Re-writing the USA After the Cold War

Abstract

This chapter attempts to understand how the PKK as an anti-American movement continued to be attractive for its followers when it radically changed its symbolic other, US imperialism, in the 1990s. As part of this attempt, the chapter tackles how the 1991 Gulf War created a dislocation for the PKK’s imagination of the USA, and how the post-Cold War human rights discourse of the USA played a significant role in the transformation of the PKK’s discourse of US imperialism. Despite a radical change in PKK’s perception of the USA, references to US imperialism in the PKK’s political language did not end. Rather, the PKK developed a dyadic stance toward the USA during the 1990s and later. This dyadic stance was not a contradiction when it comes to the PKK’s armed struggle against the Turkish state. While the PKK delegitimized the Turkish state through the identification of Turkey as the puppet of US imperialism in the region, it reconsolidated this delegitimization by appropriating criticisms by the USA toward Turkey’s human rights violations.