Emergent Conversation 24

This essay is part of the series Kurdistan(s): Repression, Resistance, and the Fight for Survival,
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 24

By Jan Yasin Sunca

This essay is dedicated to the two young men who robbed me.

Introduction

It was around midnight. I was reflecting on our long conversation with some comrades, on my way home from La Trocha-la Casa de la Paz in Bogotá, a cultural centre collectively run by former members of FARC-EP, where they sell beer brewed by their demobilized comrades along with empanadas, and display music, posters, and books on revolution and peace. We had discussed extensively the absence of peace and safety, oligarchic domination, and various mobilizations against structural violence in Colombia. I did not yet realize I was about to experience violence of a sort. I did precisely what I should not do—walking alone through a dark alley—and was robbed by two young men, who pointed a gun at me and quickly fled on their motorbike. In the hours afterward, occupied with cancelling my credit cards and changing passwords, my initial thought was that the police should have been there to protect me, otherwise what was their purpose?

In the days that followed, this reaction made me reflect deeply on my tacit legitimation of the state and its agents of violence, despite proudly identifying with anarchist, anti-state politics. My anarchism was first inspired by Abdullah Öcalan’s books, and later deepened through further readings and political activism. I found in myself a painful contradiction, captured by two opposing yet equally legitimate questions: What else could ordinary people do, if not seek protection of state-like structures against the longstanding patterns of violence? Could a state-like projection of power ever truly liberate us from the structural violence primarily enabled by the state itself?

I cannot offer a detailed answer to these questions. However, a general comparison of FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo) and PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) regarding their projection of power clarifies some aspects of the relationship between the state and liberation.^[1] FARC-EP emerged in the 1960s in response to the Colombia’s historically unresolved agrarian question and violence by the oligarchs. The PKK initially mobilized against the Turkish state, which violently controlled North Kurdistan. Despite different justifications, both movements opposed the state’s monopoly on violence, which was deemed legitimate by virtue of statehood but illegitimate for parts of society due to their lived experiences of state violence. Initially, both movements aimed to seize state-like power: FARC sought control over the Colombian state, while the PKK aimed to establish a greater Kurdistan. Neither achieved this initial objective, albeit for entirely different reasons. While FARC demobilized its guerrilla movement and joined parliamentary politics as Comunes in 2016 after the peace agreement, the PKK underwent a radical ideological and political transformation in the 1990s and 2000s, abandoning the pursuit of state power altogether. This divergence reflects fundamentally different projections of power for liberation—one state-centered, the other stateless.

Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Colombia, and a decade of research on, in, and about Kurdistan, I argue that the PKK’s ideological transformation enabled new insights into projections of power previously inconceivable within a state-centric logic, offering important lessons for liberation. A comparison with FARC illustrates the significance of this experience. I do not suggest that one path is superior to the other, but that structural conditions shape how power is projected. Following a brief reflection on Colombia and Turkey, the comparison will revolve around three axes: vanguardism, the exercise of power, the liberal state.

State and Control

Embed from Getty Images

Two armed soldiers belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) monitor the Berlin pass, 07 March, near Florencia, in the southern Caqueta province of Colombia, where cars are prevented from going through after the rebels decreed 06 March a ban on “travel on roads and waterways for six days”. The rebels try to dissuade voters from casting their ballots in the 08 March elections for congress. According to the rebels, the elections 08 March are illegitimate because the left has been forced out of national politics, following the murder over the past years of thousands of Colombia’s left-wing politicians and supporters. Photo by PEDRO UGARTE/AFP via Getty Images.

An uncontested Weberian definition of the state is a monopoly over legitimate violence. Modern contractual theories position consensus as central in delegating this monopoly to a superior authority, but reality proves far more complicated. Tilly (1982) argues that states, like the Mafia, generate or simulate threats, such as wars or unrest, and taxes dependent populations for protection. Thus, early state formation directly results from inter-group rivalry, whereby one gradually establishes oligarchic structures. Similarly, Mancur Olson describes this transition as moving from pillage-based “roving bandits” to “stationary bandits” who settle in an area, monopolize violence, and extract taxes. The modern state, as institutionalized bandits, exists as long as it manages to expand its control over an entire national territory.

This mafia-like or bandit-like conception of the state is particularly useful for understanding the formation of Turkey (Üngör 2012) and Colombia (Calvo Ospina 2018), but in relatively opposite ways: state-strength and state-weakness, respectively. Due to factors like challenging geography, lack of historical experience in centralized governance, and neo-imperial conditions that reproduce coloniality, the Colombian state remained institutionally weak which remains evident in its security provision. For example, a forcibly displaced peasant told me that if they needed to file a complaint against an armed groups’ threats, the nearest police station was a two-day walk away, and the officers were often complicit with the groups. Under oligarchic dominance (Caballero 2024), a central function of the state has been to violently suppress political movements that propose alternatives. In Turkey, the state itself has been far from democratic. Instead, it was built on Turkish economic, political, racial, and cultural superiority (Ünlü 2018). Yet, it has been highly effective in expanding control due to its Ottoman imperial legacy and strong military, among other reasons (see Bozarslan 2013). Unlike Colombia, the Turkish state’s monopoly over violence has always been prominent.

Both the PKK and FARC initially emerged seeking state power. For FARC, this resulted in an “insurgency without revolution,” characterized by limited and dispersed territorial control through state-like governance (Pizarro 1996). For the PKK, however, challenging regional geopolitical conditions led the movement to reconsider statehood. While defeating NATO’s second-largest army was practically impossible, a victory would also require confronting three other states (Iran, Iraq, and Syria) and hence, indirectly, the entire state-system in the Middle East. Among numerous factors that underlie the PKK’s transformation, these historical and geopolitical realities were central. Unlike FARC, which pursued state power within conditions of significant state weakness, the PKK had to find alternative solutions to a much deeper power dilemma. These differences significantly shaped each movement’s projection of power for liberation. In what follows, I compare three aspects of this divergence.

Vanguardism

Embed from Getty Images

SAN VICENTE, COLOMBIA: Guerrillas of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) march in a military parade 07 February 2001 in San Vicente. Amid rising tension and international pressure for dialogue, Colombian President Andres Pastrana is set to meet Marxist rebel leader Manuel Marulanda 08 February 2001 in a bid to end a civil war that has turned Colombia into one of the world’s most violent nations. Photo credit should read LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images.

Vanguardism is, at its core, the party’s leadership over the revolution, but it often reproduces centralized hierarchy and organizational rigidity. According to FARC, the Colombian state first needed to reach a bourgeois-democratic stage to enable the transition to communism, following Marxist-Leninism’s schema of historical stagism, from primitive communism through feudalism and capitalism to communism. This stagist view also defined the revolutionary party’s role as both leader and embodiment of the struggle. Historically, however, preserving the party’s existence and continuity gradually became more important than achieving revolution (Pizarro 2011).

Some authors observed a transformation within FARC regarding increased popular participation through direct democracy and the emerging role of women. For example, Guitérrez (2018) argues that with Alfonso Cano, the commander-in-chief of FARC from 2008 to 2011, revolutionary communities gained more influence in decision-making, thanks to Cano’s engagement with the new left (164). However, this development remained controversial at best and stopped almost entirely after his death in 2011, one of my interviewees observed. Additionally, women gradually assumed more prominent roles, evolving from fighters’ wives, sisters, and mothers to nurses, cooks, and finally front-line combatants, a position that they were forbidden from until the 1970s. This progression occurred mainly due to women’s struggle within the FARC. Tactical adjustments in guerrilla warfare were notable (Valencia & Àvila 2011), but FARC’s vanguardism did not allow for deeper ideological and political transformations regarding community participation and gender liberation.

From the late 1970s on, the PKK adhered to the Leninist anti-colonial national liberation thesis as the vanguard party of the Kurdistan revolution. However, from the 1990s on, the PKK initiated a transformation that questioned vanguardism and abandoned limited national-liberation perspective in favour of democratic confederalism, advocating a radical, direct democratic restructuring of political life beyond the nation, the state, and nationalism. During this period, the movement adopted an ideologically coherent but organizationally decentralized strategy across different parts of Kurdistan, allowing each to develop according to their specific conditions. A gender perspective fundamentally shaped the transformation of both the PKK and Kurdish society (Dirik 2022b). Whereas women’s participation in FARC remained limited, the Kurdish movement laid the groundwork for a genuine gender liberation (see Rostampour, this series).

I do not claim that the PKK has fully abandoned vanguardism or achieved complete decentralization. Yet its ideological transformation opens a new perspective on the vanguard party against revolutionary rigidity.

Practice of Power

Rebel governance, in its broadest sense, refers to insurgent rule over limited zones within a state’s territory, with participation of population and their taxation (Mampilly 2011). FARC’s experience of rebel governance was initially more organic and closely connected to the population as a former member recalled: “We would always seek the permission of local community” (Interview, April 4, 2025). However, another interview partner argued that over time it shifted towards “entering pueblos and taking control” (Interview, May 5, 2025).  Once territorial dominance was secured, existing governance structures were repurposed into insurgent institutions.

Juntas de Acción Comunal (JACs, or Communal Action Committees) and agrarian unions were central to the practice of rebel governance. Originally established by the state to integrate peasant areas against guerrillas, JACs consisted of 4–6 elected representatives tasked with local governance on four-year terms. Agrarian unions, meanwhile, addressed land-related issues and operated with relative autonomy (Guitérrez 2018, 195–202). While these structures existed elsewhere what distinguished them in FARC-influenced areas was the political and military authority of FARC. These institutions were shaped in opposition to, and frequently targeted by, the state’s paramilitary coercive mechanisms.

Ultimately, external protection was provided by FARC guerrillas, while internal organisation was coordinated through JACs and agrarian unions under the orientation—if not direct orders—of FARC cadres. However, this approach remained within a statist projection of power: it sought to control territory and assume state functions rather than fundamentally transform power relations by organizing communities or establishing self-defence mechanisms.

The Kurdish movement’s praxis in Rojava offers a different model. As in FARC’s case, control was first established through military means. Yet rather than repurposing existing institutions, in Rojava the movement initiated a radical transformation of society across multiple dimensions: from a paternalistic to communal-cooperative economy; from patriarchal domination to a project of gender liberation; and from state-centrism to radical and direct democratic assemblies (Aslan 2020). Another transformation occured in the decentralized movement’s approaches to judicial practice: this transformation entailed a shift from popular courts run by PKK militants, in North Kurdistan (O’Connor 2021, 136–137) to a communal judicial system run by civilians in Rojava (Knapp & Jongerden 2020).

Moreover, against a state monopoly over violence that rendered societies defenseless, Öcalan suggests self-defense. While self-defence involves military dimensions, it is not about submitting to, or replicating, a statist order (Güneşer 2018, 327). The organization of self-defense in Rojava, for example, depends on community empowerment and preventive measures through an anticolonial educative practice (Dirik 2022a).

At best, these are imperfect transformations, evident, for example, in the hierarchical status of fighters in Rojava. Still, the experience of self-defense as a deeply social practice extends beyond the vanguard party’s state-like projection of power.

The Liberal State as a Framework 

The history of massacres in Colombia reveals how impunity for perpetrators of violence has long been a defining feature of the state (Huertas Díaz 2024). FARC’s governing program focused on the basic rights and protection of agrarian communities against systematic land dispossession. As a Comunes representative noted, armed struggle would not have been necessary had democratic participation been possible. Thus, FARC’s immediate goal was to achieve bourgeois-democratic standards, much of which was achievable within a liberal democratic order (Guitérrez 2018, 312). However, while securing basic rights is essential for survival, it does not, on its own, open a path toward a radical reimagination of power relations.

The PKK’s strategic engagement with the liberal state framework presents a contrasting example. In the 1990s, changing political dynamics pushed Turkey to reforms according to a liberal human rights framework. The movement strategically engaged with these human rights reforms to reduce state violence. Kurdish lawyers brought cases before European Court of Human Rights, winning rulings on Turkey’s accountability for rights violations; legal pro-Kurdish parties gained electoral ground; and multiple peace initiatives sought a liberal democratic solution to the conflict (Sunca 2024).

Meanwhile, however, PKK has advanced a radical political project by reorganizing power relations beyond the state. For example, Democratic Society Congress (DTK) in North Kurdistan sought to establish self-rule through civil society, popular assemblies, and communal economy. Another example is the Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK) which sought to organize radical democratic forces in Turkey to push for inclusivity and recognition by the state (Novelli et al. 2024). Though far from perfect, these structures planted the seeds of a new political reorganization throughout the 2000s. This movement in Turkey was significantly weakened from 2015 onwards, as a result of the extensive repression of Kurdish activism and politics (see Celik, this series).

The key distinction lies in the Kurdish movement’s rearticulation of social power through radical-direct democracy and successful instrumentalization of the state’s neoliberal reconfiguration, whereas FARC remained committed to a state-centered program within a liberal framework.

Conclusion

When the two young men robbed me, I felt unsafe in ways that led me to reflection, an ordinary reaction in the absence of effective state institutions capable of preventing such acts. But the central conclusion of this piece is that these institutions’ very presence forecloses the possibility of projecting liberation beyond the state. In Colombia, the state is one of several armed actors competing for power. FARC emerged to address the immediate needs of peasants, but as a vanguard party, its vision of liberation remained state-centered due to interconnected structural realities: rural insecurity, oligarchic control, paramilitarism, and narco-trafficking. FARC-EP no longer exists, yet the conditions that gave rise to it persist, indeed perhaps are worsening. The PKK succeeded in transforming itself, though only partially. Even this limited shift cracked the rigidity of vanguardism and opened spaces for alternative projections of power, putting the organization of community, not just militants, at the center of power. These changes remain flawed and incomplete. Yet the Kurdish liberation movement is a powerful demonstration that reimagining power beyond the state is possible.

Dr Jan Yasin Sunca is an FNRS researcher at REPI (Research and Studies in International Politics) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He has carried out research and published in the field of the decolonial historical sociology of international relations, particularly on nation-state theory, statelessness, decolonial politics, conflicts, and peace processes, drawing on Kurdistan’s place in the world. His ongoing research project is inscribed in a South-South comparative framework to explore the colonial legacies of the nation-state based on political struggles in Kurdistan, Colombia, and Mexico. See his profile here:  https://repi.phisoc.ulb.be/fr/membres/corps-scientifique/postdoctorant-e-s/jan-yasin-sunca

Notes

^[1] By FARC-EP, I refer to the organisation that no longer exists, thus, not to dissident groups, or Comunes, the political party established after the peace accord. By the PKK, I refer to the Kurdish movement ideologically led by Öcalan across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and in the Kurdish diasporas.

Works Cited

Aslan, Azize. 2020. Economía anticapitalista en Rojava: Las contradicciones de la Revolución en la lucha kurda. (Anticapitalist Economics in Rojava:  The Contradictions of Revolution in the Kurdish Struggle). Guadalajara and Mexico City: Cátedra Jorge Alonso.

Bozarslan, Hamit. 2013. Histoire de la Turquie, de l’empire a nos jours. (History of Turkey, from Empire to the Present Day). Paris: Texto.

Caballero, Antonio. 2024. Historia de Colombia y sus oligarquías. (The History of Colombia and Its Oligarchies). Bogota: Crítica.

Calvo Ospina, Hernando. 2018. El terrorismo de Estado en Colombia. (State Terrorism in Colombia). Caracas: El Perro y la Rana.

Dirik, Dilar. 2022a. “Justice et auto-défense sans l’État dans le Rojava kurde.” Multitudes 88 (3): 118-114.

—. 2022b. The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice. Pluto Press.

Guitérrez, José Antonio. 2018. Insurgent Institutions: Refractory Communities, Armed Insurgency and Institution-Building in the Colombian Conflict. University College Dublin.

Güneşer, H. 2018. “Democratic Confederalism, Democratic Autonomy.” In Your Freedom and Mine. Edited by Thomas J. Miley and Federico Venturini, pp. 324-330. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Huertas Díaz, Omar. 2024. La construcción del enemigo como factor de persistencia del conflicto armado en Colombia. (The Constrcution of Enemy as a Factor of the Persistance of Armed Conflict in Colombia). Mexico City: Tirant lo Blanch.

Knapp, Michael., and Joost Jongerden. 2020. “Peace Committees, Platforms and the Political Ordering of Society: Doing Justice in the Federation of Northern and Eastern Syria (NES).” Kurdish Studies 8(2): 322-339.

Mampilly, Zachariah. 2011. Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Novelli, Mario, Birgül Kutan, Patrick Kane, Adnan Çelik, Tejendra Pherali, Saranel Benjamin. 2024. Laboratories of Learning: Social Movements, Education and Knowledge-Making in the Global South. London: Pluto Press.

O’Connor, Francis. 2021. Understanding Insurgency: Popular Support for the PKK in Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pizarro, Eduardo. 1996. Insurgencia sin revolución: La guerrilla en Colombia en una perspectiva comparada. (Insurgency Without Revolution: The Guerrilla in Colombia in a Comparative Perspective). Bogota: Tercer Mundo Editores.

—. 2011. Las FARC (1949–2011): De guerrilla campesina a máquina de guerra. (FARC (1949-2011): From Peasant Guerrilla to War Machine) Bogota: Grupo Editorial Norma.

Sunca, Jan Yasin. 2024. “L’Union européenne, la question kurde en Turquie et les limites de la démocratisation.” (The European Union, the Kurdish Question in Turkey and the Limits of Democratisation) La Pensée et les Hommes 68 (134): 35-57.

Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, pp. 169-191. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Üngör, Ugur Ümit. 2012. “Rethinking the Violence of Pacification: State Formation and Bandits in Turkey, 1914–1937.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (4): 746-769.

Ünlü, Barış. 2018. Türklük Sözleşmesi: Oluşumu, İşleyişi ve Krizi. (The Turkishness. Contract: Its Formation, Functioning and Crisis) Ankara: Dipnot Yayınları.

Valencia, León, and Ariel Àvila. 2011. La nueva realidad de las FARC. (The New Reality of FARC) Observatorio del Conflicto Armado. https://cedema.org/articles/240