He prepared his first anthropological study, an investigation of one of the last nomadic Kurdish tribes, the Alikan, here, which he submitted in 1967 to the Ankara Faculty of Political Sciences.

[3] His book The Order of Eastern Anatolia: Social-Economic and Ethnic Foundations, first published in 1969, in which he sought to adapt and apply Marxist concepts to the analysis of Kurdish society and to the processes of socio-economic and political change taking place, made him a public enemy.

He was detained and put on trial for communist and anti-national propaganda where he was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment for violating the indivisibility of the Turkish nation.

Continuing to write and speak in spite of all attempts to silence him, Beşikçi has become a powerful and important symbol for the Kurds and for the human rights movement of Turkey.

Beşikçi argues that, for all their political differences, there is a longstanding understanding between these regional states to deny Kurds the right of self-determination and nationhood.

[5] In 2010 he was again prosecuted, this time by the attorney general of Istanbul for “PKK propaganda” on account of an article on "The rights of the nations to self-determination and the Kurds" that he wrote for the "Association of Contemporary Lawyers".