ABSTRACT
The Kurdish question challenges the survival of Turkey as a nation-state. With the PKK’s armed struggle in 1984, the Kurdish insurgency acquired a lethal dimension. From 2005 to 2015, two peace processes were set in motion to resolve it. The first was in utmost secrecy in Oslo until 2011. After its failure, the second, from 2013 to 2015, was launched by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan with the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan acting as the chief negotiator. It also failed. Analysis of what went wrong in the peace process does not suggest a likelihood of it resuming in the foreseeable future, or a promise for the resolution of the Kurdish conflict. Since the failure of the peace process a sea change happened in Turkey and the country drifted from imperfect pluralistic democracy into increasing one-man autocracy. Staunchly anti-Kurdish Turkish nationalism became the ideological mainstay of the new regime that prioritised suppression of the Kurdish political expression. The Kurdish political actors that have taken part in the peace processes are demonised by the new regime of President Tayyip Erdoğan. Moreover, the international and regional circumstances do not seem conducive to the resolution of Turkey’s Kurdish question, which intertwined with that of Syria’s and thus acquired a more complicated and complex regional dimension.
