ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the emergence of Kurdish political movements and violence in the contemporary period. The political field is an empirical and theoretical construction and the concept is deconstructed in the Kurdish context. The chapter looks into the emergence and autonomization of the Kurdish political field in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the formation and relative autonomization of the field more specifically with respect to the space of the Turkish left. The constitution of the field comprises a long process which involves three phases: Eastism, emergence of the Kurdish organizations and construction of new realities. The chapter analyzes the split of the field through internal violence. The intra-ethnic violence corresponds to two processes: fragmentation and segmentation. The fragmentation relates to intra-ethnic violence which takes place especially between Kurdish groups; Segmentation corresponds to intra-ethnic violence in communitarian level, namely the interactions between political movements and the Kurdish society.
