The formation of postcolonial states in Asia, Africa and the Middle East gave birth to prolonged separatist wars between separatist groups in the periphery and the new, still insecure central governments. This book explores these liberation wars, aiming to provide new insights into their roots and evolution. Rather than focusing on the causes of conflict, the book focuses on the governments’ and insurgents’ strategies and policies. The book’s central argument is that we could best understand these strategies as having been shaped by the struggle against European colonialism. The practices and roles that emerged during that period survived into the postcolonial era, moulding the identities, aims and strategies of both governments and rebels. Therefore, the book suggests that theories of practice and roles in international politics serve as a sound theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of the case studies. The book examines two cases of postcolonial separatist wars: the conflict in Northern Iraq between the government and Kurdish separatists and in Southern Sudan between black separatists and the government in Khartoum. The analysis of these two cases relies on extensive field and archival research. Thus, the book sheds new light on the history and nature of these separatist conflicts.

The third chapter examines how the incumbents in Iraq and Sudan reacted to the uprisings in their peripheries. It begins by establishing that the future post-colonial elites had been exposed to colonial practices of control, through their constant interaction with the colonial authorities. It then moves to demonstrate how these practices resurfaced when these governments faced dissent in their peripheries.

The secessionist wars in Iraq and Sudan, both of them protracted conflicts that shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of people, have transformed throughout the years. During their first decades, the secessionist insurgents conducted anti-colonial liberation movements, combining guerrilla tactics and popular mobilisation along with public diplomacy that emphasised their position as the oppressed colonies of the imperialists in Baghdad and Khartoum. And in a sense, they were not far from the truth. The postcolonial governments in Baghdad and Khartoum did not perceive themselves as new colonisers. These elites, who gained much of their training, experience in and understanding of governance under colonial rule or from colonial instructors, claimed legitimacy for their rule by distancing themselves from colonial traditions.

This chapter presents the historical and ideational background to the eruption of postcolonial violence. It reviews the unfolding of the first-generation liberation wars, the response of the colonial authorities to the challenges and the birth of norms, ideas and practices of liberation, insurgency and counter-insurgency. It also provides a brief background to the wars in Iraqi Kurdistan and Southern Sudan.

The last chapter focuses on the gradual transition that both the Iraqi Kurdish and Southern Sudanese liberation movements experienced, from relying solely on armed resistance to adopting other forms of liberation strategies. It shows that while guerrilla fighting continued throughout most of the 1980s, in the early 1990s, the second-generation liberation movements began shifting their strategic emphasis from guerrilla warfare to institution building and governance as forms of resistance. The Kurdish and Southern Sudanese leaders were exposed during that period to changing trends in liberation and self-determination struggles in the former Soviet and Yugoslav republics. Once again, they internalized these lessons and applied them to their cases. They did so by taking advantage of the opportunities brought by changing geopolitical circumstances. By showing that these transitions were the outcome of continued dialogue and interaction, the book further establishes them as essential sources of strategy and policymaking.

As the Iraqi Kurds and Southern Sudanese became disillusioned with their prospects of integrating into the postcolonial states on an equal basis, they began to challenge their governments and seek new solutions, ranging from federalism to secession. This chapter details how these movements developed this anti-colonial identity, and how they used the very ideas, strategies and methods employed by the first-generation liberation movements against them.

When international journalists talk publicly about their work, they often succumb to the temptation to present themselves as charismatic adventurers all alone in foreign lands (Murrell 2015: 32). Yet reporters, though often credited as sole authors, are just one link in a chain of contributors assembled to create news stories. Sources, publicists, activists, translators, fixers, and producers also act as information brokers between local events and foreign editors.1 And the process does not end with editors.

A year into her fixing career, Elif guiltily felt like her job was to use people, to subject them to journalists’ interrogations and dehumanize them as mere bits of information. She felt exploitative in a general way when pressuring strangers into talking with her clients, but experienced a particularly knotted anxiety when introducing foreign reporters to people she knew and cared for.

South of the border, Karim was unknowingly starting down his own path as a fixer. He was from the Syrian capital Damascus but grew up partly in the United Arab Emirates, where his father was a businessman and where English is more the lingua franca than Arabic. Karim returned to Syria in the early 2000s to study economics at university and then start a job at a luxury hotel. He would sometimes lead VIP guests around on tours, learning both to charm foreigners and to objectify and neatly package Syria for them.

José also covered the siege of Kobani. The young reporter was now a stringer: he had an informal agreement to regularly provide content to an American news website, which even provided him a modest travel and expense budget when the story was big enough. The Kobani story was huge, and in October José headed to the border with an Istanbul fixer named Zeynep. Elif was his first choice, but she was already engaged by XYZ. The channel paid her more than José could dream to. José chose Zeynep next because, though not Kurdish herself, she was a leftist grad student activist who seemed to strike the right insider-outsider balance for the story.

As a specialist in stories about Afghans in Turkey, Habib had to reconcile his clients’ prescription that sources freely and individually consent to interviews with the power that organized crime held over migrants. Human smugglers could make Habib’s job harder or easier. They could secure or corrupt his reputation among reporters as a fixer for Turkey’s Afghan community.

Fixers bridge the gap between reporters and sources with a range of matchmaking, coaching, and transcoding tools. Their capacity and freedom to unify reporters and sources and control information and story frames are constrained, however, by those brokered parties’ perceptions of them, the presence of alternative pathways of communication that circumvent them, the limits of their expertise and social capital, and the magnitude of conflict between parties.

Michael wanted to do the Alevi story. I wrote to Özge, asking if she could help us with contacts for a visit to Okmeydanı, the Alevi neighborhood in central Istanbul where fighting had occurred in recent days.

After fleeing Damascus, first for Antakya and then to Istanbul after ISIS threatened him, Karim cobbled together a living from fixing gigs. Orhan had connected him with his first reporters, and Karim continued to sub-fix for Orhan on occasion. He also began to recruit clients of his own. Karim knew from his luxury hotel days how to hang out with foreigners, how to play the coolly exotic Syrian and not the desperate or aggressive one, and proved entrepreneurial in using journalist parties to meet potential clients and reduce his dependence on Orhan.