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Projecting Power From Below:

Non-State Actors, Transnational Mobilization and International Security

Fiona B. AdamsonAssistant Professor of International RelationsDirector, Programme in International Public PolicyUniversity College London

29-30 Tavistock SquareLondon WC1H 9QUUnited [email protected]

Paper prepared for delivery at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political ScienceAssociation, August 28-31, 2003. Copyright by the American Political Science Association. Ithank Benjamin Valentino, Abdulkader Sinno, Lynn Eden, Stephen Stedman and members of theCISAC Social Science Seminar for comments on an earlier version of this paper.



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Introduction

The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the emergence of al-Qaeda as a major security

concern for the United States, brought to the fore a set of transnational dynamics and

relationships that have not received significant attention in the fields of international relations and

international security studies. While the conventional wisdom touted by both the popular press

and many experts was that the attacks marked the emergence of a new international security

environment, this ignores the fact that many regions of the world have long confronted a security

environment defined as much by the activities of non-state transnational actors as by those of

territorial states.1 A host of security concerns that include, not just international terrorism, but

also many so-called “internal conflicts” such as insurgencies, civil wars and ethnic conflict are

perpetuated by non-state actors operating transnationally. This is not a new feature of the

international system, but rather, as I argue below, an ongoing and predominant one from at least

the 19th century onwards.

In this paper, I propose a framework for understanding how non-state actors operate in

the international security environment. I argue that non-state actors, like states, engage in

processes of power projection at the level of the international system. Existing systemic-level

theories of IR conceptualize power as something that is exercised only by states or, in the case of

liberal institutionalists, by international organizations. In order to understand how non-state actors

operate it is necessary to begin by making a shift from an exclusively top-down, and state-centric

approach to international politics, to one that also includes a view of the international system

from the “bottom-up” and which takes into account activities and decision-making that occur at

the margins of the international states system -- in the interstitial and transnational spaces that

exist between existing configurations of state power. Specifically, I propose that there is a

common and identifiable pattern of transnational organizing and transnational strategies that



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relatively weak non-state political entrepreneurs adopt when they mount a violent challenge to the

political status quo. I call this broad pattern the “logic of transnational mobilization” and argue

that it has been a prevalent feature of international politics for at least the past two centuries.

The rest of the argument in this paper proceeds as follows. First, I discuss the prevalence

and significance of the activities of non-state actors for understanding the international security

environment. I then describe how existing systemic-level approaches to international relations

have theorized the role of non-state actors, dividing the literature broadly into realist and liberal

perspectives on non-state actors and international security. I argue that a more fruitful means of

conceptualizing the role that non-state actors play in the international security environment is to

turn to a political mobilization perspective, which draws, in part, from the literatures in social

movements and contentious politics. I discuss the components of a political mobilization

perspective, and outline three strategies that non-state political entrepreneurs employ during

processes of transnational mobilization. I then trace how these processes worked in two concrete

cases of transnational mobilization by non-state actors in violent conflicts: the Front de

Liberation Nationale (FLN) during the Algerian War of Liberation, and the Kurdistan Workers’

Party (PKK) in Germany during the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey. I conclude with a discussion of

the theoretical and policy implications of adopting a political mobilization perspective on non-

state actors and international security.

Non-State Actors as a Prevalent Feature of the International Security Environment

The use of strategies of violence and terror by non-state actors is not a new feature of the

international security environment. If one returns to the international system of the late 19th and

early 20th

centuries – arguably before the birth of the discipline of International Relations (IR) -- a

wide variety of radicalized non-state actors organized transnationally, drawing on ideologies such

as anarchism, socialism and nationalism as tools for challenging the political status-quo. Many of

1 See, for example, The Economist ’s September 15 headline, “The Day the World Changed,” or Barry R.Posen, “The Struggle Against Terrorism: Grand Strategy, Strategy and Tactics,” International Security, 26,



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these groups also employed violence and terror as tactics in an overall strategy of transnational

political mobilization to further their goals.

For example, in late 19th century America the predominant security threat of the time was

perceived as stemming from transnational networks of anarchists and socialists. In the late 19th

century, law enforcement officials in the US struggled to manage the consequences of the new

technology of dynamite, which had been invented by Alfred Nobel in 1866, and had quickly

become the weapon of choice for radicalized groups in both the United States and Europe. The

technology had been used to build “suicide bombs” that were almost impossible to detect.2 As

one anarchist newspaper advised its readership in 1884, “One man armed with a dynamite bomb

is equal to one regiment of militia when it is used at the right time and place…the whole method

of warfare has been revolutionized by latter day discoveries of science.”3 A sympathizer of the

time commented on the prominent role that violence and martyrdom played in the anarchist

movement by asserting that, “it is among the Anarchists that we must look for the modern

martyrs who pay for their faith with their blood, and who welcome death with a smile because

they believe, as truly as Christ did, that their martyrdom will redeem humanity.”4

In addition to anarchist and socialist networks, a number of nationalist movements were

also organized transnationally during the late and early 20th centuries. These included, for

example, the Irish nationalist movement in the United States, Ireland and Great Britain, the

Young Ottoman movement that was organized transnationally across the Ottoman Empire and

Europe, and a variety of Eastern European and Balkan nationalist movements. This pattern

continued throughout the 20th century in the form of transnationally organized anti-imperial, anti-

colonial and separatist nationalist movements, such as, for example, the Algerian, Palestinian, and

3, Winter 2001: 39-55.2 For a fascinating account by a law official of the time, see Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists(New York: Arno Press, 1977 reprint of 1889 edition).3 Citation is from the October 18, 1884 edition of the Alarm as cited in Schaack, pp. 87-88.4 Cited in Emma Goldman, Anarchism (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1969, first published 1910),86-87.



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Irish movements, all of which used strategies of terror and violence. Today, a wide variety of

contemporary conflicts, from Kosovo to Kashmir and from Chechnya to Northern Ireland, have

involved transnationally-organized non-state actors who use strategies of violence and terror to

pursue their goals.5

So-called “civil wars” are coded as “internal conflicts,” yet both quantitative and

qualitative studies of the causes of “internal conflicts” point to their transnational dimensions. For

example, studies of the causes of civil wars have noted a correlation between the existence of a

significant diaspora population abroad and the probability of recurrent violence in a state that has

already experienced violent conflict. Whereas countries with no or insignificant diasporas

experience a 6% chance of the recurrence of violent conflict, the probability of renewed violence

goes up to 36% in countries that have unusually large diasporas abroad. As the author of the

World Bank report from which this finding is taken comments, “diasporas appear to make life for

those left behind much more dangerous in post-conflict situations.6 Other studies have reached

similar conclusions regarding the role that non-state actors play in conflicts. Benedict Anderson,

for example, argues that conflicts are increasingly marked by a politics of ‘long-distance

nationalism’ that he describes as:

…a serious politics that is at the same time radically unaccountable. Theparticipant rarely pays taxes in the country in which he does his politics: he isnot answerable to his judicial system…he need not fear prison, torture ordeath, nor need his immediate family. But, well and safely positioned in theFirst World, he can send money and guns, circulate propaganda, and buildintercontinental computer information circuits, all of which can haveincalculable consequences in the zones of their ultimate destinations…Thatsame metropole that marginalizes and stigmatizes [the migrant] also allowshim to play, in a flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero.7

5 For a discussion, see Mary Kaldor, New Wars and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).6 Paul Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” World BankWorking Paper, June 15, 2000, p. 6.7 Benedict Anderson, “Long-Distance Nationalism” in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism,Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 74



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A RAND survey of sources of external support in contemporary insurgencies noted that one of

the major changes in the post Cold War international security environment is the increased

importance of non-state actors in general, and diasporas in particular.8 And, in one of the most

astute analyses of the dynamics of contemporary conflicts to emerge in the literature, Mary

Kaldor has drawn attention to the crucial ideational and material impacts of diasporas in localized

violent conflicts.9

A clear example of the role that transnational organizing and transnational strategies have

played in contemporary conflicts can be seen in the example of Kosovo, which has been studied

in the literature primarily as an “internal conflict” or as an “ethnic conflict,” but in reality was

from the start a product of the transnational activities of non-state actors who were challenging

the centralized power of a territorial state by drawing on various types of external resources and

opportunities. During the period of the early to mid-1990s, almost a third of the Kosovar

Albanian population spent time working or living abroad, with approximately 400,000 Kosovar

Albanians migrating to Western Europe.10 This meant that dense transnational social networks

connected Kosovo with diaspora networks in Western Europe. These diaspora networks were

mobilized and used as a source of revenue to fund the establishment of a parallel state apparatus.

In 1996, an organization calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was formed in

Switzerland, and began to broadcast Albanian language programming that was beamed into

Kosovo and tuned in to by the local population. Simultaneously, activists in the Western

European Kosovar diaspora launched a political lobbying campaign in European capitals --

targeting states, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs),

8 Daniel Byman, Peter Chalk, Bruce Hoffman, William Rosenau and David Brannan, Trends in OutsideSupport for Insurgent Movements (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001).9 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1999).10 Information in this section is taken from The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, TheKosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000), 42-64.



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such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the European Union

(EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The escalation of an armed conflict in Kosovo was financed through an international

“Homeland Calling” fund that collected money from the diaspora, as well as from revenues from

the sale of narcotics funneled to the KLA through transnational networks of organized crime. The

KLA “army” in Kosovo consisted largely of hastily trained recruits who spoke “better German

than Albanian” and knew “little of their homeland other than the idealized visions imparted to

them by their refugee parents in cramped apartments in Munich or Zurich.”11 The Independent

International Commission on Kosovo has concluded, “it was the Kosovar Albanians in the

Diaspora who became the most radicalized part of the Kosovar Albanian community and were to

create the KLA.”12 While there are certainly important differences between previous

transnationally organized movements and the activities of al-Qaeda and other radicalized groups,

there are also many striking similarities in terms of both their transnational dimensions and their

strategic uses of violence. These similarities and patterns provide important points of comparison,

and together suggest a fruitful analytical lens through which to view the role played by non-state

actors in the contemporary security environment.

Non-State Actors and International Security: Existing Approaches in IR Theory

Despite the ongoing and prevalent role that non-state actors have played in the

international security environment, there has been a surprisingly limited amount of theoretically

informed research in IR on this topic. Non-state actors pose a conceptual challenge to IR, which

has traditionally concerned itself with understanding conflict and cooperation among state actors.

In a field in which parsimony is highly valued, transnational networks and transnational relations

have been judged by some scholars in the field as constituting phenomena that are simply too

11 Chris Hedges, “Ethnic Albanians Leave Northern Europe to Fight in Anti-Serb Rebellion in Kosovo,” New York Times, June 6, 1988; Chris Hedges, “Kosovo’s Next Masters,” Foreign Affairs 78(3) (May/June1999), 24-42.12 Independent International Commission on Kosovo 2000, p. 45.



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complex to fit into the simple causal models that dominate IR, despite the fact that such

phenomena might have important implications for understanding the dynamics of the

international system as a whole. In

what sounds like an epitaph to the study of transnational phenomena, one survey of the field

recently argued that:

Transnational relations posited a world composed of many differentactors with different interests and capabilities. Such a model can providea rich description. But the operationalization of cause and effectrelationships is complex because it is difficult to specify interests andcapabilities ex ante. The larger the number of actors, the greater thediversity of their resources (ideas, money, access, organization); and thewider the number of possible alliances, the more difficult suchspecification becomes, especially if there are interaction effects among

different groups. 13

Despite the relative paucity of theoretically-informed research on the topic of non-state

actors and international security in the field of international relations, it is nevertheless possible,

to identify two general perspectives that have dominated the discipline, which can be broadly

identified as Realist and Liberal perspectives on non-state actors and international security.14

Each perspective implies its own long-term strategy and policy response for dealing with the

security effects of non-state actors in the international system. Since the policy responses

produced by each paradigm have dominated discussions on how the United States should respond

to the contemporary threats posed by non-state actors, such as al-Qaeda, it is useful to briefly

review these two perspectives.

The Realist Perspective on Non-State Actors and International Security

The Realist Perspective acknowledges the existence of non-state actors in the

international system, but argues that they are peripheral to understanding the nature of the

international security environment as compared to states. Waltz, of course, defined transnational

13 Peter J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane and Stephen D. Krasner, “International Organization and theStudy of World Politics,” International Organization, 52 (4), Autumn 1998, 659.



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actors and transnational relations out of his model of the international system. “Transnational

movements,” he writes, “are among the processes that go on within the system structure, they are

not however a crucial feature of structure.”15 Security threats are viewed as emanating primarily

from states, and in turn are to be responded to primarily by states. Power is treated as an attribute

that is distributed across unitary state actors who must each prioritize their own security interests

in an environment characterized by the structural condition of anarchy.

While non-state actors exist, and may carry out a number of useful functions, most of

these activities, whether economic or humanitarian, are viewed as peripheral to “high politics”

and not central for understanding the core security concerns of states. When realists do look

explicitly at the activities of non-state actors in relation to the international security environment,

they are predisposed to viewing them as being mere extensions of existing configurations of state

power and capabilities. Thus realists, on the whole, have a very difficult time accounting for any

independent role that non-state actors may play in the international security environment.

Because they assume that power can only be exercised by states, they largely ignore the exercise

of power and the use of force and violence by a wide variety of other actors that operate in the

international system.

The Liberal Perspective on Non-State Actors and International Security

For liberals, unlike realists, non-state actors have figured much more prominently in their

view of the international security environment. Liberals view power as being distributed not just

across states, but also embedded in other entities such as international institutions and NGOs.

Their view of power is multidimensional, with an emphasis on the “soft power” of economic

14 This characterization is obviously an over-simplification. For the purposes at hand, I characterize muchof the constructivist work on non-state actors as compatible with a broadly defined Liberal perspective.15 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 95. To supporthis point, he argued that the Soviet Union was more likely to be around in 100 years than other actors in theinternational system, such as Ford, IBM or Shell.



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factors or the power of ideas, in addition to military power.16 In this world- view, non-state actors

have been largely assumed to play a stabilizing role in the international system -- as extensions of

domestic interest groups, or as members of a global civil society that can contribute to

international stability by performing tasks such as monitoring human rights violations and

assisting in post-conflict reconstruction and development.17

The full range of non-state actors in the international system, however, includes not just

NGOs such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, but also groups such as Hizbullah and

Hamas. Liberals will be reluctant to lump these two kinds of non-state actors together into a

single framework of non-state “interest organizations.” Thus, because liberals have

overwhelmingly focused their research attention on non-state actors that do not advocate

strategies of force and violence to achieve their goals, their overall conclusions regarding the role

that they play in the international security environment have been flawed. This means that

liberals, as much as realists, have difficulty in accounting for the use of violence and force by

non-state actors, and the impact that this can have on overall levels of stability and security in the

international system.

A Political Mobilization Perspective on Non-State Actors and International Security

As opposed to adopting either a Realist or a Liberal perspective on international

terrorism, I argue that a more useful way of thinking about the role that non-state actors play in

the international security environment is through the lens of a Political Mobilization

Perspective.18 This perspective focuses on the fact that tactics of violence and terror by non-state

actors arise within the broader context of transnational political mobilization and contention,

16 See, for example, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics inTransition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).17 Kathryn Sikkink, “Human Rights, Principled Issue Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America,” International Organization 47 (3) (Summer 1993): 411-441.18 Such a perspective can be found in the sociological and comparative politics literatures on politicalmobilization, contentious politics, social movements and resource mobilization. For examples, see CharlesTilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978) or Doug McAdam, SidneyG. Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).



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which are taken up as a means for relatively weak non-state actors to consolidate and project

power at the level of the international system for the purposes of executing a given political

project:

…the process by which a unit gains significantly in the control of assetsit previously did not control [is] mobilization…By definition, it entails adecline in the assets controlled by subunits, the supraunit of which theunit is a member, or external units, unless the assets whose control theunit gained are newly produced ones…a mere increase in the assets ofmembers, of subunits, or even of the unit itself does not mean thatmobilization has occurred, though it increases the mobilization potential.The change in the capacity to control and to use assets is what issignificant.19

Political mobilization is thus fundamentally about political conflict and competition, as actors

seek to acquire and monopolize a resource base that can be drawn upon to achieve a specific

political objective.

The process of transnational political mobilization by non-state actors resembles, in many

ways, the processes of political mobilization that occur within the state and that have been studied

by the literatures on social movements and contentious politics. The primary difference is that,

because the process of transnational mobilization takes place within the context of the

international system as a whole, the strategies that are employed by relatively weak non-state

actors reflect and respond to the incentives and constraints that are found within the unevenly

institutionalized environment of the international system, rather than within the framework of

state institutions.20 For analytical purposes, we can view such forms of mobilization as

19 Amitai Etzioni, The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes (New York: Free Press,1968), 388-389, as cited in Tilly 1978, 69.20 I discuss the concept of “uneven institutionalization” at greater length in my dissertation, Fiona B.

Adamson, Mobilizing at the Margins of the System: The Dynamics and Security Impacts of Transnational Mobilization by Non-State Actors, Columbia University, New York, 2002. While realist and liberalperspectives in international relations have not examined the institutional and economic inequalities thatcharacterize the international system as a whole, the topic has characterized other systemic-levelperspectives, such as world systems theory and neo-marxist perspectives, as well as perspectives that havedeveloped in part from this tradition, such as the sociological institutionalism and “world polity”approaches. See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agricultureand the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press,1974) and The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and



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constituting decentralized and network configurations of power, in contrast to the ideal type of

centralized and institutionalized configurations of power (territorial states) that has characterized

the study of international relations.

If we examine the role that transnational mobilization has played as a feature of the post

Cold War security environment, we notice a striking pattern: the basic logic of many of the

violent conflicts which have populated the international security environment over the past

decade appears to be almost the exact mirror image of the dynamics which have been assumed to

characterize interstate warfare. During national mobilization for international war, centralized,

territorialized and unitary states mobilize “internal” resources, identities and fighting capacity to

project power and defeat “external” enemies in an anarchical international system.21 However, in

many so-called “internal conflicts,” a reverse process appears to be in play: societal or non-state

actors draw on partially deterritorialized networks to mobilize “externally” across state

boundaries as a means of acquiring resources to fight “internal” adversaries -- including the

regime itself -- within domestic environments which have taken on some of the characteristics

normally associated with international anarchy.

Non-state actors operating from the margins of the system often themselves view

localized conflicts as embedded within the larger geopolitical configuration of the international

system. Intent on mobilizing resources and support in order to pursue their political goals, they

are not limited by the territorial boundaries of the state in their pursuit of these resources. In fact,

such actors explicitly view the international and transnational dimensions of a conflict as being

integral to their overall strategy. Whether it be in the form of acquiring external resources or

attaining publicity and legitimacy on the world stage through media attention and official

World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium 10(2) Summer 1981: 126-155; GeorgeM. Thomas, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli, Institutional Structure: ConstitutingState, Society and the Individual (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1987). A similar perspective, but focusing morenarrowly on weak postcolonial states, is beginning to characterize some of the quantitative studies of civilwars, such as recent work by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,” American Political Science Review forthcoming 2003.



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recognition by third parties, the external dimensions of an internal conflict are crucial elements of

a non-state actor’s grand strategy. Even at the tactical level, incidents of localized violence can be

directed as much to the international media, international organizations or third party states as to

the actual victims, targets or domestic audience in a conflict. From this perspective, the

international and transnational dimensions of internal conflicts are not merely spillover effects or

externalities, but rather are part and parcel of the core dynamics of the conflict itself. As Kaldor

observes, “although most of these wars are localized, they involve a myriad of transnational

connections so that the distinction between internal and external, between aggression (attacks

from abroad) and repression (attacks from inside the country), or even between local and global,

are difficult to sustain.”22

Security scholars who have ventured to look at the international or transnational

dimensions of localized conflicts focus either on the role of third-party intervention (or lack of it)

by states and other powerful international actors or, alternatively, on the potential spill-over

effects of such conflicts, such as regional contagion or refugee flows. However, almost no

attention has been paid in the theoretical literature to the full range of transnational actors and

processes that form integral components of such conflicts. Processes of transnational mobilization

are largely invisible from a levels-of-analysis approach to international politics, since they occur

neither at strictly the domestic nor at the international levels of the international system, but rather

in transnational spaces and transnational networks which are found across and between states. By

standards of international relations theory, these non-state actors who operate in the interstices of

the international system possess relatively little power in comparison with the capabilities which

can be asserted by the most powerful states in the international system. Yet, by employing

strategies which take advantage of the resources and political opportunities available in pockets

and transnational spaces distributed throughout the international system, such actors are able to

21 See Waltz 1979, p. 168 on internal balancing.22 Kaldor 1999, p. 2.



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mobilize dispersed material and political resources and consolidate them in ways which can then

be converted into substantial projections of power.

Because power and resources are unevenly distributed across the international system,

non-state actors who face either blocked opportunities or a lack of institutional resources to

mobilize politically within the framework of a state, have an incentive to turn to transnational

strategies and to reach into the societies of other states as a means of mobilizing and generating

power for the purposes of a political project. During this process, one can identify three broad

strategies of transnational mobilization that are used by relatively weak non-state actors to mount

a challenge to the political status quo. The three strategies, which I turn to below, are

transnational constituency formation, transnational resource mobilization, and transnational

organizational expansion and contention. In each of these strategies violence can, and often does,

play an important role.

Transnational Constituency Formation

A number of scholars of nationalism have pointed to the role that political elites play in

nationalist mobilization.23 For the most part, however, these analyses have looked at political

entrepreneurs operating at the level of the state, who target audiences within the state. Yet, there

is no inherent reason that such forms of mobilization activities be limited to occurring within the

state. In fact, non-state political entrepreneurs engage in similar activities to actually create a

transnational constituency before then mobilizing it politically in order to use it to gain material

and political support for a movement.

The first step in transnational political mobilization is to activate a transnational

constituency from the mass of entangled and messy social networks that crisscross the

international system and that interpenetrate state societies and structures. This involves the

23 See, for example, the work of John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, 1982); Jack L. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (NewYork: W.W. Norton and Co, 2000); Jack L. Snyder and Karen Ballentine, “Nationalism and theMarketplace of Ideas,” International Security 21 (2) 1996: 5-40.



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creation of categories, discourses and symbols that can tie together dispersed social networks

under a single category, thereby converting them into activated and politicized networks which

can be drawn upon by political entrepreneurs in the pursuit of a political goal. Because of

ongoing processes of globalization, including increased international migration and the

liberalization of international trade and finance, there is a growing density and quantity of

potentially-mobilizable cross-border networks of relations, and therefore a growing potential for

quasi-independent transnational constituencies and political support bases to emerge at the

systemic-level, as opposed to simply the level of individual states.

Charles Tilly, referring to the work of Harrison White, notes that there are two

components to “groupness,” “collectivity” or “organizational structure.” The first consists of a

category – which contains “people all of whom recognize their common characteristic, and whom

everyone else recognizes as having that characteristic.” The second consists of networks of people

who are linked to one another. “A set of individuals is a group to the extent that it comprises both

a category and a network.”24 By working at the margins of the international system, in-between

existing institutionalized centers of power, political entrepreneurs have the opportunity to operate

quasi-independently to patch together new categories that can be used to mobilize people and

resources that either exist on the margins of states or are not fully mobilized within existing

power centers. Exile, migration and boundary-crossing from one political system to another all

serve as impetuses for the creation of new categories and discourses, since these activities expose

an individual to novel social and political conditions and thus allow for a reinterpretation of what

might have previously been viewed as a naturalized state of existence. Edward Said writes that

because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind andwhat is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never seesthings in isolation. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarilydraws on its counterpart in the old country. Intellectually, this means that

24 See Tilly 1978, pp. 62-63. White uses the term “catnet.”



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an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, thereforemaking them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light.25

In order to activate social networks and create transnational coalitions, therefore, it is necessary

for political entrepreneurs to draw on categories or political ideologies that can be used to frame

the experiences of those at the margins of the international system in new ways so as to stimulate

“the process by which a group goes from being a passive collection of individuals to an active

participant in [international] public life.”26

One of the most widespread categories or political ideologies used in modern times to

create a sense of “groupness” out of a “passive collection of individuals” has been nationalism.

Nationalism has been particularly successful as a mobilizing category due to what Benedict

Anderson describes as its modular character.” 27 The utility of nationalism as a political category

is that it combines a universalist imperative – the linking of cultural groupings to demarcated

territorial spaces governed by centralizing institutional configurations (the linking of the nation to

the state, to paraphrase Gellner) – with the flexibility to incorporate an infinitely wide range of

cultural, linguistic and symbolic artifacts as mobilizing instruments. Many of the great nationalist

movements have had their origins in exile. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, studied in London and

his first major political project was to found the Natal Indian Congress in South Africa in 1894,

which was established to fight discrimination of Indian traders, before becoming one of the

leading figures of Indian nationalism. Ho Chi Minh studied in France and was a founding

member of the French Communist Party before establishing his nationalist-communist

25 Edward Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals. In Edward Said, ed., Represenations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon, 1994).26 Tilly 1978, p. 69. On the process of framing more generally see Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: AnEssay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism(London: Verso, 1983), 4.



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revolutionary movement in Vietnam.28 In short, many historical instances of nationalist

mobilization have actually started as instances of transnational mobilization by non-state political

entrepreneurs engaged in the project of mounting a challenge to the political status quo.

National categories, of course, are not the only political categories that have been used by

political entrepreneurs to activate networks and engage in transnational mobilization. In 19th

century Europe, a variety of transnational leftist networks of exiles and émigrés proliferated,

including the “Fraternal Democrats” (composed of ‘natives of Great Britain, France, Germany,

Scandinavia, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary and other countries) and groups such as “Young

Europe” and the “Democratic Association for the Unification of All Countries.”29 Exile played a

particularly important role in stimulating the revolutions of 1848 in Europe:

Most political militants of the continental left were expatriates for some time,many for decades, congregating in the relatively few zones of refuge orasylum: France, Switzerland, to a lesser extent Britain and Belgium… Acommon fate and a common ideal bound these expatriates and travellerstogether. Most of them faced the same problems of poverty and policesurveillance, of illegal correspondence, espionage and the ubiquitous agent-provocateur…In the centres of refuge the emigres formed that provisional, butso often permanent community of exile while they planned the liberation ofmankind.”30

Contemporary Islamist movements have also been shaped by experiences of exile,

emigration and boundary-crossing. The transnational dimensions of Islamist organizing are not

new. During the Ottoman Empire, for example, translocal networks of Sufi organizations

represented an alternative power base to that of Ottoman officials and government networks. In

the 20th century, Arab nationalist movements were intertwined with Islamist mobilization.

Ayatollah Khomeini produced his writings and teachings from exile in France, before returning

triumphantly to revolutionary Iran in 1979. Exile has historically played a crucial role in the

28 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Vantage, 1989), 154-155. Fiona B.Adamson, Mobilizing at the Margins of the System: The Dynamics and Security Impacts of Transnational Mobilization by Non-State Actors. PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2002.29 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York: Vintage, 1996), 128-129.30 Ibid., 131.



17

emergence of new bases of political power in Afghanistan, and was especially the case during the

Soviet Occupation in which Pakistan became the place for the emergence of the Mujahidin

opposition.31 Political entrepreneurs associated with radicalized Islamist groups, some of which

have links with al-Qaeda, have used the ideology of radical Islamism to recruit disaffected

members of Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and elsewhere.

Transnational Resource Mobilization

The emergence of transnationally-organized political movements relies not just on

processes of identity formation and politicization, but also on the ability of political entrepreneurs

to generate material resources. Across a wide variety of cases of transnational mobilization, the

generation of material resources for a political struggle has included the following elements:

fundraising and taxation of activated transnational networks and political constituencies; informal

sources, such as unreported labor remittances, grey economy networks and international

organized crime; and other miscellaneous sources, such as states or individual donors, in addition

to the harnessing of skilled and unskilled labor in the form of recruits. 32 Just as ideologies and

political categories can be deployed by non-state political entrepreneurs as a means of activating

transnational networks in immigrant communities and mobilizing a transnational constituency, so

too can political entrepreneurs use their position as actors at the interstices of powerful

centralizing institutions as a means of harnessing transnational networks in order to capture or

generate material resources that are dispersed across various levels of the international system.

The harnessing and consolidation of these resources occurs primarily through informal channels,

personal networks and underground institutions, taking advantages of disjunctions and uneven

opportunity structures that exist across various levels of the international system.

One means by which political entrepreneurs harness dispersed resources and raise money

for their political projects is to directly tap into the material resource base available within the

31 See, for example, Barnett R. Rubin, “Afghanistan: Political Exiles in Search of a State,” in Yossi Shain,ed., Governments-in-Exile in Contemporary World Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 70-91.



18

transnational constituencies which they have activated and mobilized. Mobilized migration-based

or diaspora networks can be tapped through voluntary donations, taxes and/or coercion. This has

been a common strategy of transnational mobilization in the past and is of increasing significance

for understanding the dynamics of contemporary conflicts. Between 1916 and 1921, for example,

nearly 800,000 Irish Americans joined nationalist organizations, contributing over $10 million to

Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the cause of Irish independence from Great

Britain.33 In the early 1970s Irish-Americans supplied at least half of the Irish Republican Army’s

total budget via the organization Irish Northern Aid (Noraid), which was based in New York and

had ninety-two chapters in the U.S., with a paid membership of 5,000.34

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka has one of the most effective

contemporary transnational fundraising organizations. Tamil diaspora communities in the United

Kingdom, Canada and Australia are estimated to provide $1.5 million a month via donations and

informal taxes. The transnational fundraising techniques of al-Qaeda, which include the use of

informal networks, legitimate businesses, such as the honey trade, criminal enterprises, such as

the drug trade, and global fundraising via donations and skimming money off of NGOs and

charity organizations follow a common pattern of transnational resource mobilization that has

been used frequently by non-state actors mounting a violent challenge to the political status quo.

In addition to direct financial contributions by politicized networks in immigrant

communities, non-state political entrepreneurs tap into a number of other transnational flows as

sources of revenue for their political projects. These include labor remittances, transnational grey

economy networks, and transnational networks of organized crime. The transnational flow of

32 See Byman et al. 2001; Collier 2000.33 Kerby A. Miller, “Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish-American Ethnicity,” in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1990): 96-129.34 James Adams, The Financing of Terror (London: New English Library, 1986), 131-155. Raymond JamesRaymond, “The United States and Terrorism in Ireland, 1969-1981,” in Yonah Alexander and Alan O’Day,eds., Terrorism in Ireland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).



19

labor remittances is estimated to be $75 billion annually.35 Global revenues from transnational

organized crime have been estimated as being as high as $1 trillion annually – the size of the

entire US Federal Budget in 1993. Many organized crime networks define themselves on the

basis of ethnicity or nationality, a form of social capital that can be drawn upon to generate

resource-rich transnational economic networks, which in turn are drawn upon by political

entrepreneurs.36 Countless examples exist of the role that networks of organized crime play in

funding localized conflicts – the illegal trade in diamonds has played a key role in the conflict in

Sierra Leone; the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) relies heavily on drug

trafficking as a source of funding; the LTTE engages in human smuggling to raise money for its

political struggle.37

MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga note that, “Globalization is generally thought of in

terms of multinational companies and the changing relations between nation states and peoples as

they become enmeshed in the world economy, [but a study of transnational informal economic

networks] focuses instead on individuals operating at the interstices of these larger entities, and

on how they manage to take advantage of the way the world economy now works.”38

Transnational economic networks are usually also social networks, in that they rely heavily on

personal relations between members, rather than formal or impersonal organizational structures.

The opportunities for transnational mobilization of economic resources via organized crime or

informal structures have increased greatly with changes in communication and transportation

technologies, the emergence of a global financial infrastructure, and increased flows of licit trade

between states.

35 Philip Martin, “International Migration and Trade,” HCO Dissemination Notes No. 29 (Washington, DC:The World Bank, 1994.36 Cited in Manuel Castells, End of the Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 169 and James H.Mittelman and Robert Johnston, “The Globalization of Organized Crime, the Courtesan State, and theCorruption of Civil Society,” Global Governance, 5, 1 (Jan-March 1999): 103-126.37 Collier 2000; Byman et al. 2001.38 Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa Ganga, Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins ofthe Law (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 3.



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Transnational Organizational Expansion and Contention

Political participation has been viewed by political scientists as something that occurs

within the context of state institutions. Yet, there have always been other non-territorial

organizations that compete with the loyalties of individuals. Political entrepreneurs operating

transnationally build up cross-border organizational structures that command political loyalties

and mobilize resources. Groups such as the PKK, the FLN, the IRA, Hamas, and other

transnationally-organized non-state actors fall somewhere on the continuum of transnational

social movements, de-territorialized proto-states, and organized networks of terror and crime.

They are not just involved in violence, but also provide social services, such as welfare, policing,

education, employment, membership, identity and existential meanings – to constituencies that

are marginalized within the given political order.

An emerging literature on transnational networks and transnational relations has begun to

examine the logic of transnationally-organized networks and movements, such as those of human

rights organizations, environmental groups and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs).39

Yet, this literature has focused overwhelmingly on western-based transnational organizations that

espouse liberal political causes. It has largely ignored ethnic and religious organizations or other

transnationally-configured political movements that may resemble the organizational form of

other transnational networks, yet differ in their political goals and everyday activities.

Similar to international NGOs that are organized according to local branches and

networks, transnationally-organized non-state political movements are organized into branches

and cell-structures, depending heavily on existing social networks and personal ties. Such

organizations have long-existed, for example, in organized religions, whether it be the Catholic

church or Sufi orders during the Ottoman Empire. In many regards, such transnationally-

39 See, for example, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networksin International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) and Thomas Risse-Kappen, BringingTransnational Actors Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1995).



21

organized networks predate the state as a locus of political participation, loyalties and affinities.

Yet, contemporary political science has largely discounted participation in such organizations as

“political participation,” instead relegating such participation to the realm of “civil society.” This

misses the fact that many transnationally-organized movements operate as quasi-states in that

they have a geopolitical agenda, rather than simply a social or cultural agenda, and/or view

themselves as directly challenging the interests and identities of existing state elites in either the

home or host state. Thus, active participation in such organizations goes beyond membership in

civil society organizations, and can be viewed as a direct competitor to participation in existing

state institutions.

Domestic social movements engage in a variety of activities, such as framing, coalition-

building, lobbying and agenda-setting at the domestic level in order to make claims against state

authorities in their attempt to change the status quo. Transnational mobilization involves many of

these same activities, yet within a very different and unevenly institutionalized context. Like

domestic political entrepreneurs, transnational political entrepreneurs attempt to frame their

demands in ways that will mobilize political support, build coalitions, lobby powerful actors and

engage in agenda-setting activities that shift the terms of debate at various “sites of power”

around the international system.40 In short, political entrepreneurs who mobilize at the level of the

international system use many of the same techniques as domestic political entrepreneurs, yet the

lack of a centralized institutional infrastructure in the international system means that

entrepreneurs need to engage in strategies that will harness dispersed sources of political power,

for which network organizational structures are well-suited.

From a transnational political entrepreneur’s perspective, powerful states are important,

but not the only relevant actors in the international system. As a means of building a political

support base and engaging in agenda-setting activities, non-governmental organizations,



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international organizations and international media outlets are also sources of political power

which entrepreneurs use as platforms and/or sources of political support to engage in what Keck

and Sikkink refer to as “leverage politics.”41 Non-state actors engage in framing processes to

garner support from international organizations, international non-governmental actors, and the

public at large. Electronic media, e-mail, the internet, satellite television and web sites all play an

increasingly important role in this process.

Terror and Violence as Political Tools in the Process of Transnational Mobilization

Within the broader context of transnational mobilization in the pursuit of political goals,

strategies of terrorism and violence are one component of an overall agenda that is designed to

challenge the status quo. In addition to inflicting pain and damage, and weakening the existing

political order, terrorism, writes Hoffman, “is designed to create power where there is none or to

consolidate power where there is very little. Through the publicity generated by their violence,

terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence and power they otherwise lack to effect political

change on either a local or an international scale.”42 As a “weapon of the weak,” terrorism is

deployed by groups to gain media attention and visibility as the first step in gaining “name

recognition” within the international community.43

Even if acts of terrorism are universally

condemned, they can stimulate media coverage of an issue and provide an opening for the more

moderate organizations to ask the public to consider the legitimacy of the cause as separate from

the tactics with which the cause is being promoted. In this regard one must note that one of the

observable outcomes of 9/11 has indeed been a spotlight of media attention on the Middle East

and Islam, and an opening for more moderate voices to have their grievances at least publicly

considered and deliberated, to a much greater extent than had been possible prior to 9/11.

40 On the concept of sites of power in the international system, see David Held, Democracy and the GlobalOrder: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995),176-188.41 Keck and Sikkink 1998, 23-24.42 Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 4.



23

“Legitimacy” is an intangible and difficult to measure quality, which has been largely

ignored in the literature on international politics.44 Yet, it is a crucial concept for understanding

the dynamics of transnational mobilization by relatively powerless non-state actors. Gaining

widespread legitimacy in the international system as the sole representative of a people, state,

nation or cause can compensate for a lack of material resources and other conventional measures

of power. Gaining legitimacy and official recognition is both a goal in and of itself, as a well as a

means to an end. Attaining legitimacy on the international stage opens up new avenues for the

mobilization of resources, and offers actors new opportunities for attaining their political goals.

The intangible quality of legitimacy is what separates a terrorist from a freedom fighter, what can

transform a rebel into a statesperson, an opposition movement into a regime. It was not a change

in the material capacities of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) or

Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) that transformed the two from

outlaws into recognized leaders on the world stage, rather it was a change in their status from

illegitimate to legitimate actors.

Projecting Power from Below in Violent Conflicts:

The Use of Transnational Strategies by the FLN (1954-1962) and the PKK (1984-2000)

So far, I have argued that non-state actors who organize transnationally and employ

transnational strategies as means of generating power to mount a violent challenge to the political

status quo have been prevalent features of the international security environment, and that their

strategies are characterized by a general pattern that can be referred to as the “logic of

transnational mobilization.” In this section, I provide illustrations of how the logic of

transnational mobilization operates in practice, by process-tracing in two cases in which relatively

43 Brigitte Nacos, Terrorism and the Media: From the Iran Hostage Crisis to the Oklahoma City Bombing(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).44 See Yossi Shain, The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State (Middletown,CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989) for a discussion regarding competing claims of legitimacy bydissident exiles and governments.



24

weak non-state political entrepreneurs engaged in transnational mobilization as a means of

mounting a violent challenge to the political status quo.

The two cases I examine are transnational mobilization by the Front de Libération

National (FLN) during the Algerian War of Liberation (1954-1962) and the Kurdistan Workers’

Party (PKK) during the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey (1984-2000). The case studies were selected

as “critical cases” of the security impacts produced by processes of transnational mobilization,

and as a means of analyzing the quasi-independent role that non-state actors play in the

international system. In both cases, despite the very different time periods, relatively weak non-

state actors were able to organize transnationally in ways that challenged the interests and identity

of powerful states, including highly instutionalized and militarized states such as France,

Germany and Turkey. As such, the cases demonstrate the independent effect that non-state actors

can exert on the international security environment and illustrates that the configurations of

power that are generated by transnational mobilization cannot simply be reduced to the interests

and power embedded in state actors in the international system.

The Front de Libération National (FLN) and Strategies of Transnational Mobilization

Before there was an Algerian state, there were non-state political entrepreneurs and the

ideology of Algerian nationalism. The first articulation of Algerian nationalism as a political

ideology was by Algerian political entrepreneurs living in Paris in the 1920s, who mobilized a

constituency of support for Algerian nationalism within the Algerian immigrant community in

France. From the 1920s to the start of the Algerian War of Liberation in 1954, successive groups

led by Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj, including Etoile Nord Africaine (ENA), Parti du Peuple

Algérien (PPA), and Mouvement Pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD), were

active within the community of Algerian immigrant workers in France.

Positioned in marginal spaces between Algerian and French society, exiles, students and

immigrant workers were able to draw on the discursive opportunity structures that existed within

intellectual currents in Europe that addressed workers’ rights and anti-imperialism, and in turn



25

apply those ideas to the specific context of Algeria’s status as a French colony. Rather than

focusing narrowly on work conditions and workers’ rights within the metropole itself, political

entrepreneurs pursued their interests within the context of systemic level opportunities and

constraints. Political entrepreneurs within the Algerian immigrant community patched together a

version of Algerian nationalism that could speak to the larger geopolitical context as a means of

remedying structural inequalities – of which their presence in France was, in their minds, a

symptom.45 By drawing on discourses of equality and progress in France, Algerian nationalists

pointed to the unequal status of Algeria vis-à-vis France and viewed themselves as continuing the

French revolutionary tradition. They fought equally against discrimination of the Algerian worker

community by the French and assimilation of that community into French society, in their attempt

to foster an autonomous political constituency of revolutionary Algerian nationalists within

France.

The first independent Algerian nationalist organization was the Étoile Nord Africaine

(ENA), which was founded by a small group of Kabyle immigrant workers in Paris and which

rose to prominence under Messali Hadj. Messali Hadj was an archetypical political entrepreneur

who moved back and forth between France and Algeria, and headed up a variety of successive

nationalist organizations that are collectively referred to as the “Messalist” strand of Algerian

nationalism, considered now to be the main precursor to the Algerian nationalist movement that

culminated in the founding of the Front de Libération (FLN) in 1954.46 The organization patched

45 Benjamin Stora, Ils Venaient d’Algérie: L’Immigration Algérienne en France 1912-1992. (Paris: Fayard.1992): 39-60.46 The organizations headed up by Messali Hadj included the Étoile Nord-Africaine (ENA) which was

founded in 1924 and lasted until 1937. It was replaced by the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) in 1937, andorganization that was dissolved by the French government in 1939 and then went underground until it wasreestablished as the Mouvement Pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD) in 1946. TheMTLD existed until the outbreak of the Algerian War of Liberation in November 1954, after which it wasreplaced by Messali Hadj’s Mouvement Nationaliste Algérienne (MNA). The other strands of Algeriannationalism were the religious strand, as represented by the Association des Ulemas, founded in 1931 andthe liberal reformist strand as represented by Ferhat Abbas. See Alistair Horne. 1987. A Savage War ofPeace: Algeria 1954-1962. (London: MacMillan, 1987): 38-39; Janet Dorsch Zagoria, The Rise and Fall ofthe Movement of Messali Hadj in Algeria 1924-1954. PhD Thesis, Columbia University, New York.1973,pp. 1



26

together a version of Algerian nationalism that included elements from French communism, anti-

colonial nationalism, and Islam. The leaders of the movement targeted a transnational

constituency of Algerians both in Algeria and within other Algerian immigrant and exile

communities abroad. Several hundred copies of each issue of their political journal were sent to

Algeria, as well as several dozen to communities in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and the

United States.47 ENA cells were created in Charleroi and Liege, Belgium. In the early days,

however, the ENA had no base in Algeria other than through the influence that Algerian workers

in France had on their friends and family at home.48

In France, the ENA drew on the already-existing networks of immigrant cafes that

existed throughout Paris – as a way of tapping into the political potential of the Algerian

immigrant community in a way that was both low-cost and low-risk. The network of cafes

throughout Paris were the places in which Algerian immigrant opinion was shaped, and targeting

networks of cafés also held out the possibility of coopting the local elite – Algerian and other

North African café owners, who tended to be the best off financially and the most well-

connected. By 1935, the ENA had mobilized a network of “activist-café owners” (militants-

cafetiers) through its “politique des cafes” which made Algerian-owned cafes recruiting and

propaganda centers for the movement.49

Following the founding of the FLN, and the declaration of war against France on

November 1, 1954, Messali Hadj transformed his organization into the Mouvement Nationaliste

Algérien (MNA), which was to continue to command support amongst the Algerian immigrant

community during the first years of the war. In 1955, internal documents of the FLN

acknowledged that their organization had little popular support amongst Algerians in France, who

were overwhelmingly loyal to the MNA. 50 One of the challenges the FLN faced from the

47 Stora 1992, p. 29.48 Zagoria 1973, pp. 55-56.49 Stora 1992, pp. 29-34; Zagoria 1973, p. 213.50 Ali Haroun, La 7e Wilaya: La Guerre du FLN en France 1954-1962. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986)



27

beginning of the outbreak of the war was to mobilize the Algerian immigrant community in

France, which could provide the FLN with a source of both material support and political

leverage within France. At the FLN’s Soummam Conference in 1956, a decision was made to

drastically expand the FLN’s operations into metropolitan France. Mobilization within the

Algerian immigrant community in France was to be stepped up in order to draw it away from the

rival MNA. The immigrant community, it was envisioned, was to be used as a base from which to

mobilize French public opinion, with the goal being to win over the French Left to the cause of

Algerian independence.

The FLN branch established in France was called the Fédération de France du FLN

(FFFLN). A “Committee of Five” was established, which set up a vast organizational structure

throughout France (and Belgium), concentrated in the urban areas.51 Within a relatively short

period of time, the FLN, “through a combination of persuasion and terror, was able to organize

the majority of Algerians in France within the framework of the FFFLN.”52 Like Messali’s

organizations before it, the FFFLN distributed newspapers and other literature as tools of

mobilization, worked through personal contacts, and exploited the power base of Algerian

immigrant café owners in France.

A civil war within the immigrant community in metropolitan France emerged over which

group would control the political loyalties and the financial resources of this constituency.”53

Altogether, the battle for control over the Algerian immigrant community between the FLN and

the MNA resulted in the death of approximately 4,000 Algerian immigrants and the wounding of

10,000 more in metropolitan France during the war.54 The FLN’s seizure of control of the

51 The Committee of Five consisted of Omar Boudaoud, Abdelkrim Souici, Ali Haroun, Kaddour Ladlaniand Saïd Bouaziz.52 William B. Quandt, Revolution and Political Leadership: Algeria 1954-1968 (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1969), 121.53 John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1989), 166.54 MacMaster, Neil, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France 1900-62 (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1997), 195.



28

nationalist movement from the rival MNA in France, and its establishment of the FFFLN is

generally agreed to be one of the most important battles of the war of independence. The worst

clashes between the MNA and FLN in France were in 1960, as the FLN attempted to monopolize

its control of the immigrant population and firmly establish itself as the only representative of

Algerian nationalism in France.

It is estimated by several sources that by the end of 1960, 90% of the workers in France

were loyal to the FFFLN organization. Although the number of politically engaged members may

have been closer to 50% and Quandt argues that many immigrants may have simultaneously paid

dues to both the FLN and the MNA as a means of avoiding reprisals, the tactics of mobilization

and terror which had been employed by the FLN had been largely successful in winning over the

loyalties of the immigrant community.55 The main goal of the FFFLN was to collect money from

immigrant workers to finance the war, but in the process the FLN also set up an organizational

structure within France that performed a variety of functions. Headed up by the aforementioned

“Committee of Five,” the organization founded student and workers’ branches and established a

vast organizational structure throughout France.56 The FLN also set up organizational structures

in other European countries, with representatives in West Germany, Great Britain, Italy,

Switzerland and Belgium.57 The FFFLN provided a number of social services to the immigrant

population in France, setting up institutions parallel to the state within metropolitan areas of

France:

…the FFFLN provided judicial services to Algerians in France, paid monthlyallowances to the families of political prisoners, set up commissions ofhygiene to improve the living standards of the workers, and organized armedgroups to carry out police actions against the MNA or repressive landlords.58

55 Quandt 1969, pp. 121-122; Horne 1987, p. 237.56 Detailed descriptions of the organizational structure of the FFFLN can be found in Haroun 1986 and inAnnexes in Stora 1992.57 Horne 1987, p. 262; Irwin M. Wall, France, The United States, and the Algerian War (Berkeley:University of California, 2001), 168; Martha Crenshaw Hutchinson, Revolutionary Terrorism: The FLN in Algeria 1954-1962 (Stanford. Hoover Institution Press. 1978, 45).58 Quandt 1969, p. 122.



29

Stora describes how the FLN established a “contre-société” within France for the Algerian

immigrant community. The FLN was determined to “isolate Algerians from French society” by

developing their own infrastructure of social welfare.

Headed up largely by an intellectual elite, the FFFLN also actively made contact with the

French left and civil society groups within France in an attempt to influence public opinion in

favor of French decolonization. The newspaper organs of the FFFLN – the El Moudjahid , which

was founded by Ramdane Abane in 1956, and various other FLN publications, such as Résistance

algérienne encouraged the Algerian immigrant community to make alliances with left-wing

organizations in France and to “disseminate information, explain FLN objectives to the masses,

and make them aware of the meaning of the Algerian people’s struggle.”

Early Algerian nationalist movements, such as the ENA, raised money in France during

the 1920s-1950s by collecting membership dues, selling newspapers, receiving donations from

wealthy individuals, and through revenues collected at nationalist cafes and other establishments.

Extortion techniques were also a part of the fund-raising repertoire, with threats of boycotts

against Algerian merchants in France used as a means of obtaining financial contributions.59

According to one source, the PPA-MTLD raised 5,777,560 francs through member donations

alone in France during the two-month period of August and September 1952. Money raised by

selling brochures, vignettes with a map of Algeria, Messali Hadj’s picture and other items

reportedly brought in millions of francs by the end of 1952. Funds were also raised from “taxes”

of Algerian immigrant merchants, café owners and artists, under threat of boycott. By 1954 the

Messalists had raised 100 million francs for the movement.60

Throughout the Algerian War of Liberation, the FFFLN furnished 60% of the FLN’s

internal budget.61 The money raised in France by Algerian immigrant workers was used, among

other things, to buy arms, support the FLN’s diplomatic missions, and provide support for the

59 Zagoria 1973, pp. 96-97.60 Zagoria 1973, pp. 135-136.



30

families of rebels that were killed or wounded.62 The FFFLN had an extremely well-organized

system of revenue collection from the Algerian immigrant community in France. Algerians in

France were “taxed” on a sliding scale, of 500 francs per month for students, 3000-4000 francs

per month for workers, and 50,000 francs or more for shopkeepers. For the average wage earned

by Algerian workers at the time, these were relatively high amounts. The FFFLN claimed in 1961

to be raising anywhere from 600 million to 2 billion francs ($4 million) per month from the

immigrant community in France, of which at least 450 million francs ($900,000) a month went to

the FLN’s provisionary government apparatus.63 While the total money raised by the FLN in

France can only be estimated (and estimates vary widely), French police records exist which

record the amount of money “for the North African rebellion” that was seized by the police

between 1956 and 1962. The amounts ranged from 105,879 Francs in 1956 to over 3 million

francs within a single one-month period during 1962. Between 1956-1962 the total amount seized

by the police was over 11,000,000 francs. The assumption is that this represented only a very

small fraction of the total money that was being raised and used to support activities relating to

the conflict.64

In order to facilitate the internationalization of the Algerian War, the founders of the FLN

created an organizational structure comprised of “internalists” and “externalists.” The overall

strategy of internationalization rested on the basic assumption “that military means would not be

sufficient to bring France to the negotiating table on terms favorable to the FLN.”65 The first task

of the external committee of the FLN was to “defeat French efforts to define Algeria as an

internal affair and to take the FLN’s case to the United Nations. By 1956 Algeria was formally on

the agenda of the UN General Assembly:

61 Belloula 1965, p. 99, cited in Hutchinson, p. 156, fn. 16.62 Stora 1992, p. 16463 Quandt 1969, p. 122; Horne 1987, p. 237.64 Stora 1992, p. 1992.65 Joan Gillespie, Algeria: Rebellion and Revolution (London: Ernest Benn, 1960), 113.



31

The FLN’s growing visibility and consideration in international forums such asthe Bandung Conference and Algeria’s emergence as an international issue in theUnited Nations General Assembly and the United States Senate menaced themétropole with diplomatic alienation and isolation, especially among Arab andemerging Third World nations.”66

The FLN’s own Soummam Congress in 1956 put forth a platform that outlined a specific strategy

for the internationalization of the Algerian conflict. The FLN was to work for the international

political isolation of France, and was to establish a permanent office at the United Nations and in

the United States, as well as one in Asia. “Mobile delegations” were to be set up in various world

capitals, and these delegations would also travel to international events, such as “international

cultural, student and trade-union meetings.” By October 1956, the FLN had established eight

international bureaus – in Cairo, Damascus, Tunis, Beirut, Baghdad, Karachi, Djakarta and New

York.67

Whereas the FLN was defeated militarily by 1957, it was the FLN’s political campaign

on the international stage, and within France during the period of 1957-1962 that led to its

ultimate victory and to Algerian independence. FLN offensives, general strikes, and other

demonstrations in Algeria were timed to occur at periods when the UN General Assembly was

scheduled to convene or discuss the conflict. Hoffman notes that in January 1957 when the FLN

began a campaign of urban terrorism in Algeria (later known as the ‘Battle of Algiers’), it was

“deliberately choreographed to coincide with the General Assembly’s annual opening session.

The FLN communiqué announcing the strike that accompanied the new terrorist offensive

candidly admitted to this timing, announcing its desire to ‘bestow an incontestable authority upon

our delegates at the United Nations in order to convince those rare diplomats still hesitant or

possessing illusions about France’s liberal policy.”68 “[T]he battle of Algiers brought world

attention to the Algerian revolution in a striking way. In this, the brutality involved in placing

66 Phillip C. Naylor, France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation (Gainesville,FL: University of Florida Press, 2000), 27.67 Michael Connelly, “Rethinking the Cold War and Decolonization: The Grand Strategy of the AlgerianWar of Independence,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 33, 2 (2001), 227.



32

bombs in public places where their explosion inevitably claimed innocent victims seems to have

been outweighed by revised estimates of the power of the FLN.”69

The FLN was from the start aware of the importance of using international media outlets

as a means of achieving its political goals, and focused its terrorism campaign in Algeria on urban

areas and highly visible targets. The FLN regarded their campaign with the international media to

be one of the most successful aspects of their strategy in the early years. By its own assessment in

1956 the FLN argued that:

…the world Press, notably the American Press, is pitilessly condemningwar crimes, more particularly by the Legion and the paratroopers,genocide of the aged, women, children, the massacre of intellectuals andof innocent civilians, torture of political prisoners, multiplication of

concentration camps, execution of hostages. It is demanding of Frenchcolonialism the solemn recognition of the right of the Algerian people tofree self-determination.70

Connelly notes that “radio and television formats rewarded the FLN for creating controversy and

providing combat footage.” American radio and TV outlets interviewed FLN representatives and

showed footage supposedly taken with hand-held cameras by the FLN fighters in Algeria. France

accused the FLN of staging scenes for the international media and concocting staged “raids” for

journalists, yet whether staged or not, the imagery was more effective than France’s attempts to

deflect attention from the conflict by emphasizing their economic development programs in the

region.71

The FLN mission in New York…put out a continuous barrage of pamphletsand press releases, organized public meetings, and was quite effective inmobilizing American opinion in favor of the cause of Algerian independence.The rebels played on American anti-colonialism and evoked outrage by theiraccounts of the French use of torture in the war. They reveled in dubiousanalogies between their struggle and the American war of independence. InNew York the FLN was particularly active in the United Nations and wonover international opinion in favor of its cause, infuriating the French.72

68 Hoffman 1998, pp. 56-57.69 Gillespie 1960, p. 146.70 Gillespie 1960, p. 140.71 Connelly 2001, p. 230.



33

In 1958, the FLN created a provisionary government in exile, which was the external

dimension of the strategy that the FLN had used within Algeria to “establish a State within a

State, performing for the Algerians, in secret or in the open in liberated areas, all of the functions

previously performed by the French administration.”73 The government was immediately

recognized by several Middle Eastern and Asian states – fourteen states in all within a few days

of announcing the formation of a provisionary government. Two years later, a major diplomatic

victory was achieved by the FLN in 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev met with the Algerian

“Foreign Minister in exile” and gave the government the official recognition of the Soviet

Union.74 The Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA) actively engaged

itself in the task of internationalizing the conflict on all fronts:

With a Ministry of Armaments dealing with everyone from German armsdealers to Communist China, and a Ministry of General Liaisons runningbagmen and agents across Europe and the Middle East, nothing was“foreign” to the new government. Indeed, in 1960 even the “minister of theInterior,”…concluded that “each one of our agencies, military, political,diplomatic, social, associational or otherwise should act in its areaaccording to the same objective: INTERNATIONALIZATION .” [emphasisin original GPRA memo]… The GPRA was like a state turned inside out.75

Within the context of their strategy of internationalization, Algerian leaders were able to

use even Cold War rivalries to their advantage. Most analysts view Cold War rivalries as

imposing “global priorities regardless of local context,” however, as Connelly argues,

“comparatively little attention has been paid to how anti-colonial nationalists…approached the

superpower rivalry.”76 For entrepreneurial actors, the Cold War provided as much of an

opportunity as a threat. The “externals” of the FLN put great effort into using the global

geopolitical context to their own advantage. In the early stages of the war, Ben Bella and Aït

Ahmed courted U.S. diplomats and made the argument that the French handling of the Algeria

72 Wall 2001, p. 80.73 Gillespie 1960, p. 106.74 Connelly 2001, p. 221.75 Connelly 2001, p. 222.



34

crisis was dangerous to U.S. interests because it shifted French forces from NATO to Algeria.77

The leaders of the FLN were careful not to appear to take sides in the Cold War, charting an

independent course by playing off the fears of each superpower against each other.78

During 1961 French police killed hundreds of Algerians during a demonstration in Paris.

As the domestic situation in France worsened, the pieds-noirs organizations became more

radicalized – even attempting assassinations of French intellectuals in Paris, such as Sartre, who

supported the FLN. Such actions prompted a massive demonstration of 10,000 in Paris in early

1962 against the pieds-noirs terrorist organization, the OAS, in which eight were killed. The

ensuing funeral procession drew a crowd of half a million. France was on the verge of civil war at

this point. The Evian Accords, which brought an end to the war and granted Algeria its

independence, were signed between France and the FLN just weeks later.79

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Strategies of Transnational Mobilization

In his provocatively titled article, “How Turks Became Kurds, Not Germans,” sociologist

Claus Leggewie notes that “there have always been Kurds among the Turkish “guest workers”

and refugees, but most of them did not discover their “Kurdishness” until they came to Europe.”80

Similarly, van Bruinessen argues, “Among the Turkish “Gastarbeiter” who had migrated to

western Europe since the late 1950s, there were many who ‘discovered,’ in the course of the past

few decades, that they were not Turks but Kurds.”81 Many who now identify themselves as Kurds

in Europe may have migrated to Germany or other countries as self-identified Turks, grew up

speaking Turkish, not Kurdish, or had parents who came to Germany as labor migrants in the

1960s and fully identifying themselves as secular and Kemalist Turks.

76 Connelly 2001, p. 221.77 Connelly 2001, p. 225.78 Wall 2001, p. 15.79 Horne 1987, pp. 502-504.80 Claus Leggewie, “How Turks Became Kurds, not Germans,” Dissent 43: 79 -83.1996, p. 79.81

Martin van Bruinessen,. 1998. Shifting National and Ethnic Identities: The Kurds in Turkey and theEuropean Diaspora. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 18 (1) 1998: 44-45.



35

The politicization of a Kurdish identity and the development of a Kurdish nationalist

movement within the “Turkish” immigrant community in Germany occurred largely during the

1980s and the 1990s, due to the efforts of a group of Kurdish political entrepreneurs who

emigrated from Turkey to Germany and other European countries following the 1980 military

coup. The Kurdish political exiles and intellectuals who arrived in Germany in the late 1970s and

1980s were able to make use of political freedoms in Western Europe to develop a Kurdish

cultural and intellectual life in Western Europe, to an extent that had not been politically possible

in Turkey. It was possible, for example, to print and distribute Kurdish language materials and

literature, and gradually develop and standardize a written version of Kurdish (Northern

Kurmanci dialect), all of which was illegal in Turkey during the 1980s. Kurdish intellectuals and

activists made full use of their rights and freedoms to publish materials in the Kurdish language,

establishing numerous Kurdish newspapers in Europe. There are also at least 25 Kurdish

publishing houses based in Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere.82 In Sweden alone,

approximately 40-50 Kurdish language books are published every year, with about half of these

in the Kurmanci dialect. One estimate suggests that at least 268 books have been published in

Kurmanci in Sweden since 1974.83

A variety of Kurdish groups and individuals have been active in promoting a Kurdish

national identity within Germany and other states in Western Europe, yet it was the Kurdistan

Workers’ Party (PKK) that was the most actively involved in mobilizing immigrant communities

in Europe. The majority of Kurdish cultural associations, information centers, and publications

have been somehow associated with or controlled by European branches of the PKK. The PKK’s

monopolization of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Europe began in the early 1980s, when

Kurdish political entrepreneurs associated with the PKK were among the activists who gained

82 Nicole F. Watts, “Institutionalizing Virtual Kurdistan West: Pro-Kurdish Politics in Western Europe,” inStates and Societies and the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practice, edited by Joel Migdal,forthcoming.83 Bruinessen 1998, p. 46 and pp. 51-52, fn. 13.



36

political asylum in Germany following the military coup. Most of the Kurdish leadership in

Germany at the time was already connected in some way to the 1970 student networks via

personal contacts, and there was thus an established link between Kurdish activists in Germany

and the PKK leadership that operated out of Syria and southeastern Turkey.84 Members of this

group of exiles in Europe maintained contacts with networks of PKK members who had fled to

Syria and Lebanon, and who had begun to take up arms against the Turkish state from across the

border. Exiles in Germany and other countries in Europe set out to build a pan-European

counterpart to the PKK’s political wing, the ERNK, beginning in 1985, and successfully created a

transnational structure that is organized as a network of local cells that spans the European

continent and beyond.85 The Kurdish movement, writes van Bruinessen, became “an almost

invisible network spread across the globe.”86

The ERNK organizational structure within Western Europe was headed up by a European

Central Committee, which had been very closely connected with the Central Committee under the

leadership of Abdullah Öcalan that, until 1999, was based in Damascus, Syria. According to

Stein, several members of the European Central Committee also sat simultaneously on the

ERNK’s Central Committee in Damascus.87

The European Central Committee has had

headquarters in Cologne, Germany and Brussels, Belgium, with national organizations in

Germany, Belgium, France, Holland, England, Switzerland, Italy and the Scandinavian

countries.88 Throughout the mid-1980s to early 1990s the political wing of the PKK operated

84

Henri J. Barkey and Graham E. Fuller. Turkey’s Kurdish Question (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.1998), 32.85 Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz. Die Arbeiterpartei Kurdistans (PKK) – Strukturen, Ziele, Aktivitaeten (Cologne: Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz, 1996), 7.86 Martin van Bruinessen, “Shifting National and Ethnic Identities: The Kurds in Turkey and Europe,”Paper prepared for presentation at the International Symposium, “Redefining the Nation, State andCitizen,” Marmara University, Istanbul, March 28-29 1996, 14.87 Gottfried Stein, Endkampf um Kurdistan? Die PKK, die Turkei und Deutschland (Muenchen: BonnAktuell, 1994), 86.88 Stein 1994, p. 91; Barkey and Fuller 1998, p. 38; Helfer 1988, p. 20.



37

legally in most of Europe, with its above-ground cultural, social and political organizations

existing side-by-side with a parallel covert and tightly organized underground structure.89

The PKK was not the only Kurdish group active in Europe. Kurdish organizations with

links to Kurdish Social Democrat movements in Turkey who eschew political violence also

existed in Germany, largely under the guise of the umbrella organization KOMKAR, which

views itself as working simultaneously for the rights of Kurdish immigrants within Germany and

for an improvement of the political situation of Kurds within Turkey. In addition, there have also

been smaller Kurdish organizations, such as PPKK/Hevkar and KIP/Kurdische Gemeinde in

Deutschland.90 There have also been organized groups of Kurds who try to avoid contact with any

Kurdish political organizations. Generally, however, the PKK was successful in acquiring a

relative monopoly over the segment of the “Turkish” immigrant community that now identifies as

“Kurdish.” This was accomplished through a combination of successful mobilization and

propaganda, the creation or cooptation of an extensive organizational structure, and high levels of

coercion that are used to extract material resources from the immigrant community and to

intimidate and or even eliminate the leadership of other Kurdish organizations.

The PKK has not hesitated to use violence to suppress its rivals within Europe, as well as

in Turkey. Just as the PKK targeted its rivals in Turkey, by assassinating Kurdish feudal elite, the

PKK has in the past assassinated a number of KOMKAR officials in Germany and other

European states, and regularly disrupts KOMKAR events. KOMKAR organizers in Germany

claim that they require more German police protection to defend themselves against violent

attacks from the PKK than from Turkish right-wing nationalist gangs (the Grey Wolves) or

89 Stein 1994, p. 86.90 Faist 2000, p. 219.



38

German neo-Nazi groups.91 The PKK has also been particularly ruthless in the past with members

of the organization that leave or denounce the party line.92

PKK affiliates in Germany were “organized in a dense web of workers’ organizations,

sports clubs, cultural centers and migrants’ organizations.”93 The organizational structure

included student groups, womens’ organizations and youth clubs.94 The PKK organized cultural

festivals, political demonstrations, Kurdish language courses, immigrant support groups, youth

camps and parents’ clubs. Political demonstrations and cultural festivals organized by the PKK in

Germany regularly attracted crowds of between 50,000 and 70,000, and were filmed and

converted into videotapes that are circulated throughout the diaspora.95 PKK- operated publishing

houses and media outlets were geared towards the politicization of the immigrant community in

Germany and the larger German public. The PKK published a daily Turkish language newspaper

Özgür Politika that reports on events in Turkey and in the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. The

political wing of the PKK, the ERNK, also published a broad spectrum of literature in German

and other European languages, such as the monthly Kurdistan Report, as well as numerous

reports and research papers on selected topics.96

Until recently, the PKK continued to dominate Kurdish community organizations

throughout Germany and Europe under the guise of the organization YEK-KOM – Federation of

Kurdish Organizations in Germany, and to control a network of student, parent, youth and

lawyers’ organizations. The PKK was particularly active in raising money within immigrant

91 Author’s interviews with Ferman Duwan and Zelal Ciwan (pseudonyms), Kurdistan Kultur- undHilfsverein e.V., Berlin, June 2000.92 An example is the 1984 assassination of Enver Ata in Uppsala, Sweden, who was a prominent Kurdish

intellectual and PKK functionary. He was assassinated by a member of a PKK organization in Cologne,Germany. See Hans-Ulrich, Helfer Arbeiterpartei Kurdistans (PKK) – Organisation – Aktivitaeten in derSchweiz (Zurich: Presdok, 1988).93 Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 219.94 Stein 1994, pp. 96-98.95 Paul J. White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement inTurkey (London: Zed Books. 2001), 175.96 The Kurdistan Report is also published in Russia, Finland, Cyprus, Canada, the US and Australia. SeeWhite 2001, p. 202, fn. 34.



39

communities in Germany, where it harnessed material resources from the community by

collecting voluntary donations and “taxes” of up to 20% of individual salaries and business

profits. It also relied on extortion and protection money, business investments, criminal activity

and the drug trade as other sources of revenue. 97

The German government estimated that the PKK collected between DM 30 and DM 50

million annually via donations and racketeering from the Kurdish community in Germany during

the 1990s – over DM 1.5 million annually in the city of Berlin alone.98 Rates of “donations” or

“taxes” are set according to one’s financial means and status, with the unemployed and asylum

seekers expected to pay DM 30-50 per month; gainfully employed members of the community

DM 100-300 per month, and rates of up to DM 3000 a month for successful business owners.99 In

the early days of the conflict, money collected in Europe was reportedly transferred first to a PKK

office in Sweden, where it was consolidated from networks across Europe and transferred directly

to Abdullah Öcalan at his headquarters in Damascus. The official ban of the PKK in Germany in

1993 led to an increase rather than decrease in the revenues that it collected in Germany.100 In

addition to collecting money from immigrant communities in Germany, the PKK also actively

collected revenues in a number of other European countries. British intelligence sources report

that the PKK collected 2.5 million British Pounds in 1993 from immigrants and businesses in

England.101

97

Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 8, 1997, p. 6.98Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz 1996, p. 6; Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz Berlin 1994; DerSpiegel, February 22, 1999, p. 3599 “Hilflos vor dem Terror,” Der Spiegel, 13, 1996, pp. 35-38.100 Rohan Gunaratna, “Dynamics of Contemporary Terrorist and Guerrilla Campaigns: International andDomestic Factors Facilitating and Inhibiting PKK, LTTE, ETA, FARC, GIA and MTA to Escalate and De-escalate Violence. Paper prepared for the workshop, “Trajectories of Terrorist Violence in Europe,” at theMinda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, March 9-11, 2001, 13-14.101 Turkish Democracy Foundation, Fact Book on PKK Terrorism (Ankara: Turkish DemocracyFoundation, 1997), 47.



40

Money raised by the PKK in Europe from donations and criminal activities has in the past

been used to purchase arms originating from Germany, Iran and Iraq.102 In addition to purchasing

arms and funding the PKK’s extensive organizational structure, including sophisticated printing

and distribution networks, the Kurdish diaspora in Western Europe has been a source of PKK

recruits for the conflict in the southeast. Figures on the number of recruits that originate from

Western Europe are difficult to verify, but estimates from interviews put the number at 4,000 to

5,000 recruits from Western Europe. These recruits take up positions as guerrilla fighters

following a period of training in Lebanon, and others work as “organizers, diplomats, technicians

of various sorts.”103 Throughout the history of the conflict, a number of Germans have also joined

the armed conflict, including a contingent of German women.104

The PKK engaged in processes of transnational mobilization that take advantage of its

position as a relatively weak non-state actor within an unevenly institutionalized international

system. This involved a dual strategy that simultaneously exploited the opportunities provided by

institutional voids and weaknesses that existed in the international system, as well as the

opportunities that were available in strongly institutionalized regions of the international system.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, this dual strategy consisted of pursuing an armed conflict in

southeastern Turkey, in which institutional voids in Lebanon and Syria and, following the Gulf

War, Northern Iraq, were used as bases from which to train guerrillas and plan incursions into

southeastern Turkey. At the same time, the resources and opportunities provided by institutions in

Western Europe were drawn upon by political entrepreneurs and used to strengthen and codify a

Kurdish identity, build a coherent organizational structure, and mobilize constituencies within

immigrant communities in Western Europe. Constituencies in Europe had access to resources that

102 Imset G. Ismet, The PKK: A Report on Separatist Violence in Turkey (Ankara: Turkish Daily News,1991), 160.103 Interview with Muhammed Fauzi, Arkada Kitabevi, Kreuzberg, Berlin, June 29, 2000. Bruinessen1998, p. 45.



41

provided much-needed funding for the conflict in the southeastern region of Turkey, as well as

access to institutions through which they could engage in political activities and channel demands

in ways that would call into question the legitimacy of the Turkish state, and increase the

visibility and legitimacy of the PKK as the representative of Turkey’s Kurdish population.

One of the key strategies of Kurdish political entrepreneurs in Europe has been to ensure

that “Turkey’s ‘Kurdish Problem’” is viewed not simply as a problem that is internal to Turkey,

but is defined instead as an international, or more specifically, a European problem. To this end,

Kurdish nationalists have pursued a strategy of transnational mobilization designed to place the

Kurdish issue on the European political agenda at both the national and regional levels. Through a

combination of agenda-setting, framing, lobbying, coalition-building and tactical political

violence, they have been largely successful in raising public awareness of the Kurdish issue in

Europe, making the human rights practices of Turkey more generally, and the Kurdish issue in

particular, one of the central focuses of discussions surrounding Turkey’s accession to the

European Union.

Activities designed to raise public awareness of the Kurdish conflict, and which engage in

agenda-setting activities fall into two sets of categories. One is a set of “contentious politics” or

“confrontational strategies,” which include mass demonstrations, and various other activities,

such as blocking German freeways, taking over official buildings or symbolic sites, self-

immolation, and hunger strikes. On the most extreme end of the spectrum, the PKK has issued

threats against German tourists in Turkey and has threatened suicide bombing campaigns within

Germany. On the more mundane level, posters, placards and graffiti are used as a means of

ensuring that the Kurdish conflict in Turkey becomes partially embedded within the fabric of

everyday life in Germany and other European states.

104 Estimates put the number of German women participants in the armed conflict at approximately 100.For a German woman’s account of her participation in the armed conflict see Carla Solina, Der Weg in die Berge: Eine Frau bei der Kurdischen Befreiungsbewegung (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1996).



42

One of the strategies used by Kurdish nationalist political entrepreneurs has been to

establish an embryonic government-in-exile. A Kurdistan Parliament-in Exile was established in

late 1994, and has met intermittently in cities throughout Europe since that time. In 1999 it

regrouped as the Kurdish National Congress. Largely dominated by the PKK, and its political

wing, the ERNK, its members are elected from transnational constituencies and its activities

include holding press-conferences, publishing literature on the Kurdish issue, and dispatching

delegations to third party states, and to international organizations, such as the United Nations,

European Parliament, Council of Europe and the European Committee. The parliament in 1995

supported the PKK as a Kurdish liberation organization, arguing that it was “what the FLN was

for the Algerians and the ANC for South Africans.”105 During the mid-1990s its meetings

attracted representatives from various human rights groups and NGOs, and several left-wing

parties, such as the German Green Party. 106 Members of the KNC have established ties with

national parliaments in England, Poland, Italy and Spain.107 Houston writes, “The establishment

of a Kurdish Parliament-in-Exile signals the building up of a state in absentia, a state with no

territory to manage (no liberated zones) except, with the aid of Med TV, the private sphere of the

home.”108

Watts points out that Kurdish representatives “have acquired the characteristics and a

status approximating that of diplomats, parliamentarians and government officials.”109 While

PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan performed the function of a charismatic leader around which the

Kurdish immigrant community in Western Europe has mobilized, other Kurdish political

entrepreneurs have acted as “ambassadors” to European organizations. Kendal Nezan, the head of

the Institut Kurde de Paris, and other representatives of the organization have, for example, been

105 Watts 2001, p. 24.106 Kurdistan Parliament in Exile, Kurdistan Parliament in Exile, April 12-16, 1995, The Hague, Netherlands (Brussels: Kurdistan Parliament in Exile, 1995).107 Watts 2001, p. 25.108 Christopher Houston, Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 128.109 Watts 2001, p. 21.



43

consulted prior to European Parliament and Council votes concerning Turkey and have appeared

on French television to discuss the issue of Kurdish human rights with then Turkish President

Süleyman Demirel.110

The arrest of the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan set off waves of violent protests

throughout Europe and the rest of the world. In Berlin, three Kurdish students were shot and

killed by Israeli guards, during an attempt by hundreds of Kurdish protestors to storm the Israeli

consulate. The arrest of Öcalan was clearly a major defeat for the PKK. At the same time,

however, the coordinated demonstrations, and political discussion surrounding Öcalan’s quest for

political asylum served to publicize the Kurdish issue and keep it on the front pages of European

newspapers. Öcalan’s arrest and its aftermath gained, for the first time, headline media coverage

of the Kurdish issue in Turkey in the American press. Romano writes, “thanks to new

communication technologies and globalization, Kurdish nationalists have been able to turn what

could be considered a humiliating defeat into a catalyzing event promoting Kurdish

nationalism.”111 Indeed, the arrest of Öcalan immediately raised concerns among European

leaders that his execution would set off an uncontrollable wave of violence across Europe. Within

days after Öcalan’s arrest, German Chancellor Schroeder had already contacted the Turkish

regime in Ankara to tell it that he expected that the death penalty, “in accordance with the

practice in all European Union member states, would not be inflicted.”112

Only a month after the wave of violent protests had hit Europe in response to Öcalan’s

arrest, NATO initiated its bombing campaign in the Kosovo conflict, which lasted from March

1999-June 1999. Throughout this period, both Kurdish groups and leftist political parties in

Europe specifically made comparisons between the situation of the Kurds in Turkey and that of

110 Watts 2001, p. 24.111 David Romano, “Modern Communications Technology in Ethnic Nationalist Hands: The Case of theKurds.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 35, 2, 2002.112 Der Spiegel, February 22, 1999, p. 35.



44

Kosovars in Yugoslavia.113 In December of 1999, following lobbying by German Chancellor

Schroeder and others across Europe, and a dramatic change in the political orientation of Greece

toward Turkey, the European Union officially accepted Turkey as a candidate for membership in

the European Union – setting out a course for internal reform within Turkey, particularly in the

area of human rights and minority protection.

Implications of a Political Mobilization Approach for Theory and Policy

A political mobilization perspective on the use of violence and force by non-state actors

who seek to challenge the political status quo suggests a “bottom-up” perspective on non-state

actors and international security, which can be contrasted with the “top-down” approaches that

characterize most of IR theory. A perspective that focuses on the strategies that relatively weak

non-state actors use during the process of mounting a violent challenge to the political status quo

by mobilizing at “the margins of the international system” has a number of advantages over

existing systemic level perspectives on non-state actors and international security. For one, it adds

a political dimension to our understanding of the uses of violence and force by non-state actors,

as opposed to isolating political dimensions from the military and regulatory dimensions of the

problem, which are the policy responses that emerge, respectively, from Realist and Liberal

perspectives on non-state actors and international security.114

More importantly, however, a political mobilization perspective provides us a means of

studying the process by which new political actors emerge in the international system. The study

of international politics of late has increasingly been modeled as a series of strategic interactions

113 A collection of articles from the international press under the title “Kurds vs. Albanians” is found on the

PKK’s web site at http://www.kurdstruggle.org/kosovo/index.html. During a public lecture in Berlin duringthe NATO bombing campaign, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana answered a question from theaudience regarding the parallels between the situation of the Kurds in Turkey and the Kosovars inYugoslavia by responding. “As you know, Turkey is a member of the NATO alliance, therefore, as youknow, I cannot comment.”114 The Realist perspective attempts to treat a security threat from a non-state actor as similar to a securitythreat emanating from the state – thus resulting in a framework that favors military responses. A Liberalperspective, on the other hand, attempts to isolate violence and terrorism from their political origins,preferring to treat them as “global problems” that can be dealt with in an apolitical manner through



45

between unitary actors. In the Algerian and Kurdish cases above, however, half of the story may

indeed be about strategic interaction between actors, but the other half of the story is about a

deeper process – the emergence of new actors on the international stage, the articulation of new

grievances and political claims outside of existing institutional frameworks, and the implications

of this for regional and international security. A political mobilization perspective helps to

increase our understanding of this process, and the range of possibilities that might exist for

devising institutionalized channels for the articulation of political claims arising out of such

processes.

The international system does not have an infrastructure available to non-state actors to

effectively channel political demands and grievances, other than through states and the

representatives of states. Using Huntington’s terms to describe non-state sources of political

instability, it could be argued that the process of “modernization” has outpaced the process of

“institutionalization” at the level of the international system.115 If the strengthening of effective

intelligence collection, coordination, policing and surveillance is the only form of

institutionalization that occurs at the global level as a long-term response to terrorism, the result

will be a gross imbalance. It is useful therefore to at least think in terms of the types of political

institutions that could be used to address this broader issue over the long term.

One example of the types of political institutions that deserve further study can be

derived from the Kurdish case study, in which the robust institutionalization that is accompanying

the process of European Union enlargement appears to be providing new domestic and regional

institutional channels for articulating political demands in ways that de-legitimize and offer

alternatives to strategies of violence and terror as political tools for articulating grievances. The

larger process of regional integration and complex institutionalization has opened a number of

cooperative ventures between states, such as international regimes, institutions and other regulatoryresponses.115 Samuel P. Huntington,Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press,1968).



new institutional channels, such as the European Court of Human Rights, which political

entrepreneurs use to articulate grievances and engage in claims-making against the Turkish state,

instead of using strategies of violence. 116 While other factors have also been significant in this

process, the role that new regional and domestic channels cannot be underestimated.117 The lifting

of many restrictions on Kurdish expression in Turkey, and the recent victory of the moderate

Islamist Justice and Development Party, which ran on a pro-European and pro-secular platform

provide other examples of the moderating effect that the complex institutional developments are

having.

Of course, the EU is a unique case in many respects, and it is valid to ask to what extent

aspects of the model can be applied to other regions. But as a general model of the role that

complex institutionalization might play in addressing the political dimensions of transnational

mobilization by non-state actors, such an approach deserves closer study. For researchers in

international relations and international security, such an approach would involve thinking

outside the conceptual box imposed by “states in anarchy” and beginning to think instead of the

factors that create political stability at the domestic level – such as legitimacy, robustness of

institutions, and avenues for democratic participation – and what such factors might look like

transposed to the level of the international system.

116 The Kurdish Human Rights Project in London, for example, has submitted more than 100 cases to theEuropean Commission and European Court of Human Rights, and engages in monitoring of complianceand the effects of Court decisions on Turkish legislation and practice. See their web site at www.khrp.org.The Court is also being used as a venue by Islamist women for mounting a legal challenge to the Turkishbanning of headscarves in universities and other public institutions.117 In interviews that I conducted in Germany during 1999 2000 members of the PKK indicated that the

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Nonstate Actors Mobilization Is