The Stateless and the State-like: PKK, FARC, and the Projection of Power

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.