Death as Victory, Victory as Death : Violence, Martyrdom, and the Cosmology of Revolution in the Kurdish Freedom Movement

The central investigation of the thesis concerns the nature of revolution in the Kurdish freedom movement, i.e. the social movement affiliated with the guerilla organization, the PKK. The main argument forwarded is that revolution in the Kurdish movement should be understood as intimately connected with and defined by martyrdom. The thesis argues that martyrdom not only informs participants in the movement about what counts as revolutionary practice and discourse, but also that the martyrs structure the very hierarchies and social order of the movement itself, both in present reality and in its utopian project. Shortly summarized, the thesis sets out to prove that revolution and martyrdom are two sides of the same coin in Kurdish freedom movement. The thesis makes its argument in nine chapters, and builds on 21 months of fieldwork in Iraq, Turkey, and Germany from 2015 to 2017. The first chapter summarizes the main argument of the thesis, and argues for the importance of examining the Kurdish freedom movement on its own terms, taking its ‘otherness’ seriously. It argues against placing the Kurdish movement in matrices for measurement that are already pre-defined prior to the investigation. The chapter claims that pre-ordained frameworks for analysis not only over-write what the people in the movement say and do, but also that the perspectives might actually do harm to the movement it has set out to study; by already having a definition of revolution ready before the movement is examined, it precludes an attentiveness to ‘the new’ that the movement strives to achieve. Moreover, the chapter argues, such pre-defined notions also preclude an attentiveness to the emic categories in the movement that make up its cosmology, which the thesis sees as the locus for how the movement is driven forward. In chapter 2, the thesis explores how revolutions may be conceptualized analytically, and how one may figure out where a revolution may be said to take place. The thesis contends that contrary to certain perspectives on multi-sited fieldwork, it would be fortuitous to consider revolution as an open-ended and mutable logic, which is located both everywhere and nowhere, emerging rather than available. Such a perspective, the thesis contends, opens up for examining revolution ethnographically, since it encourages attentiveness to practices (or modalities of practices) as they unfold in time, and may also draw attention away from place towards time as the prime mover in con