Routinised Insurgent Space (RIS)

This project bridges the literatures on insurgent movements from the fields of Rebel Governance and Social Movement Studies. It goes a step beyond insurgent actors’ coercive capacities to analyse their strategic use of space as a means to obtain support and political legitimacy. It uses an innovative concept, routinised Insurgent space (RIS), to disaggregate the insurgents spatial ordering of their immediate social environment. It focuses on four specific instances of this type of RIS which re-occur across insurgent movements of different ideological orientation: Insurgent justice and policing, insurgent service provision, insurgent prison organisation and insurgent funerals. It draws primarily on two case studies, the M-19 in Colombia and the PKK in Turkey, using extensive qualitative interview data (fieldwork Bogota 2018 and ongoing interviews with the Kurdish  diaspora in Europe), primary sources (movement publications and biographies) and local media sources from the periods under analysis.