By Muhsin Aslan
Abdullah Öcalan’s long-standing, formative influence over the Kurdish political field is today undergoing what Michel Foucault would describe as an internal collapse of a disciplinary regime of power. For decades, Öcalan constituted an almost totalising centre—discursively and affectively. Yet this centre, rather than producing what Antonio Gramsci termed organic leadership and hegemonic legitimacy, increasingly resembled an organisation of cultural coercion. As a result, the Öcalan paradigm is experiencing not only political exhaustion but an epistemic one as well.
The sporadic texts and statements transmitted from Öcalan’s prison cell no longer generate the collective mobilisation they once did. Instead, they evoke what Frantz Fanon described as the pathological repetition of the colonised subject. His discourse no longer expands the horizon of national subjecthood; it confines it to a perpetual posture of deferral and suspension.
Öcalan as a Disciplinary Regime: The Regulation of Bodies and Discourse
Foucault’s assertion that “when power inscribes itself on the body, society itself is shaped” finds striking relevance in Öcalan’s historical influence. His role in shaping internal organisational discipline encompassed not only strategic decisions but also emotions, morality, daily conduct, and the very regime through which the subject perceived itself. This was not classical charismatic leadership but a form of behavioural engineering—a biopolitical arrangement of micro-power networks.
Today, however, this disciplinary regime is disintegrating. Discipline can operate only where the body and time are under constant surveillance; Öcalan’s prolonged isolation has decentralised the very discursive networks he once controlled. His discourse now circulates as a fragment of authority suspended in a void.
Gramsci and the Loss of Hegemony: The Break from Organic Leadership
For Gramsci, hegemony operates where consent is produced—not where sanctified authority imposes itself. The position Öcalan long occupied within Kurdish society was never truly organic hegemony; it was a simulation of hegemony transformed from charismatic coercion into manufactured consent.
That simulation has now collapsed.
Öcalan’s political messages increasingly synchronise with the strategic preferences of the Turkish state rather than producing societal consent from within Kurdish political consciousness. In Gramscian terms, the leader ceases to be a figure representing a social base and instead becomes a mechanism that manages, regulates, and limits it.
What remains is not hegemony but a rigid doctrinal culture.
Fanon and the Colonised Subject: The Alienation Produced by Öcalan’s Discourse
Fanon’s analysis of the colonised psyche resonates sharply within the contemporary Kurdish political field. In Öcalan’s discourse, Kurdish society—particularly Kurdish women—often appears as pathological, backward, or in need of “correction”. This mirrors Fanon’s notion of internalised coloniality.
Rather than emancipating society, Öcalan’s critiques create a zone of political psychopathology that renders the subject perpetually deficient, guilty, and dependent on further submission for rehabilitation. This is precisely what Fanon identifies as the delay of national consciousness: the nation becomes alienated within a leadership discourse that positions itself against the people it claims to guide.
The Conceptual Erosion of Democratic Modernity
The conceptual universe Öcalan constructs around “democracy”—democratic modernity, democratic confederalism, democratic society—functions less as a theory and more as what Foucault would call a legitimising discourse of power. The inflationary repetition of these terms has emptied them of substance. In practice, no institutional pluralism, no dissenting space, and no horizontal organisational principles have emerged.
In Gramsci’s terms, Öcalan’s “democracy” does not build authentic self-governance; it rebrands an already hegemonic dogmatism as democratic theory.
The Structural Crisis of the PKK: The Collapse of a Foucauldian Dispositif
For many Kurds, the PKK today resembles a dysfunctional version of what Foucault termed a dispositif of power: enclosed, internally punitive, doctrinaire outwardly, disciplinary inwardly, and increasingly collapsing under its own internal logic.
The urban warfare of the mid-2010s was not merely a strategic failure; it exemplified Fanon’s idea of misdirected national energy. Rather than destabilising colonial power, it produced irreversible devastation within Kurdish communities themselves.
The Structural Limits of One-Man Politics
Öcalan’s historicised leadership produced what Gramsci warned against: a monopolisation of legitimacy around a single figure. This monopoly facilitated the Turkish state’s use of the Öcalan figure as a mechanism of control. The collective political subject was reduced to a single biography; political imagination was tethered to the life, isolation, and pronouncements of one man.
A Post-Öcalan Horizon: Fanonian Resubjectivation and Gramscian Re-Hegemonization
The future of Kurdish politics necessitates transcending Öcalanism. This transition is not an act of enmity but, in Fanon’s terms, the subject’s rediscovery of its own authentic voice. It demands, as Gramsci theorised, a new form of organic leadership: not a figure who represents society from above but a pluralistic hegemonic formation arising from within society itself.
The Kurdish people must break from Foucauldian cycles of disciplinary power, construct the hegemonic autonomy theorized by Gramsci, and cultivate the decolonised, self-producing subject envisioned by Fanon.
The post-Öcalan era is precisely this: the historical juncture at which the Kurdish political horizon emerges from the shadow of one man and reclaims its own collective capacity.
