The evaluation of the effectiveness of counterterrorism policies on the PKK-inflicted violence during the democratization process of Turkey

Abstract

This study tries to explore the relationship between soft-line governmental policy interventions of Turkey and the responses of the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers’ Party) by using time series data from 1995 to 2010. The negative binomial specifications for two models, the number of incidents and the number casualties are used. The aggregated impact of soft-line policies on the level of violence is found to be positive and significant. In one hand, Turkey’s EU accession process had a decreasing impact on PKK inflicted violence. On the other hand, the Active Repentance Law increased the violence in the short run. It was found that defiance based governmental policy interventions of Turkey had an increasing impact on the PKK-inflicted violence.