Abdullah Öcalan was born on 4 April 1948, to a poor family in the village of Amara, (Turkish: Ömerli), in the province of Urfa, in the Kurdistan region of Turkey. He was the third of six siblings.

An integral figure in the burgeoning Kurdish nationalist liberation movement in the 1980’s, he founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the armed wing of the Kurdish struggle for autonomy, in 1978. From 1984, the PKK fought for an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey, in a sustained popular uprising in which thousands of PKK guerrillas have fought the Turkish army, the second largest in NATO.

In 1999, Öcalan was captured in Nairobi and sentenced to death under Article 125 of the Turkish penal code, and when Turkey abolished the death penalty in support of its bid for EU membership, Öcalan’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. For the first 10 years in jail, Öcalan lived in solitary confinement as the sole prisoner on the island of Imrali, a condition that was temporarily lifted by the Turkish Authorities as it engaged with secret negotiations with the PKK in 2011. On 28 December 2012, the Turkish government announced that they had begun talks with Ocalan in order to bring about an end to the conflict.

Despite these conditions, Öcalan has continued to work actively for a resolution to the conflict, writing numerous books and articles on the history of the Kurdish people, the sources of the conflict and possibilities for peace. Having long abandoned separatism in favour of a new form of democratic confederalism, his nuanced analysis  has led him to contribute important proposals for democratic reform of the Turkish state, including, in 2011, The Road Map to Democratisation in Turkey, and Solution to the Kurdish Question. The text was illegally confiscated in 2009 by the Turkish authorities, who refused to release it to the European Court of Human Rights, as was intended, for 18 months.

The books written by Öcalan are available to order from the International Initiative