THE MAKING OF COMMUNAL RIOTS AND HOSTILE COUNTERMOBILIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM TURKISH-KURDISH VIOLENCE IN TURKEY

While ethnic insurgencies fuel ethnic hostilities in society, they do not always evolve into communal conflicts in which competing ethnic groups confront each other in violent ways. Ethnic contention may metamorphose into non-violent or violent forms in time and space due to endogenous and exogenous dynamics of ethnic conflicts. While some countries that experienced ethnic insurgencies have not experienced violent intercommunal conflict such as Burma against Karen Insurgency, Spain against Basque insurgency, intercommunal violence accompanied ethnic insurgencies in some other countries such as Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sri Lanka-Tamil conflict and the communal violence between Bosnians, Serbs and Croats during the break-up of the Yugoslavian federation. The recent quantitative studies suggest that the likelihood of ethno-nationalist war increases when demographical significant ethnic groups are excluded from the center while competitive elections, interethnic engagement, and patronage politics provoke the rise of communal conflicts. However, the over quantification in the literature left unexplained the composite and causally heterogeneous relations between ethnic tensions and communal conflicts. This study brings a contentious politics approach to ethnic conflicts and explains the rise of Turkish-Kurdish communal riots in Turkey through a contentious politics approach. Focusing on movement-countermovement interactions during Turkish-Kurdish communal clashes, it shows that hostile countermobilization is a crucial mechanism that activates ethnic riots and spreads political violence into civilians. As such, the study contributes to studies on countermobilization studies that received little attention in the literature. The study is based on original data of Turkish-Kurdish communal violence, semi-structured interviews and media archives.