Containing Ethnic Conflict: Repression, Cooptation, and Identity Politics

Why do states target some civilians with collective punishment while coopting others with material goods during an ethnic civil war? This article examines how the Turkish government calibrated its repression and cooptation policies towards the Kurdish population during the counterinsurgency of the 1990s. In contrast to the situational conflict dynamics emphasized by the civil war literature, we explain the distribution of cooptation and repression with the state’s identity policy: government policies were more punitive in areas that displayed strong Kurdish linguistic/political identity, or high tribal concentration, while they were more cooptative where the government had fostered a Sunni-Muslim Kurdish identity. The study is based on a novel dataset that includes information about displacement, tribal concentration, and violent events from archival sources.