Sanctuary State - Insurgency Relations in Ethnic Conflicts: A New Explanatory Model

Abstract

Guerrilla leaders from Che Guevara to Mao Tse-Tung have emphasised, and countless examples from Afghanistan to Nicaragua have evidenced the vital importance of a sanctuary in the near abroad for the success of an insurgency. Given this significance it is astonishing how under-studied and under-theorized the relations between insurgencies and the states that offer them sanctuary are in the literature. This paper offers the first schematic model to systematically analyse the relations between a sanctuary state and its affiliated insurgency, grounded in social theory and centralizing both the nature of identity as a performatively enacted socio-political construct and the complex dynamics of insurgency-sanctuary state relations. The value of the model in capturing the range and complexities of the dynamics between an insurgency and ‘its’ sanctuary state is then tested against the case study of the sanctuary of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Iraqi Kurdistan.