The Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Counterterrorism Policies on the PKK-inflicted Violence during the Democratization Process of Turkey

Abstract

This study tries to explore the relationship between soft-line governmental policy interventions of Turkey and the responses of the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers' Party) by using time series data from 1995 to 2010. The negative binomial specifications for two models, the number of incidents and the number casualties are used. The aggregated impact of soft-line policies on the level of violence is found to be positive and significant. In one hand, Turkey's EU accession process had a decreasing impact on PKK inflicted violence. On the other hand, the Active Repentance Law increased the violence in the short run. It was found that defiance based governmental policy interventions of Turkey had an increasing impact on the PKK-inflicted violence.

Blue blood or true blood: Why are levels of intrastate armed conflict so low in Middle Eastern monarchies?

“…For instance, discrimination against Kurds has fueled armed conflict between the Kurdish insurgent group PKK and the Turkish government. PKK’s demands for recognition and representation demonstrate that the Turkish discrimination is perceived as illegitimate among the Kurds (Ciftci and Kula, 2015). Other examples of problematic discrimination involve Sunni dominance in Iraq, Islamic dominance in Sudan, and Alawite dominance in Syria.…”