Resurgence and Revolution

Aliza Marcus is the author of Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. She is formerly an international correspondent for The Boston Globe and lives in Washington, D.C. Marcus covered the PKK for more than eight years, first as a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, and later as a staff writer for Reuters, receiving a National Press Club Award for her reporting. She is also a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant for her work.

"If you really wish to know the story of the PKK, the Kurdish movement which, more than any other, mobilised Kurds in their struggle for freedom, Aliza Marcus' Resurgence and Revolution, in tandem with her previous Blood and Belief, brilliantly lets the PKK membership tell their own story, their successes and travails in Turkey, Syria and more widely from 1999, when Abdullah Öcalan was captured, until what may prove the PKK's final disarmament in 2025. Her book is replete with detail and insight, and thus essential reading for understanding not only the course of the PKK's campaigns, but the mind-set and controversies behind them." - David McDowall, author of A Modern History of the Kurds "The PKK is among the most important and least understood insurgencies of recent decades, and no one knows it better than Marcus. This is a gripping historical narrative about the struggle to build a Kurdish national movement in the Middle East, full of remarkable testimonies and insights from the warriors and diplomats who were at the center of it. Marcus's book braids together several extraordinary threads: a tragic history of war and dispossession, a bold effort to create a new form of democracy, and the cult-like powers of the PKK's imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Resurgence and Revolution is the best book I know on the troubled Kurdish effort to build a national home over the past few decades." – Robert F. Worth, author of A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS "In recent decades, the Kurds have emerged as major players in the Middle East. There is nobody better able to explain the dizzying changes for the PKK – the dominant Kurdish actor in Turkey and Syria – than Marcus. Resurgence and Revolution tells the extraordinary story of how the PKK, a US designated terrorist organization, sponsored a Syrian Kurdish movement that engineered a social revolution in the most conservative part of Syria and became America's main ally in the war against Islamic State and al Qaeda. Marcus draws on decades of personal experience to create a narrative that is fantastically well researched and highly readable." - Ambassador Peter W Galbraith, author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End "Marcus' book tells the complicated, fascinating story of the PKK, the most important Kurdish nationalist group in Turkey and Syria. Told with a storyteller's verve and authoritatively informed by extended interviews with key participants, Marcus is an empathetic but skeptical narrator: Her approach blends scholarly detachment with a willingness to inhabit the swirling narratives to understand people's motivations and capture the realities of how and why the PKK has managed to continue its dominance in the region. As she did in her masterful earlier work, Blood and Belief, Marcus illuminates the compelling, wildly contradictory , and ruthless Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK's founder and still its leader, even after more than three decades in prison in Turkey." - Amb. William Roebuck, Former Deputy Special Envoy to the Global Coalition Against ISIS