Zones of Rebellion examines an important and yet understudied topic: the variation in violence during the civil war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish insurgency (PKK). This conflict, which recently got reignited in Turkey’s unstable political atmosphere, has claimed over 40,000 lives since the early 1980s. Aysegul Aydin and Cem Emrence explore why the Turkish state and the PKK failed to achieve their goals, turning the conflict into a stalemate.They argue that both sides could not translate military gains into political solutions at critical junctures due to their ideological and institutional problems. The PKK’s failure to set up a modern and efficient administrative structure due to its strong one-man rule as well as its unwillingness to address diverse Kurdish identities hindered its ability to unite all Kurds behind its agenda and achieve an independent Kurdish state. Similarly the Turkish state’s establishment of a separate administration (OHAL) in Southeastern Turkey to contain the Kurdish insurgency and its repressive policies, resulting from a rigid approach to the Kurds, contributed to the rise of Kurdish ethnic consciousness and nationalism.

More importantly, the authors analyze how the state’s and the insurgents’ violence varied geographically in distinct zones. This analysis relies on an original and extensive database that the authors compiled, covering 5,576 counterinsurgency operations and 4,299 PKK attacks from 1984 to 2008, as well as 846 incidents of civilian unrest in the Kurdish cities between 1989 and 2008. Aydin and Emrence divide the civil war geography into three zones for each of the combatants: a zone under control, a contested zone, and a zone beyond reach. These zones vary according to each combatant; in other words, they are asymmetrical and are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As such this conceptualization is complicated. For the PKK, Zone 1 refers to its stronghold and encompasses the border areas of emergency rule (OHAL). Zone 2 also falls within the OHAL region but the PKK fails to control this zone due to the state presence as well as other rivals. Zone 3 falls outside the OHAL region, referring to the areas where the state is hegemonic. For the state, the zones of counterinsurgency include a Battle Zone, a Transition Zone, and Zone 3. The Battle Zone is most of the OHAL region where the state undertook its military operations. The Transition Zone is an area in OHAL where the state had to resort to both military operations and political arrests in order to deal with Kurdish civilian unrest. The authors argue that in zones where combatants feel most secure, their violence is selective and based on a single tactic. In the contested zones, the combatants’ violence becomes more indiscriminate and mixed.

This is an ambitious study and represents one of the few studies on the military strategies of the Kurdish insurgency and the Turkish state. However, the book suffers from some shortcomings. The most important concept of the book, zones of rebellion, needs more clarification. The concept comes from Stathis Kalyvas (The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 2000). While the authors cite Kalyvas, they do not engage with his argument. In a brief endnote (p. 150, endnote 9) they describe how their conceptualization of the zones differs from Kalyvas’s, but they do not explain how it improves on his. The authors do not explain why they divided the zones asymmetrically for the insurgents and counterinsurgents, unlike Kalyvas. For example, Mardin, Nusaybin, and Cizre are categorized as stronghold regions for the insurgents but as transition zones for the state. It is not clear what the advantage of such division is and how the conduct of violence occurred in these towns. Did the state use indiscriminate violence and rely only on military encounters because it was a stronghold of the insurgency, or discriminate violence and mixed strategies because it was a transition zone for itself? The asymmetrical zones make the causal mechanism of the main argument harder to understand.

The strongest and most original chapters of the book are the ones that discuss counterinsurgency and insurgency strategies based on the large dataset that the authors compiled. The authors’ finding that coercive strategies and their targets varied geographically is novel in the literature on the Kurdish conflict. The collection of this dataset must have involved an immense amount of work, for which the authors should be applauded. However, it is also frustrating to see that the authors’ discussion of this dataset is too general and thin, and the specifics of the data cannot be found in the book. For example, while the appendix lists the range of rebel methods, no systematic information is provided about the numbers or ratios of these methods and their variation across the years.

This is a remarkably short book given the range of issues it tackles. As such, the causal mechanisms of some arguments are not discussed adequately. For example, the causal mechanism between the lack of a managerial class and the PKK’s failure to transform itself into a political actor requires more elaboration. It is not clear what kind of a transformation could have happened if Ocalan had allowed for the emergence of a managerial/bureaucratic class in the PKK. The authors also attribute the PKK’s failure solely to its internal characteristics, neglecting the external constraints that the Turkish state, along with other states in the region, presented. Similarly the authors treat path-dependency as simply an argument that history matters, underlining the historical continuities in combatants’ strategies. The concept of path-dependency requires identifying mechanisms by which moving off the path becomes increasingly costly and difficult. The authors do not specify these mechanisms. The early Republican state chose military repression over cooptation of Kurdish tribes or using a religious discourse to appeal to the Kurds. This policy diverged from the Ottoman strategies to deal with Kurdish dissent (p. 104).Path dependency does not explain such policy deviations.

Some of the factual information in the book is questionable. For example, in their discussion of counterinsurgency in OHAL, the authors write that the “political leadership successfully restructured the Turkish security forces without privatizing security or creating an autonomous group within the state” (p. 112). This statement ignores the formation of the Gendarmerie Intelligence Organization (JITEM) or the use of criminal gangs, PKK informants, and village guards who were agents of extrajudicial repression and undertook assassinations, disappearances, and torture. These groups were autonomous within the state. Elsewhere the authors write, “After its military peak in 1999, the state also shied away from political solutions that involved group recognition” (p. 9). This statement ignores a set of reforms that allowed for the free expression of Kurdish language and culture, more official tolerance accorded to the pro-Kurdish political party, as well as the state’s negotiations with the leader of the PKK in the post-2000 period. It is true that the Turkish state relied more on military methods, but it would be an exaggeration to argue that it did not formulate any political solutions to address the question.

Despite its problems, this book is important because it analyzes an underexplored topic and relies on an original and extensive database. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of Turkish and Kurdish studies as well as of civil war.