Overview

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 Karkeren 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.

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9781399505994

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Reviews

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)

Author Information

Ayhan Işık is an interdisciplinary political historian specialising in 20th and 21st-century political violence, conflict, peace studies and Kurdish Studies. He completed his PhD in the Department of History-Political History at Utrecht University, focusing on Turkish Paramilitarism and perpetrators' violence in the 1990s. His postdoctoral research was at Centre de Recherche Mondes Modernes et Contemporains, Université libre de Bruxelles and a visiting researcher at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a co-founder and editorial board member of the journal Toplum ve Kuram (Theory and Society: Kurdish Studies). His articles have been featured in numerous journals (including Southeast European and Black Sea Studies and Kurdish Studies). His work has also been published in the edited collection Kurds in Turkey: Ethnographies of Heterogeneous Experiences (Lexington Books, 2019). Işık also a co-editor of Kurds and the Republic, including 100 articles edited volume. Turkish Paramilitarism in Northern Kurdistan will be his first monograph.

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