The PKK-Kurdistan Workers' Party's Regional Politics - During and After the Cold War

This book presents a theoretical framework to study dissident ethnic movements' imagination of world politics, with a special focus on the PKK as a case study. Dissident ethnic movements are not only a challenge to the existing hegemonic power, but they also produce an alternative closed society based on different ethnic imagination. Instead of taking the armed PKK movement as a pure resistant, this book approaches contemporary Kurdish nationalism led by the PKK as a counter-hegemonic with a narrative that entails the emergence of a new kind of identity and sense of belonging, through which the PKK has been able to exercise its power. This book is an attempt to go beyond resistance-oriented approach, unveiling the two faces of the PKK's representation of world politics: its transformative effect on the Kurds, and its exclusionary function towards traditional and alternative Kurdish subjects/institutions.

Ali Balcı is Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations in Sakarya University, Turkey. He specializes in poststructuralism in International Relations, Turkish foreign policy, and postcolonialism in the Middle East.