Understanding Insurgency: Popular Support for the PKK in Turkey

LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts

This event, as part of the LSE Middle East Centre's Kurdish Studies Series, was the launch of Francis O'Connor's latest book 'Understanding Insurgency: Popular Support for the PKK in Turkey' published by Cambridge University Press. 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, O'Connor 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, the book 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. Francis O’Connor is a Marie Curie Skłodowska Post-Doctoral Fellow in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. His research addresses the grey-area between violent and non-violent mobilization. He particularly focuses on the relationship between insurgent movements and their supporters: his current project Routinised Insurgent Space looks at the spatial dynamics of insurgent support in the cases of the PKK in Turkey and the M-19 in Colombia. He is a member of the Centre of Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy, a member of the International Expert Network for the Right-wing Terrorism and Violence in Western Europe Dataset and sits on the Advisory Academic Board for The Commentaries. He has published on insurgent movements in Turkey, Mexico and Colombia, anti-austerity protest in Europe, lone-actor radicalisation and social movement mobilisation in secessionist referendums. Robert Lowe is Deputy Director of the LSE Middle East Centre and Co-Editor of the Kurdish Studies Series published by I.B. Tauris. His main research interest is Kurdish politics, with particular focus on the Kurdish movements in Syria.