A Relational Perspective on Land in Armed Conflict: Analysing the Village Guard Mobilisation in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article examines the Turkish state's Village Guard system, revived in the 1980s as part of its counterinsurgency strategy against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). While often framed as a defensive militia, the Village Guards became central to the state's exceptional governance in Kurdistan, both facilitating military control and enabling significant socio‐economic and demographic transformation. Drawing on scholarship on paramilitarism and fieldwork in the village of İslamköy, the article offers a relational perspective that understands the Village Guards not merely as instruments of state violence, but as active political actors who reshaped local power dynamics, gained access to land and resources and reconfigured rural livelihoods. It argues that paramilitary mobilisation in Kurdistan reflects complex, locally embedded power relations rather than tribalism or state repression alone.