Benedict anderson5/28/2023 My realization that I was a positivist dogmatic was certainly connected to my isolation. So how does Ocalan explain his more recent change of heart? Here’s how he put it, according to a recent article by Eyüp Can in the Turkish daily Radikal: Many Turks have interpreted this as nothing more than a desperate willingness to appease the government that held him captive in the hopes of clemency. Since his arrest in 1999, Ocalan has repeatedly claimed that he is no longer seeking a new state for Turkey’s Kurds, but merely increased autonomy and cultural rights. The resulting relationship between a Kurdish terrorist leader and a renowned social scientist is certainly one of the strangest-and potentially most hopeful-stories to come out of Turkey this year.Īs the Turkish government conducts increasingly serious conversations with Ocalan aimed at ending Turkey’s forty-year struggle with Kurdish separatists, journalists have pointed to Ocalan’s intellectual conversion as evidence that negotiations can work. Ocalan is the revered and despised leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Anderson is the scholar whose book Imagined Communities is famous for introducing the idea that nations are social constructions rather than real entities. How Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities inspired PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s intellectual conversion.
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