The final chapter summarises the book's argument that insurgent groups’ ability to maintain popular support and legitimacy is a key dimension of their success or failure. It shows that the PKK, notwithstanding its ever decreasing military capacity, has proven resilient because of the strength of its relationship with its supportive constituency. It proceeds to assess the strength of the argument, explaining the challenges in demonstrating causality in the field of conflict studies. It further assesses whether the book's framework could possibly explain the evolution of the movement in the period after the timeframe of this book. It briefly gives an overview of changes in the PKK since Öcalan’s capture in 1999, including its dramatic ideological transformation, reconfigured structures, the growth of an affiliated Kurdish civil society, the strength of Kurdish political parties and their relationship with the PKK. It also looks at the PKK’s role in Syria and how its experiences there have shaped the conflict in Turkey.

The third chapter is an account of how PKK revolutionaries are educated in the mountains, analysing how the liberation ideology is learned and lived in the everyday. Here, women find a language to talk about their oppression and learn about their responsibility: to liberate themselves, their minds, and through armed and political struggle, other women in the region. I demonstrate how this process of learning to become ‘free’ is both emancipatory and coercive, arguing that while the liberation movement opens spaces for women, women can only participate in those spaces if they learn to become soldiers for the cause. The ethnographic data of this chapter adds another layer to my concept of militant femininities by paying attention to the matrix of domination and the intersecting power structures at work and puts forward a more nuanced analysis of agency.

Chapter 2 examines how the claim of difference and sustainability was organised and implemented by the Kurdish women’s movement in the political sphere of Diyarbakir, where the movement has a long-standing history of organising women according to party ideology and structures. I analyse how this struggle for space unfolded once the urban wars started in mid-2015, mapping out the tools and mechanisms of resistance used by the movement as a whole and the women’s structures in particular. This chapter gives space to the critical voices, residents not organised behind party lines, as they were caught in the frontlines between the PKK and the Turkish army.

The chapter addresses the launch of the PKK’s rural insurgency in 1984; although the circumstances did not favour armed rebellion, the PKK still managed to launch an armed uprising in rural Kurdistan and survive the challenging initial years to become deeply entrenched across the region by the end of the 1980s. On the ground, the PKK exhibited much ideological flexibility when framing its political project to potential supporters. The chapter also addresses some of the strategic errors the PKK made in this period, such as failed efforts to impose conscription on Kurdish youths and the massacres of civilians associated with the state-backed paramilitary forces, the Village Guards, outlining some the heterogenous motivations for participation in the VG and some of its unanticipated consequences. It also explains how Öcalan came to dominate the movement, through the party education system and the killing of potential rivals within the PKK. It also empirically examines how the PKK obtained local support, through forms of insurgent service provision and intertwining itself into the community by building familial ties and developing a consistent local presence.

Chapter 5 shows that aid facilitates the creation of a political architecture of control that pushes refugee people into self-disciplining behaviours, in the hope to be seen by aid agencies as conforming to a certain style of refugeehood. Specifically, I look at projects favouring migrant labour integration to show that migrant people can be attracted to or can decide to distance themselves from aid-funded projects for reasons that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the initiative (in this case, favouring migrants’ integration into the labour market). Rather, the structural constraints characterising the life of migrant people in Morocco (lack of legal mobility avenues, lack of access to public services, lack of access to decent work) pushes project beneficiaries to read aid-funded projects as disciplinary tools through which aid agencies can observe their behaviours.

Chapter 1 lays out the main argument of the book, asserting that insurgent groups’ dependence on their support networks ensures that to a certain extent they are obliged to respect their supportive constituencies’ ideological preferences and normative expectations. Relationships between armed groups and their constituencies are not stable and change over time as conflicts develop, ensuring that insurgent groups can also lose popular support. This chapter argues that this important dimension of insurgency is sometimes overlooked in favour of structural, ideological or resource-oriented analyses of conflict. It specifies how the book uses (or not) specific terminology and concepts like terrorism and Kurdistan. The chapter proceeds to discuss the difficulties in working with data in research on insurgencies. It argues that all forms of data – quantitative and qualitative – have inconsistencies and it backs the call for greater data transparency in conflict studies. It elaborates on some of the specific challenges related to data reliability on the conflict in Turkey. It describes the interview process, discusses the representativeness of the interview sample and the challenges of fieldwork. It finishes by outlining the structure of the book.

The Introduction presents the argument, theoretical approach, and methods underpinning the study of aid as migration control in Morocco. I argue that aid marks the rise of a substantially different mode of migration containment, one where power works beyond fast violence, and its disciplinary potential is augmented precisely by its elusiveness. I build on Foucault’s analytic of power to develop a framework that explains the coexistence of fast techniques of bordering with emerging instruments of indirect and elusive rule. I then build on Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of the ‘quasi-event’ to complicate our understanding of ‘benevolence’, ‘malevolence’, and co-optation into borderwork. I emphasise that the elusiveness of aid makes containment less visible and thus more difficult to resist for the actors orbiting around the aid industry. I compound these different threads of analysis into a discussion about power relations in the governance of the border.

Chapter 4 examines how the entanglement between care and control transforms aid into a tool that filters marginalisation without directly excluding migrants from basic service provision. By looking at projects providing social assistance to migrants living in the big Moroccan urban centres, I argue that aid rather mediates the marginalisation of migrants through their inclusion in a parallel network of care. Developing in the interstices of a tight border and of an indifferent Moroccan state, this care is volatile: it rests on bureaucratised logics of filtering that normalise the abandonment of migrants. This care is also unaccountable: the actors providing assistance enact mechanisms which allow them not to see themselves as responsible for migrants’ grievances.

The Conclusion retraces the argument foregrounded in the book. It reflects on recent events in border control cooperation between the EU and Morocco, and casts attention on future developments, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter also identifies future research avenues and formulates policy recommendations for development and humanitarian practitioners.

The last chapter takes an in-depth look at body politics and sexuality and aims to do two things: first, to unpack the often sidelined aspect of the fighters’ desexualisation. How is this part of the subjectivity produced, believed, maintained and policed? What are the tensions that emerge from creating a desexualised guerrilla army that comes down from the mountains to liberate society? Second, this chapter discusses what I call ‘party bargains’. I argue that women break out of their particular societal constellations by joining the party and enter a new bargain, this time with the party. It discusses three sites of party bargains: the fighter, the civil activist or politician, and the mother, whereas the three categories are overlapping. I demonstrate that in each case these party bargains hold great emancipatory power and that chosen abstinence (for the guerrillas) can be seen as one of the main tools of female resistance that strengthens the female ranks. However, this process goes hand in hand with a strict process of discipline and coercion, and I ask whether the sex ban is in fact at the heart of the new gender norms and relations in the making and key to the party’s ability to control its revolutionaries.