• A. Çelik - ‘Keep your mouth shut in the day and your door shut at night.’ Intra-Kurdish Violence in the Shadow of the State: The case of Hizbullah in Kurdistan of Turkey

    Çelik, Adnan. 2021. “Keep Your Mouth Shut in the Day and Your Door Shut at Night". Intra-Kurdish Violence in the Shadow of the State: The Case of Hizbullah in Kurdistan of Turkey. Kurdish Studies 9 (1). pp. 37-57. https://doi.org/10.33182/ks.v9i1.563.

    This article focuses on the main three limitations of the current studies on Hizbullah, an Islamist organisation in Turkey operative during the 1990s: the lack of historicisation of the trajectory of Hizbullah and its members, the lack of consideration of the spatial dimension of its spread and the absence of grounded studies about how it has functioned at the local level. Taking the case of Silvan, a small town in the province of Diyarbakir, the article investigates and analyses Hizbullah’s repertoire of action in the shadow of the state, the degree of coercion it achieved in different spaces, its targets, and its conception of the world. The paper argues that the extremism and intensity of the PKK-Hizbullah violence is said to have expressed a completely new type of intra-Kurdish conflict within the long intra-Kurdish conflict history.