Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a case study from the urban margins of Istanbul, the paper examines the enduring legacy of Cold War counterinsurgency warfare in refashioning dissent against the state. It illustrates the links between counterinsurgency and civilian violence.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on a case study from the urban margins of Istanbul, and illustrating the role played by the RAND cooperation (American counterinsurgency think thank) in crafting new warfare paradigms to suppress the allignment of leftwing and pro-Kurdish dissent in Turkey, my paper examines the legacy of Cold War counterinsurgency warfare in refashioning dissent against the state. The growing literature on the enduring legacies of the Cold War counterinsurgency techniques mainly underlines the pacification effect of counterinsurgency and does not focus on the low-intensity conflict doctrine. I show the ways in which the low-intensity conflict doctrine, which played a crucial role in provoking counterviolence in the Cold War era, still informs counterinsurgency attempts of bottom-up reconstruction of dissident forces in a way to counter existing and/or prevent emerging forms of alignments among dissident populations. Ultimately, I illustrate the links between counterinsurgency and civilian violence from the vantage point of counterinsurgency's productive concern not merely with "suppressing the enemy," but also with fundamentally shaping it and its relation to society.