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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.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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“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.
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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
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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
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
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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).
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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