Patterns of insurgent violence diachronically evolve in relation to structural and institutional developments, access to resources and military and political interactions with the state. However, emphasis on these factors often obscures the importance of armed groups’ relationship with their support networks and the formative impact it has on the strategic decisions made by insurgents. This paper will reflect the reality that insurgents are obliged by the very nature of asymmetrical conflict to maintain a popular support base in order to supply it with tangible resources such as combatants, financial and material support, as well as political legitimacy and ideological solidarity. It draws on the theoretical focus accorded by Waldmann and Malthaner to these reciprocally formative relations inherent in armed groups radication in their immediate social environments. This dependence thus conditions the nature and extent of violence that armed groups can deploy against incumbent forces and the wider civilian population. In the mid 1980s, the PKK in order to deter enrolment in the government sponsored militia, the Village Guards, methodologically targeted villages that had taken up arms against them. This policy resulted in the killings not only of the Village Guards themselves but also of their entire families. The policy of deterrence had some success in dissuading recruitment to the militia but had a corresponding counter impact, as many fighters within the movement and its supporters were horrified by the targeting of civilians and exerted a series of sanctions against the movement, ranging from defection, to the withholding of resources and public criticism. In consequence, the PKK altered its policy and desisted from targeting civilians, thus highlighting the importance of the aforementioned relationship between insurgents and their support networks. The PKK is of specific theoretical interest because it enjoys massive support not only in the Kurdish region of Turkey but also from Kurds in the major cities of Western Turkey and its European diaspora, therefore, its relationship with its support networks is mediated across both a territorially contiguous area and a trans-national community. The geo-spatial peculiarities of such an arrangement render its analysis to a large degree impervious to standard control-coercion or rational choice theoretical models of armed movements thus rendering the case of the PKK of particular importance to the wider fields of violence and Social movements.
