Securitisation via functional actors and authoritarian resilience: collapse of the Kurdish peace process in Turkey

Abstract

By combining two separate strands of research, the comparative authoritarianism literature and securitisation theory, this article examines the question of why the Kurdish peace process in Turkey failed. By analysing the Turkish government’s treatment of the pro-Kurdish opposition, the article argues for a novel conceptual proposition on a securitisation mechanism of authoritarian resilience in electoral politics. It argues that the incumbents attempted to use the peace process (de-securitisation of the Kurdish issue) not for democratisation but for authoritarianism (by co-opting the pro-Kurdish opposition) and when that failed, they re-securitised the Kurdish issue, repressed the opposition and established an authoritarian regime thanks to justification of securitisation. The article contributes to both securitisation and authoritarian stability theories by showing that for authoritarian stability, depending on its needs and context, a government can successfully securitise, de-securitise and re-securitise the same issue with the use of the same functional actor in each stage.