Description
The study of armed and revolutionary movements still leans on single-case narratives that travel poorly across regions. This paper sets out the Revolutionary Configuration Matrix (RCM), a comparative framework developed in my doctoral research, and applies it to three movements now passing through decisive transitions: the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its political wing in the current PKK–DEM process in Turkey, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria.
The RCM compares movements along several linked dimensions: strategic doctrine, internal organisation, the handling of coercion and governance, ideological adaptation, and external alignment. Rather than asking whether a movement is moderate or radical, it asks how these elements fit together, and which configurations let a movement move from armed struggle towards holding territory and exercising rule.
On that basis the paper offers testable propositions. It reads the PKK–DEM process as a managed shift in configuration rather than a simple peace settlement, and sets out the conditions under which the Taliban and HTS are likely to consolidate, fragment, or revert. The argument is that conflict and cooperation are not opposite states but points on a single trajectory the framework can track.
The paper speaks to the conference theme by treating cooperation as a strategic phase of conflict, and by offering a structured way to compare that phase across very different cases.