Representation in Security Forces and Ethnic Conflict: The Turkish Army & Kurds

• In Event: Militaries and the Public: Representativeness, Trust, and Intervention

Abstract

This paper examines the geographical and historical patterns of access to state power and their political implications in Turkey. It focuses on the Turkish armed forces as the dominant political institution until recently, and the Kurds, the largest and only ethno-mobilized ethnic minority group in Turkey. Drawing on an original historical demographic dataset, it investigates the representation of the Kurds in the security forces and its implications on the relations between the Turkish state and Kurds from 1923 until 2015 and particularly on the Kurdish insurgency since 1984. I preliminarily find that the Kurds have long been excluded from positions of power in the Turkish military, and their persistent exclusion has contributed to both onset and durability of the Kurdish ethno-mobilization and the conflict between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) and the Turkish army.

Data and Research Design: In investigating the social representation in the armed forces, the paper primarily draws on original historical demographic data on 9.850 general staff officers and 2500 flag officers, who have constituted the entirety of the senior officer corps of the three major services of the Turkish armed forces—the army, the navy, and the air force—from 1923 until 2015 and focus on the geographically concentrated Kurdish-majority provinces. The demographic data in the Turkish Armed Forces Senior Officer Corps (TAFSOC) dataset was collected by the author from military archives and libraries, court-martial records, and national newspapers in Turkey. 2-year ethnographic research between 2016 and 2019 in Ankara and Istanbul, including 30 in-depth interviews with active duty and retired officers of various ranks, including politicians, scholars, and activists who were former military officers, complements the archival work. Additionally, the paper employs Tezcur’s KIM (Kurdish Insurgency Militants) dataset (Tezcur 2016) and Belge’s data on state-employed local village guards to measure the level of conflict, state information, and insurgence recruitment (Belge 2016).

Claims and Preliminary Findings: A preliminary exploratory analysis of the TAFSOC dataset demonstrates that Kurds have been persistently excluded from state power since the early days of the republic. The first question with which the paper is concerned then is what accounts for the persistent Kurdish underrepresentation in Turkish security forces. Based on the temporal comparison of regional recruitment rates and insurgent fatalities as an indicator conflict, my research shows that in contrast to the common view the socioeconomic deprivation and ongoing conflict have had limited effect on Kurdish underrepresentation and that the exclusion of Kurds in Turkish armed forces is path-dependent and predates the foundation of the republic. The paper shows how the pre-republican period legacy of ethnic exclusion was aggravated by regional rebellions in the early years of the republic and have long-lasting effects. The military’s institutional autonomy has contributed to this self-perpetuating pattern of ethnic exclusion. Secondly, the paper investigates how the exclusion of Kurds from state power affected their relations with the central government, especially the Kurdish insurgency. A spatial and temporal analysis of military recruitment patterns compared to rebel recruitment patterns in the Kurdish-majority provinces between 1984 and 2015 suggests a strong relationship between ethnic exclusion from state power and Kurdish ethno-mobilization. In localities where access to positions of power in security forces has been lower, the rates of rebel recruitment have been considerably higher. Considering also that the underrepresentation of Kurds predates the onset of the armed conflict, I suggest that exclusion from state power has been indeed an important factor that has contributed to both the outbreak and resilience of the PKK-led armed rebellion of Kurds.

Literature: Scholars have widely emphasized the significant consequences of the composition of the armed forces on political stability and democracy (Decalo 1990; Gutteridge, 1962, 1969; Enloe 1980; Horowitz 1980, 1985; Harkness 2013). Existing literature, especially about post-colonial societies, shows that ethnic balance or imbalance in the military significantly affect the onset, durability, and outcomes of civil wars and rebellions (Cederman and Girardin 2007; Cederman; Wimmer and Min 2010; Chandra & Wilkinson 2009; Fearon, Kasara and Laitin 2007; Tezcur & Gurses 2016, Wilkinson 2016). My findings confirm both the cross-country and area-based scholarship suggesting a strong link between ethnic exclusion and ethnic mobilization. We assume that the military in Turkey represents the nation, but my work also shows that even the most ‘national’ of institutions is actually quite geographically uneven.

Author

• Ozgur Ozkan, University of Washington