In its 1978 manifesto, the PKK declared the establishment of an independent state to be the most important political goal of any national liberation movement. Twenty years on, the party’s leader Abdullah Öcalan changed this when he developed an ideological framework based on the idea of self-governing, stateless societies as the best way of addressing socioeconomic and sociocultural injustices. In this talk, Joost Jongerden explains this paradigm shift, which reoriented the PKK as well as other Kurdish movements in the Middle East.

Joost Jongerden is Assistant Professor at the Rural Sociology Group and the Center for Space, Place and Society at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is also a Professor at the Asian Platform for Global Sustainability & Transcultural Studies at Kyoto University in Japan.

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