Grappling with the question of the inclusion of Islamists in democratic processes has been personally challenging. As a progressive, I have frequently lent my voice to those who have argued against cultural explanations for why few Muslim societies are democratic. I am committed to encouraging democratization on a global scale, although I question whether positive change can be realized through external intervention. I believe that international standards of human rights should be applied throughout the Middle East and Muslim world (indeed, globally) and that the greatest obstacles to the realization of those norms and practices are the repressive and nondemocratic regimes that prevail in the region. It is a sad truth, as well, that many of these nondemocratic regimes came to power, have remained in power, or have been substantially strengthened by direct support from democratic nations. I am shamed and embarrassed by these ongoing practices.

An honest commitment to democratization in the Middle East and Muslim world requires recognition that Islamists are legitimate political actors with substantial constituencies. They cannot be excluded wholesale from the political arena on either normative or practical grounds. Yet I recognize that Islamist groups do not aspire to the same secular vision of freedom and equality that I embrace. They may, in fact, aspire to banish that vision from the political arena. The tension – sometimes, the open conflict – between these personal commitments is not easily resolved.

Do Islamist political parties threaten emerging democratic processes? According to some, these groups are uncommitted to democratic norms and seek to exploit electoral processes to achieve nondemocratic ends. Others argue that the inclusion of Islamists is necessary because they represent a significant segment of their societies and because excluding them is a surefire means of promoting radicalism rather than encouraging moderation. Embedded in this latter argument is the idea that those who are included will become more moderate and tolerant as they learn to engage in democratic processes. Theoretically, we know surprisingly little about how this process might actually unfold. On a practical level, the stakes of getting political inclusion right – of deciding whom to include and whom to exclude – are extraordinarily high, particularly when pluralist institutions and practices are not yet well established.

Yet the relationship between inclusion and moderation is more complicated than typically portrayed, and two distinct propositions – that exclusion increases radicalism, and inclusion increases moderation – are frequently conflated. Inclusion and exclusion are often posited as a continuum, with moderation greatest in democratic, pluralist, and politically inclusive societies, and radicalism greatest in exclusive, repressive, and authoritarian societies. If increased inclusion means decreased radicalism, then inclusion is certainly preferable on both normative and practical grounds. But are these relations as strong as they are assumed to be? Even more, are the implied causal mechanisms for moderation and radicalization well established on their own, let alone as producing consistent effects with movement along a continuum?

The idea that authoritarian leaders can maintain their power by pretending to care about the public good has been around for thousands of years. In The Politics, Aristotle discusses two strategies by which a tyrant sometimes strives to preserve his rule: he may keep his subjects too preoccupied to challenge his rule (distracting them with war or with fighting each other), or he may dissuade them from conspiring against him. The second strategy requires that the tyrant publicly present a false image of himself, so that he “seems to be a steward of the public rather than a tyrant” (5.11.1314b6–7). This kind of tyrant maintains his tight control of power, but pretends to work for the good of society and creates a public persona as a benevolent ruler torn by tough real-world challenges. His objectives, however, are not only to preserve his power and wealth, but to increase them as much as possible, even at the expense of the people he rules.

A contemporary correlate to Aristotle's “benevolent” tyrant is the authoritarian regime that professes a commitment to democratization while adopting only superficial reforms. The goal is to seem to move toward democratization while preventing the new “participatory” institutions from playing a meaningful role in governance. Political dissent and opposition movements are channeled into institutions controlled by the state as a means of managing or deflating threats to the ruling elite and preserving existing hierarchies of power.

The creation of Iraq and early Kurdish revolts

Following the Treaty of Lausanne, Britain and the League of Nations in 1925 attached the Mosul Vilayet and the rest of today's Iraqi Kurdistan to the British-occupied Mesopotamian vilayets of Basra and Baghdad. Out of these holdings Iraq was created. The British installed Hashemite Emir Faysal, a prince from the Arabian peninsula, as King of the new Iraq, and Britain's mandate over Iraq was supposed to last twenty-five years. Some Kurdish leaders who had been friendly towards Britain, in the hope that they would be helped to establish a Kurdish state in the area, were gravely disappointed. The opportunity structure of foreign support for their Kurdish nationalist aims was not as favorable as they had imagined. The British had decided that creating and controlling a single Iraq, including the Kurdish areas in question, would be the best way to exploit the oil fields around Kirkuk and Mosul, as well as to protect their colonial holdings elsewhere.

Sporadic Kurdish unrest and agitation against being included within the new Iraq had begun even before the Treaty of Sèvres. Lacking sufficient troops to quell the unrest, as early as 1919 the British deployed the RAF to aerially bombard Kurdish rebels and civilian areas in rebellion, setting an enduring precedent for both the region and the world.

At first glance, ethnic nationalist movements may seem amongst the least likely of social movement phenomena amenable to a rational choice (RC) analysis. We have a tendency to view ethnic nationalism as an expression of identity and the strong emotional values attached to identity. This chapter does not attempt to dispute the idea that powerful non-material values underpin ethnic identity and that these may act as strong behavioral motivators. If, however, we accept that identity is a dynamic phenomenon and that ethnic nationalist movements often play a major role in fostering ethnic identification in the first place, then resource mobilization (RM) and rational choice analysis can provide some very useful insights. If a given population lacks a strong sense of ethnic identity, or possesses a non-politicized ethnic identity, then an ethnic nationalist movement may not be able to attract their support with ideological appeals centered around the ethnicity and non-material values of the ethnic group. Instead, the initial attempts to garner large-scale support may have to appeal to the material self-interest of the target population. Additionally, rational, material interest-based appeals, as well as strategic use of recruitment networks and other mobilizational vehicles, may serve as the crucial extra inducement to action for a population receptive to the politicized ethnic ideology of a movement but needing additional motivation.

As discussed earlier, RC theory derives from economics, and its basic premise is that rational actors will choose options that maximize their gain and minimize their risk, based on the information available to them.

Many of the sources on the Kurds consulted by this author made implicit use of a synthesis of the three theoretical approaches to understanding social movements examined in this study. What concerns us here is whether or not an explicit synthesis of these theories contributes significantly to our understanding of the subject matter and the field of social science in general.

Consider this excellent example of a theoretical synthesis by Martin van Bruinessen. He argues, in essence:

Introduction

Throughout today's world, ethnic minorities are mobilizing along ethnic nationalist lines, demanding power and recognition as a group from the states in which they live. In some cases, they are demanding a state of their own, based on their group's status as a nation of its own. These challengers to the states in which they live are often brutally suppressed, yet mobilization often continues in the face of this repression. Why, despite the high risks involved and the often remote chances of success, have such movements continued to emerge?

Contextually specific accounts of ethnic nationalist resurgence typically lack much of a theoretical component. The historical details of specific cases are thought to present an “obvious” explanation for the conflict – “group ‘X’ was oppressed, dissatisfied, or simply in a position to wrench more power from the state, which it then tried to go about doing in the following way …” forms a common approach to the subject. The fact that we can probably find a vast array of injustices, grievances, and relative deprivation affecting ethnic minorities in every society on the planet, yet few ethnic minority groups mobilize for change, is left unexplained. Approaches that are more theoretical often focus so much on one element of the phenomenon (such as socio-political structures in society, movement strategies, or identity struggles) that the resulting account leaves out more than it explains.

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.