Why and how do people engage in a radical movement? To answer this question, this paper analyses two Kurdish movements in Turkey, the PKK and the Hizbullah, under three different aspects. First, the constitution of radical groups is explained as a way for political entrepreneurs without social and economic capital to mobilize ressources. Radicalisation is also results of the competition with others groups belonging to the same political field. Secondly, personal dispositions are actualised during the process of adhesion. Here, the first group of militants linked by strong and multiple links has to be distinguished from the second generation, more likely to be made up by isolated individuals. Finally, the paper analyses two ways to bridge the old values of the primary socialization and the new world of the party: values such as charism and honor (namus) work in both universes and biographies (or autobiographies) allow individuals to recreate a coherence in their self-perception.

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In December 1977 an independent candidate named Mehdi Zana was elected mayor of Diyarbakır, one of the biggest cities in Turkey's southeastern region. His election was a striking event, upsetting the troika of class, party, and state that had maintained a tight hold over the local political apparatus in Diyarbakır since the 1940s. Unlike most prior mayors of Diyarbakır, Zana did not come from a prominent family of local notables but was a working-class tailor with a middle-school education. He was one of only two independent candidates who won electoral contests in Turkey's sixty-seven big-city races; his election therefore flew in the face of a national trend that favored candidates from the country's two main political parties. Zana was well known for his left-wing, Kurdist politics, and at the time of his election he already had spent several years in jail for his activism. In a system that suppressed collective expressions of Kurdish identity, he was thus a clear ideological interloper.