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On the 28th of July, a 26 year old man, Ahmad A. launched a knife attack in a supermarket in the Barmbek area of Hamburg, wounding four people and killing one. He fled the scene of the attack before being forcefully apprehended by some bystanders. The attacker, a rejected asylum seeker, was understood by the police to have been recently religiously radicalised. Hamburg's Interior Minister Andy Grote explained that he was known to the police as an "Islamist but not a jihadist" and was suspected of having psychological problems. Prosecutors have asserted that he had no known connections with any organized radical network or group and that he had planned on dying as a martyr.

Defence date: 18 November 2014 ; Examining Board: Professor Donatella della Porta, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Olivier Roy, European University Institute; Professor Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University; Professor Jocelyn Viterna, Harvard University. ; The supportive environments which sustain armed groups are arguably an understudied aspect of political violence; it is widely acknowledged that all armed groups necessitate a degree of popular support if they are to be successful but the relationship between armed movements and their supporters is often underdeveloped or considered self-explanatory. This project puts forth the argument that the relationship between armed groups and their supporters is of fundamental importance to how and where armed groups mobilise and the repertoire of contention they adopt. Making use of Malthaner's concept of "constituency" (2011a), the PKK's armed struggle from its foundation in the 1970s until 1999 will be analysed. The particular manner in which the PKK actively constructed and maintained extensive support networks across contrasting socio-spatial contexts ensured its ongoing legitimacy and the material resources necessary for its survival. Although a noted power disparity exists between armed and unarmed actors, the relationship between them is always characterised by degrees of reciprocal influence; influence that is often expressed in a variety of subtle and contextually specific fashions. The project will therefore examine the dialectic between the PKK and its communities of support and how this has evolved over time and space from rural Kurdistan to the urban centres of western Turkey, and consider how it has impacted on the nature of violence deployed by the PKK in the course of its insurgency.

Armed movements are usually analyzed in the context of ongoing conflict, and much of the preceding mobilization and recruitment is often given far less attention. In this article, we assert that this period can be of critical relevance to subsequent movement trajectories. Analysis of the period antecedent to insurgency also facilitates a deeper contextualization of movement actors and their environments. We examine the period of preconflict mobilization for PKK and the FLN/EZLN, two movements of comparable interest due to their successful urban-to-rural transitions. We contend that the establishment of cross-class, locally based constituencies in both cases was critical to their consolidation as armed movements. We discuss the cases in relation to three main parameters: their immediate social environment, the role of the state, and the strategies adopted by the respective movements.