focuses on relations between paramilitary groups and the Turkish state during the armed conflict between the state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in the 1990s.

Book Synopsis

This book focuses on relations between paramilitary groups and the Turkish state during the armed conflict between the state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in the 1990s. In August 1984, the PKK launched an armed struggle against the Turkish state, leading to a full-blown war throughout the 1990s. During the conflict, the Turkish state established new armed groups, many of them having a paramilitary character. This research investigates the ways in which these paramilitary groups emerged, functioned, and were deactivated. It analyses the historical background, transformations and continuities of these paramilitary groups, and examines their violence against civilians particularly in two regions of Northern Kurdistan: Batman province and Cizre district.

Review Quotes

Turkish Paramilitarism in Northern Kurdistan is a significant scholarly achievement. It brings together legal analysis, historical inquiry, and sociological insight to explain how paramilitary violence was not an anomaly but a recurring mechanism in the state's efforts to suppress Kurdish resistance. It challenges official narratives, brings long-silenced voices into the academic conversation, and opens the door for further research on the legacies of this violence in contemporary Turkey.--Mashuq Kurt "Kurdish Studies"

Işık argues that, at least during periods of intense violence like in the 1990s, there is even a tendency towards the paramilitarization of the state itself. He bases this on six points. First, state institutions and politics are dominated by members of paramilitary groups. Second, there are increasingly complex interconnections between various state apparatuses and paramilitary groups. Third, these interconnections are also used for economic purposes. Fourth, paramilitary groups are deployed in conflicts instead of legal armed institutions. This is accompanied, fifth, by the use of paramilitary groups against the political opposition and, sixth, by the deformation of state institutions.--Lukas Kaufman "Arbeit - Bewegung - Geschichte"

Ayhan Isik's well-documented monograph allows us to understand the para-legal structuration of power relations in Turkey since the Hamidian Era (1876-1909) and sheds a new light on the country's episodic violent crises, erratic evolution and impossible democratisation, in spite of the irruption of sociologically differentiated political generations.

--Hamit Bozarslan, EHESS (SIÈGE)