As was stated in the introduction to this study, the synthesis of opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and identity-framing is not intended to serve as a falsifiable paradigm or theory (if such a thing even exists in the social sciences). Rather, its intent is to focus analysis of social movements on the most important factors, serving as a theoretical framework of explanation. The Kurdish case has been examined here as a sort of heuristic application of these theories and their synthesis. In this sense, readers must judge for themselves the utility of the approach. Hopefully this study provides a sufficiently interesting employment of social movement theories to aid in such judgment.

The application of individual theoretical approaches to understanding social movements in Chapters 2-4 relied on the case of Kurdish ethnic nationalist movements in Turkey. Chapter 2 found that political opportunity structures (a version of structural approaches in general) were particularly useful for explaining the form that emergent challenger movements take. To a lesser extent, a greater understanding of the likely timing of movement emergence was also arrived at. In the case of resource mobilization and rational choice approaches, Chapter 3 arrived at a better understanding of how a movement that has emerged may build itself up. For movements such as the PKK that start with few or no resources, the RM-RC approach was particularly useful for illuminating the mobilization process.

This chapter focuses on the usefulness of a structural analysis in explaining Kurdish ethnic-nationalist opposition to the state in Turkey. In particular, I probe the explanatory power of the following five variables:

1. the relative openness or closure of the institutionalized political system;

2. the stability of that broad set of elite alignments that typically undergird a polity;

3. the presence of elite allies;

4. the state's capacity and propensity for repression; and

5. international and foreign influences supportive of the state or its opponents.

The first four of these variables are those that constitute McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald's notion of opportunity structures. The final variable (the international dimension) I judged simply too important to be left out. Understandably, there is a common tendency to include a long list of factors that constrain or encourage state opposition movements, but to make sense of such a complex phenomenon we must focus on a short list of variables and divide the subject into cognitively manageable chunks. The analysis presented here examines opportunity structures in different phases of Turkey's modern history, ending with the present.

Although there have been many outbreaks of subversive violence as well as specifically Kurdish rebellions in modern Turkey, there have been no cases of successful revolution or Kurdish revolts there. Hence it is not possible to even approach “proving” or “disproving” the importance of different approaches to the subject; rather, we can only hope to roughly evaluate the extent to which the opportunity structures concept contributes to a compelling explanation for the outbreak of ethnic nationalist rebellion in Turkey.

The early Iranian state and the Simko revolt

The events surrounding World War One did not witness a disintegration of lands held by the Iranian monarchy in the way they did for the Ottoman empire. Nonetheless, the Iranian state at the time did not effectively control much of the countryside. Parts of Iranian Kurdistan which had been tenuously ruled by Iran since 1639 (when an Ottoman–Safavid treaty ceded some of the Kurdish regions to the Ottomans), rose up in rebellion. Around the same time as the Kuchgiri, Sheikh Said, and Barzinji revolts in Turkey and Iraq, Ismail Agha Simko led the most major Kurdish revolt in Iran at the time. A feudal tribal agha with a villainous reputation for being more of a warlord than a genuine nationalist, Simko first subdued and plundered the Kurdish, Azeri, and Assyrian groups in his region around Lake Uromiyah. These groups and their leaders might otherwise have emerged as competitors to Simko. In an attempt to take advantage of what he saw as Iranian state weakness (lack of coercive capacity and divisions amongst the capital's elites), Simko then declared an independent Kurdish state in the area under his control, proclaiming his actions to be a prelude to independence for all of Kurdistan. Simko held the area against the Iranian army for four years, and even met in 1923 with fellow Kurdish sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji (described in Chapter 6 on Iraqi Kurdistan, Barzinji and Simko had some similarities in style and followings) to coordinate strategies.

Having examined Kurdish nationalist challenges to the Turkish state from an “opportunity structures” as well as a “resource mobilization” perspective, we now consider the same issue from the perspective of social psychology and culture. As was the case in the previous two chapters, an attempt will be made to limit the bulk of our explanatory focus to this last theoretical perspective. Such a perspective should prove most useful for understanding “why” Kurdish ethnic nationalist dissent arose in Turkey, as well as the values, aims, and objectives of Kurds in the country. At the same time, important revelations concerning how Kurdish nationalist resurgence occurred and the prospects of this phenomenon should be made.

Many variants of cultural and social-psychological approaches could be applied to the Turkish-Kurdish case, and the intangible, amorphous nature of identity and culture makes the task doubly difficult. For the purpose of delimiting our task as well as furthering current research trends on social movements, the approach taken here applies the perspective adopted in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald's Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements. “Framing” is defined along the same lines originally espoused by David Snow, as “conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action.” The analysis of cultural framing is therefore broken down into the following components:

1. the cultural tool kits available to would-be insurgents;

2. the strategic framing efforts of movement groups;

3. the frame contests between the movement and other collective actors – principally the state, and countermovement groups;

4. […]

A former French protectorate that came to independence in 1956, unlike its often imposing Algerian and Libyan neighbors, Tunisia is both geographically and economically of modest size, although offshore oil discoveries have made important contributions to what was otherwise a largely agriculturally based economy. Whether because of the unpredictability of Libya, which has on occasion expelled Tunisian workers, or the potential spillover of civil war from Algeria, Tunis has pursued policies aimed at insulating itself from the vagaries of regional politics and economics. From independence until the 1980s, a single party, the Parti socialiste destourien (PSD), and the state were led by the country's most prominent independence figure, Habib Bourguiba, a French-trained lawyer who had ideas not unlike those of Turkey's Atatürk regarding modernization and state-building.

In terms of population movement, until the end of the First World War, Tunisia was a region of immigration, attracting those seeking wealth, welcome or asylum from other parts of the Mediterranean basin. It began to export labor to France about the same time Morocco did, but the flows did not become important until several years after independence, when unemployment levels began to rise. Unlike Rabat, Tunis took a more interventionist approach from the beginning, in keeping with the developmentalist leanings of its leadership. While not always meeting targets or expectations, the Tunisian state did establish offices to address placement and programs to provide training.

It was during a quiet Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles that a program on Arab-American television triggered my initial interest in the state and emigration. This particular day, the program featured an interview with Talal Arslan, the Lebanese Minister of Expatriates. Listening to the interview, I realized that I had not been aware that a ministry devoted to nationals abroad existed, in Lebanon or elsewhere in the Arab world. In the weeks that followed, I learned that in fact a number of Arab (and other) countries had similar institutions, but that little research had been done on them, and the idea for this research was born.

The subsequent development of the project, however, was far from what I had initially envisaged. First, heavy administrative duties as a center director, then the tremendous demands on my time placed by the aftermath of September 11 meant halting progress at best. By the time a sabbatical finally enabled me to focus fully on the research abroad, war drums had begun beating inside the Beltway. In spring 2003, the period I had set aside for the major drafting of the book, Washington launched its invasion of Iraq and, living in Beirut at the time, my attention turned from book writing to war protesting.

Since the invasion, there have been many times when the intellectual call of this project sadly paled in comparison with the need to devote time to speaking out against the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policy record.

While scholars remain divided as to whether population movement in the post 1945 period in fact surpasses the magnitudes of earlier periods, the issues of who, why, when, how, and to what effect people move from farm to city, town to town, or country to country have received increasing scholarly and policy attention in recent years. Researchers across disciplines have sought to answer these and related questions, focusing on a variety of levels and units of analysis, and drawing upon myriad theoretical frameworks and empirical tools. While some have looked at the micro-level questions of individual decisions to migrate and their impact, often emphasizing economic cost–benefit calculations or push-pull factors, others have posed community or societal-level questions, as they have sought to understand the cultural impact of immigration, various historical aspects of the immigrant experience, or the possibilities for integration or assimilation in the new host country. In the fields of political science and international relations, explanations have often been sought for governmental response to immigration, with some analysts locating their explanations at the level of the state, others in the international political economy, and still others in changes in international norms.

If migration or immigration studies have been remarkable in terms of the diversity of treatment and disciplinary interest noted above, they have, conversely, been, in their majority, surprisingly limited geographically: most of the work that has been done on the question of the permeability of borders, border controls, citizenship and migration or immigration (as opposed to work solely on citizenship) has dealt with Western Europe and the United States.

The now voluminous literatures on globalization and the new security agenda intersect in their discussion of whether the state is waning in importance or manifesting forms of resistance in the face of contemporary challenges. There is no question that many issues formerly understood as being under the control of the state or falling within its sovereign realm can no longer be accurately portrayed in such a way. Environmental threats in the oceans and the air admit no boundaries; developments in military technology have rendered national boundaries vulnerable in an unprecedented way; economic restructuring in response to neoliberal dictates has reconfigured the role of the state in the domestic economy and opened the way to broader and deeper foreign investment that is less controlled by national authorities; and the speed and development of communications have rendered virtually impossible tight governmental control of information flows across borders. In the realm of population movement, the evolution of the global economy has led employers to seek low-cost (often illegal) labor, thus rendering increasingly difficult the prevention of undocumented flows. Moreover, despite state efforts to stem the tide, the numbers of refugees, displaced and asylum seekers have been steadily rising.

In addition, some argue that state power is waning owing to the growth in numbers and importance of a variety of transnational actors – some of them of a supranational sort, others sub-national in origin – which engage in coordination and advocacy work on such issues as human rights, the environment, indigenous culture and women's rights, supported by like-minded activist groups abroad.

Of the four countries covered in this work, Morocco's history as a distinct entity (as traced through its Alaouite monarchy) is the longest and its experience with outside intervention the shortest. Unlike Tunisia, Lebanon and Jordan, it was never a part of the Ottoman Empire, and it was the last of the three to come under external control, succumbing for economic and political reasons to the imposition of a protectorate with French, Spanish and international zones in 1912. It secured formal independence in 1956 following an independence struggle that produced the bases of one of the few multiparty political systems in the region, just as it transformed Mohammed V, the grandfather of Mohammed VI, into a beloved national hero. A strong sense of national identity – at least among the elite and the city-dwellers – notwithstanding, Morocco entered the community of nations with a significant divide between rural and urban which coincided to a certain extent with that between Berbers and Arabs.

Hassan II succeeded his father Mohammed V in 1962 and ruled until his death in 1999 using a governing formula that combined the traditional authority of religion (the royal family's claims to be from the line of the Prophet Muhammad), the power of the state apparatus with its attendant patron–client relations (called the makhzen), and at times brutal coercion. It was a formula that preserved the monarchy, but which did little to promote socio-economic development.