As was stated in the introduction to this study, the synthesis of opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and identity-framing is not intended to serve as a falsifiable paradigm or theory (if such a thing even exists in the social sciences). Rather, its intent is to focus analysis of social movements on the most important factors, serving as a theoretical framework of explanation. The Kurdish case has been examined here as a sort of heuristic application of these theories and their synthesis. In this sense, readers must judge for themselves the utility of the approach. Hopefully this study provides a sufficiently interesting employment of social movement theories to aid in such judgment.

The application of individual theoretical approaches to understanding social movements in Chapters 2-4 relied on the case of Kurdish ethnic nationalist movements in Turkey. Chapter 2 found that political opportunity structures (a version of structural approaches in general) were particularly useful for explaining the form that emergent challenger movements take. To a lesser extent, a greater understanding of the likely timing of movement emergence was also arrived at. In the case of resource mobilization and rational choice approaches, Chapter 3 arrived at a better understanding of how a movement that has emerged may build itself up. For movements such as the PKK that start with few or no resources, the RM-RC approach was particularly useful for illuminating the mobilization process.