ABSTRACT
Despite official claims to the contrary, the main factors fuelling militant activity in Turkey have always been indigenous, primarily social alienation and exclusion on the grounds of identity. The state’s response to leftist and Kurdish nationalist organisations has long been heavily securitised, making little distinction between practitioners of violence and those who peacefully advocate similar ideological goals. Militant Islamists have been treated differently, their methods and goals being regarded as a distortion of, rather than inseparable from, Islam itself. The continued lack of comprehensive de-radicalisation programmes risks the creation of large numbers of recruits for militant Islamist groups in the future.
