This paper addresses a historical puzzle: Why do people continue to join the Kurdish insurgent organization (Kurdistan Workers Party - Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan), which has been militarily subdued, officially renounced the goal of secession, and whose leader has been under the custody of the Turkish state, in a time when non-violent expressions of Kurdish identity have been rapidly expanding in Turkey? The paper presents findings of an ongoing research project on the Kurdish insurgent movement and some preliminary answers to this question. Previous research has demonstrated that the survival of an insurgent organization is a function of its ability to recruit new members and prevent splits. An insurgent organization has strong incentives to disarm and reinvent itself as a non-violent entity when its recruitment levels drops below the sustenance rate. This did not obviously happen in the case of the PKK. The question of why people join insurgencies that entail tremendous risks and initially few benefits attract considerable scholarly attention. People may join or support an insurgent organization because they seek selective incentives in the shape of pecuniary rewards, which overcome the collective action problem. Alternatively, an insurgent movement can attract new members by offering them collective incentives in the shape of bonds of solidarity, ideological fulfillment, and moral purpose. Successful insurgent recruitment depends on the level of control the insurgent organization exerts over its constituency. The paper will evaluate how these theoretical expectations fare in the light of the recruitment patterns to the PKK. A better understanding of the micro-level dynamics of insurgency recruitment will generate a better understanding of conflict resolution at the macro-level. The paper is based on multiple methodologies that combine ethnographic research and historical narratives with systematic analysis of the obituaries of the PKK militants killed in action. The author visited Kurdish regions of Turkey many times and interviews dozens of people since 2002. He also interviewed several ex-PKK militants in Iraqi Kurdistan in fall 2007. The PKK regularly publishes short obituaries of its killed militants since 2003. Information about the militants killed before 2003 is also available in published PKK affiliated sources. The author analyzes information about more than 2,000 PKK militants killed in action to reach some general conclusions about recruitment patterns. Finally, personal memoirs, news articles, and websites sponsored by PKK dissidents provide unique insights to the dynamics of PKK recruitment.

This paper addresses the contested issue of the ‘true’ identity of Kurds in eastern Anatolia, as presented, through the lenses of the Armenian intelligentsia, during the crucial period between 1878 and 1914. In the Armenian nationalist writings of the time, ‘the Kurd’ had multiple, and often conflicting, images. Kurds were frequently portrayed as merciless plunderers and fanatic aggressors in the service of the Ottoman rule; for others, Kurds symbolized a rival ethnic group, or nation, with interests -- due to religious and territorial reasons—essentially at odds with those of Armenians. Yet, and in stark contrast with the aforementioned interpretations, the writings of particular Armenian intellectuals deemed Kurds potential or prospective allies, should they become conscious of their ‘true’ ethnic selves and attain a separate national identity detaching themselves from the religious and political influence of the Ottomans. For the latter group of intellectuals, Kurds turned into an object of ethnographic interest. In the search for an “authentic” and “true” Kurdish identity, many Armenian intellectuals, including professional ethnographers, inquired into Kurdish language, culture and history. Meanwhile the tension between Armenians and Kurds continued to escalate, eventually culminating – in the majority of areas cohabited by Kurds and Armenians – in the en masse participation of Kurdish groups in the genocide of 1915. In this paper, utilizing ethnographies written by Armenian nationalist intellectuals, Armenian journals and newspapers published between 1878 and 1914, I examine the imagining and the attempts at construction of Kurdish nation by certain Armenian intelligentsia and political actors as a strategy towards Armenian nation building projects. In doing so, my purpose is to rethink the formation of Kurdish subjectivity as an effect of manifold processes, operating not only in the confrontational encounter with the ‘host-nations’ and the Kurds but through contacts at the very margins as well.

KURDISH ORAL TRADITION AS A ‘HISTORIOLOGICAL’ COUNTER-NARRATIVE This paper aims to analyze Kurdish oral traditions with a specific attention to various songs and lamentations composed about Kurdish social and political leaders from the late Ottoman Empire through the early decades of the Turkish Republic. The broader observation that I will make in this paper is twofold: firstly, through a literature review of the works on Kurdish oral tradition, I will demonstrate that Kurdish oral tradition served the reproduction and transmission of the culture and language of the Kurdish population of the country. The second observation is that in the standardized and ‘teleological’ accounts of the modernization process from the late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, the Kurdish periphery has been perceived as a ‘reactionary-religious, tribal, backward’ site against the modernizing and ‘civilizing’ center. Against the anachronistic and teleological historical narrative of the center of the country, on the other hand, the Kurdish periphery has produced its own counter-narrative in the form of oral tradition. Through a textual analysis of various songs and lamentations on Kurdish tribal leaders (mîr), Sheikh Said and Ferzende Beg, which have been circulating among the Kurds, I will argue that in stark contrast to the prevalent assertions in the Turkish official historiography that these figures were a ‘problem’; Kurdish ‘historiology’, to borrow Jan Vansina’s term, as instantiated by a number of songs and lamentations, provided the Kurds with their own version of historical narrative and consciousness. Therefore, the Kurds have perceived and represented their social and political leaders such as sheikhs and tribal leaders as heroes unlike their official Turkish representations as backward religious and tribal figures.

In the late 19th-early 20th centuries, the Ottoman Empire under the influence of pressures for political modernization applied several policies to centralize its rule and exercise direct power over the Kurdish territories. Nevertheless, the loss of autonomy on the part of the Kurdish intellectuals and leaders was experienced as a challenge to their authority. In return, they struggled with these policies by exteriorizing the state and the discourses that the state represented. Kurdish nationalists tried to create their own domain of sovereignty by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains, “inner/spiritual” and “outer/material”. They imagined a Kurdish constituency untouched by the material domain and composed of language, history, folklore, legends-stories and folk songs. Kurdish intellectuals established their hegemony within this inner realm by attempting to standardize the Kurdish language, to revive traditional literature, to establish organizations and to publish journals. Moreover, the mother tongue became an essential instrument to distinguish the Kurdish nation from the other Muslim constituents of the Ottoman Empire as well as to create an imagined community among Kurdish people. The contextual rhetoric of the building and emergence of the Kurdish nation subsumed the location and identity politics of the “woman”. In this respect, Kurdish women were accepted as the pure and historical symbols/conveyors of Kurdishness since it was their language and culture that was thought to be the purest and most Kurdish. This suggests that despite their symbolic female role as mothers of the nation, women are subordinated in actual political processes. Thus, “ideal Kurdish women” who were portrayed as “desexualized political bodies” have been cultural constructs which are continually being revised, rewritten and re-appropriated. This paper analyzes the convergence and divergence of gender and national discourses in the Ottoman Kurdistan by scrutinizing the ways in which representations of masculinity and femininity were articulated within the framework of Kurdish nationalist discourse and by exploring political setting, historical exigency or ideological imperative which helped the discourse of nationalism to become the overarching umbrella that embodied other and different political temporalities. In doing so, the paper aims to understand how it was possible for the Kurdish nationalist elite to achieve the "imagined" patriarchal constructions of "female body" as passive signifiers of national cultures by metaphorically equating inviolable woman and inviolable motherland. The paper also focuses on the way in which concepts like "womanhood", "motherhood" and "gender" (trans)formed the meanings of "national/tribal/personal honor" and "nation".