Municipal Politics and the PKK in the late 1970s: A citizenship perspective

Joost Jongerden and Francis O’Connor recently published a commentary in which they discuss the Kurdistan Workers Party’s (PKK) municipal politics in the late 1970s through the lens of citizenship politics. The data for this work is based on empirical research on the PKK’s political activities among rural workers, peasants, women and workers in the petrol industry in Batman and Hilvan, including 24 interviews with witnesses and activists engaged in the PKK’s electoral and representative municipal political work in the 1970s.

The article introduces two concepts – activist citizenship and fugitive citizenship – to analyse the PKK’s mobilisation in this period, before the 1980 military coup in Turkey. Activist citizenship challenges the restrictive boundaries of state-sanctioned citizenship, while fugitive citizenship creates alternative political spaces for marginalized groups. Both concepts highlight how individuals and groups, such as the PKK, can assert their political agency in contexts where they are denied formal citizenship. The research questions linear understandings of the PKK’s emergence as a political movement inevitably destined to become an insurgent movement.

The PKK’s participation in municipal electoral and representative politics in the late 1970s in Batman and Hilvan was the PKK’s first attempt to establish Kurds as citizens, a struggle which continued in activist and fugitive forms through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, albeit in the shadow of the violent storm of insurgency, mass rural population displacement and suffering which characterised the years after 1984.