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Volume 13
Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories
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Following the Path of the Martyrs
Death and Revolution in the Kurdish Freedom Movement
Axel Rudi
340 pages,
ISBN 978-1-80768-057-2 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (January 2027)
Reviews
This is one of the finest books ever written on the PKK and is one of the best books I have had the pleasure of reading in years. It is a deeply thought-provoking book that leads the reader to reconsider their own conclusions on the movement and on martyrdom more broadly. Francis O’Connor, European University Institute
This book is academically rigorous and empirically extremely rich. I not only enjoyed reading it, but I also learned a lot. This is a masterpiece about the martyrdom, but it goes beyond martyrdom as it tells the reader what the PKK is from A to Z. Kamal Chomani, Kurdish Peace Institute
Description
Providing a novel, ground-up perspective on the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s revolutionary struggle, this book explores supporters’ political commitments and practices in Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian Kurdistan as well as in the German diaspora. Binding the movement together across all these sites, it argues, is a common obligation to the movement’s martyrs, which guides and shapes the struggle in various ways. Through complex relations between the living and the dead, the book contends that the movement’s political structure should be seen as founded on a social order of sacrifice.
Axel Rudi is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has published on sacrifice, sovereignty, egalitarianism and conspiracy among other topics. He has published extensively in journals such as History and Anthropology, Focaal, and Social Analysis.
