Making Sense of the PKK's Violence Against Civilians

Although civilian casualties in the PKK history are remarkably low, the armed group has exercised one-sided violence against civilians (UCDP, Imset, 1991:100; Kocher, 2002:6). With the aim of answering whether this violence can be accurately labelled as political, this paper aims to make sense of two concrete instances of PKK civilian victimization (school teachers in rural Kurdistan and village guards and their families in the late 1980s). Against original empirical data collected via more than fifty interviews with PKK activists and Kurdish civilians between 2011-2013, we evaluate predominant explanations of civil war violence (Valentino, Kalyvas, Weinsten, Metelits, Wilson) and examine how far Kalyvas’ widely used distinction between selective/indiscriminate violence takes us in making sense of these instances. Finally, we discuss how the validity of these labels vary according to the level of analysis (i.e. local v. national) and the perspective of the actor (i.e. perpetrators v. civilians).