The Production of the New Man Within the PKK

Abstract

Les chercheurs ont surtout analysé les théories de l’« Homme nouveau » en tant que composante idéologique des systèmes totalitaires. Fondée sur l’étude du Parti des Travailleurs du Kurdistan (PKK), la plus importante organisation du mouvement kurde de Turquie, cet article dépasse le cadre des idéologies d’Etat pour analyser les relations entre théories et pratiques, et pour évaluer les effets concrets de la doctrine de l’Homme nouveau sur les activistes du PKK. Cet article examine donc les discours politiques au sein du PKK afin de comprendre comment, au delà du marxisme et du nationalisme, s’est institutionnalisée une construction spécifique de l’Homme nouveau au sein de l’organisation. A cette fin, le parti a utilisé un certain nombre de dispositifs disciplinaires : l’autocritique a notamment joué un rôle très important dans toutes les branches de l’organisation. Evaluer l’efficacité de ces dispositifs est difficile, mais l’article suggère que l’étude des trajectoires biographiques des individus engagés permet de mieux comprendre pourquoi et surtout comment certains militants ont pu (ou pas) se conformer aux idéaux développés par le PKK.

Becoming a Fearless Tiger

“…Aft er WWI, this idea spread throughout Europe and was partially enacted by the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy (Grojean 2014). Since then, it has inspired so many states and political and religious movements across the world that it would be superfl uous to list them (Grojean 2014). Th e attempt to produce new men and women in socialist countries has been analyzed through the ethnography of discourses and political rituals in Soviet Russia (Yurchak 2003), the ontology of the Revolution (Holbraad 2014), education (Blum 2011) in Cuba, and peasant cooperatives in Sandinista Nic-aragua (Montoya 2012).…”

“…Rather, militancy also has a deep impact on fi ghters' identity and subjectivity and contributes to creating a new community (Aretxaga 1997;Feldman 1991;Hedlund 2020;Hoff man 2011;Pudal 2018). As Saramifar (2015) has shown for the Hezbollah and Grojean (2014) for the PKK, this transformation is consciously guided by the insurgent group through military training; it is here that a recruit leaves his or her previous social life to embark on the life of a freedom fi ghter willing to sacrifi ce himself or herself for the aims of the insurgent group.…”

“…Existing research shows how non-state armies shape fi ghters' subjectivity through control over their bodies and emotions, nationalistic narratives, political rituals, and artistic forms of expression (Aretxaga 1997;Feldman 1991). As shown by Olivier Grojean (2014) for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Younes Saramifar for Hezbollah (2015), it is in training camps that such organizations produce the soldiers who are to represent the values of the society they envisage, and thus where the project of transforming the individual and building a new community is most intense. Due to the importance of these training camps as sites of transformation, this article will focus on the military training endured by former LTTE fi ghters.…”

Anatomy of a Civil War

“…This goal was later replaced by "democratic autonomy" aimed at seeking solutions within the existing frame of Turkey. The classical Marxist notions of "class struggle" and "historical materialism" were progressively replaced by such terms as "individual emancipation," "humanization," and "self-production" in the second half of the 1990s (Grojean 2008; also see White 2015). With a focus on developing a pluralist, grassroots-driven democracy, new concepts such as "democratic confederalism" and "ecological democracy" were introduced to adapt to the changing environment in the post-2000 era (Ocalan 2011; for a summary see Leverink 2015).…”

ICHEP 2014 Summary: Theory Status after the First LHC Run

“…An important question to address is whether H corresponds to the unique scalar boson incorporated in the SM, or it is just the first signal of a much richer scenario of EWSB [37]. Obvious possibilities are an extended scalar sector with additional fields or dynamical (nonperturbative) EWSB generated by some new underlying dynamics.…”