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.

Read more: https://journals.tplondon.com/com/article/view/3428