Abstract
This chapter explains in brief the rationale behind a monograph on the intermittent war between the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê or Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkey since 2004: first of all, this fluctuating war (i.e. defeat of the PKK in 1999, ceasefire between 1999 and 2004, limited war between 2004 and 2011, all-out war in 2012, peace negotiations between 2013 and 2015, all-out war between 2015 and 2017 and now stalemate?) is indeed an ideal case study for specialists in insurgency and counter-insurgency (COIN), and, secondly, this intermittent conflict is still an ongoing war with a critical peripheral dimension (i.e. Iraq and Syria). This chapter argues that this book will use the insights of the disciplines of International Relations and Strategy to offer an up-to-date and critical account of the Turkey vs PKK conflict.
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Notes
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Paul J. White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernisers? The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in Turkey (London: Zed, 2000), 70–84, 142–205.
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Michael Gunter, The Kurds: A Modern History (Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishing, 2015), 25–60.
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The AKP stands for Turkey’s ruling Islamist party since 2003.
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Simon Waldman and Emre Caliskan, The New Turkey and its Discontents (London: Hurst, 2016), 163–278.
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Michael M. Gunter, “Contrasting Turkish Paradigms towards the Volatile Kurdish Question: Domestic and Foreign Considerations” in The Kurdish Question Revisited, eds. Stansfield and Shareef, 225–244.
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Henri Barkey, “The Transformation of Turkey’s Kurdish Question” in The Kurdish Question Revisited, eds. Stansfield and Shareef, 211–224.
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Ali Sarihan, “The Two Periods of the PKK Conflict: 1984–1999 and 2004–2010” in Understanding Turkey’s Kurdish Question, eds. Ali Sarihan and Fevzi Bilgin (New York: Lexington Books, 2013), 99–102.
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Güneş Murat Tezcür, “The Ebb and Flow of Armed Conflict in Turkey: An Elusive Peace” in Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, eds. David Romano and Mehmet Gurses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 171–188.
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Mustafa Coşar Ünal, “Is It Ripe Yet? Resolving Turkey’s 30 Years of Conflict with the PKK”, Turkish Studies 17, no. 1 (2016): 91–125; Ibid., “Counter-Insurgency and Military Strategy: An Analysis of Turkish Army’s COIN Efforts”, Military Operations Research 21, no. 1 (2016): 55–88.
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Plakoudas, S. (2018). Why Study the PKK versus Turkey Conflict. In: Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Turkey. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75659-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75659-2_1
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