Turkey’s Struggle with the Kurdish Question: Roots, Evolution, and Changing National, Regional, and International Contexts

Abstract

The Kurdish question in Turkey is a deep-rooted issue that dates back to the Ottoman times. The most current and bloodiest Kurdish insurgency group, the PKK, caused not only a high volume of violence, but also social and political instability in the recent political history of modern Turkey. To curb the PKK problem, Turkey employed a wide variety of countermeasures throughout the conflict. Embracing different paradigms as the conflict unfolded, Turkey’s countering policies emerged as “Iron-fist” oriented intense securitization and repression and led to the PKK’s military defeat in 1993. Turkey then embraced accommodating, “motive-focused” oriented policies to remove certain legitimate identity-related grievances after Ocalan’s capture in 1999 (Unal 2011). Meantime, the PKK also employed significant shifts in its strategy, i.e., from a top-down military approach to a bottom-up politico military campaign, to coerce Turkey into a political concession in a long lasted tit-for-tat struggle. This study argues that, despite the military defeat, the PKK has been able to maintain its threat level during the entire span of the conflict that has culminated in Turkey’s recognizing the stalemate and shifting to a conflict resolution paradigm in 2007. However, what led Turkey to commence a peace process toward a negotiated settlement has been, in addition to the perceived stalemate, the critical developments in the Middle Eastern Region—i.e., Arab Spring, Syrian Civil War, and, most importantly, the changing role of the PYD, a non-state Kurdish actor in Northern Syria, affiliated with the PKK, that would lead to power shifts among actors (both state and non-state) in the region.