The Recognition–Security Paradox in the Kurdish Peace Process in Turkey (2013–2026)

Introduction
The Kurdish question in contemporary Turkey is more than a peripheral security challenge; it expresses a deep crisis in the political ontology of the modern nation-state. The prevailing literature explains the collapse of the 2013–2015 peace process mainly through event-centered, realist, or geopolitical accounts, such as the Syrian crisis, the rise of Rojava, or elite rivalries. These approaches cannot explain why the deadlock persists despite repeated tactical shifts in state strategy, from cultural opening to military repression.
This article argues that the failure should be traced to a structural “paradox of recognition and security”: two conflicting existential logics, the state’s instrumental-security rationality and the Kurdish movement’s ontological rationality, have lacked a shared semantic sphere. Building on Jenkins’ dialectic of external categorization and internal self-definition, and complementing it with securitization, symbolic violence, the state of exception, and necro politics, the study asks: how did the interaction between the state’s categorizing power and Kurdish self-definition cause the 2013–2015 failure, and do the developments of 2024–2026 signal a genuine transition or a tactical, elite-driven reconfiguration of the same cycle?
Methodology
The research follows critical social constructivism and a qualitative historical-documentary strategy covering 2002–2026, using abductive reasoning between empirical observations and theory. Data were organized into two archives. The hegemonic archive, tracing external categorization, includes counter-terrorism legislation, judicial packages, post-2016 emergency decrees, Erdoğan’s key speeches, and Interior Ministry documents on the trustee (Kayyum) policy. The counter-hegemonic archive, tracing self-definition and agency, includes Kurdish party statutes and manifestos, courtroom defense statements of political leaders, and theoretical texts on democratic confederalism.
Analysis combined critical discourse analysis (Fairclough) and qualitative content analysis (Bryman) in three stages: coding the discourse of power, coding the discourse of resistance, and a dialectical synthesis. Validity was strengthened by data triangulation against reports of the Council of Europe, Human Rights Watch, and the UN human rights office. The main limitation is the securitized research field, which restricts direct fieldwork and increases reliance on documents and secondary sources.
Result and discussion
The 2013–2015 process collapsed because of a conflict of rationalities. The state defined peace as PKK disarmament and individual, subordinate integration (“security first”), while the Kurdish movement demanded structural recognition and democratic autonomy (“recognition first”), producing a sequencing problem. After the Dolmabahçe statement (February 2015) and the HDP’s breakthrough of the 10 percent threshold (June 2015), politics turned toward re-securitization. The state was not unitary: a civil-hegemonic project around Erdoğan competed with a bureaucratic-security project, and after the break with the Gülen movement in December 2013, Erdoğan’s transformist alliance with former adversaries, including the MHP, sacrificed the peace process for political survival.
After 2016, the state of exception, lawfare, and symbolic violence combined into what the article calls bureaucratic necro politics. Through the trustee system, more than ninety Kurdish-majority municipalities were placed under appointed administrators by 2024, devaluing Kurdish political capital, turning electoral victories into grounds for repression, and eroding the democratic habitus, while collective trauma froze identities. The article models this as a “dialectic of structural disjuncture” at discursive, bureaucratic, and constitutional levels, sustaining a permanent gap between peace discourse and security practice.
The 2024–2026 developments, namely Öcalan’s call, the PKK’s dissolution, the parliamentary commission, and the August 2026 law, serve as a conditional test. They reflect change in internal self-definition but no symmetrical change in external categorization: trustee appointments continued, and implementation depends on National Security Council verification of disarmament. The evidence strongly supports the diagnostic claim that a purely security-based solution is insufficient, while the prescriptive claim of symmetrical recognition remains incomplete and reversible. Three indicators (elected versus trustee-run municipalities, Kurdish-language education, and administrative decentralization) place current developments in the scenario of “conciliatory management.”
To address Jenkins’ binarism, neglect of material power, and “resolution gap,” the article proposes the “transcendental patriotic contract,” built on dialectical escalation, necropolitical reaction, and contractual transcendence, the last emphasizing procedural democratic principles, a balanced constituent assembly, and asymmetric decentralization. These are normative, testable propositions, not empirically proven claims.
Conclusion
Peace in post-Kemalist and authoritarian states is the meeting point of two regimes of ontological security: the state’s search for security in a single-voiced definition of the nation and the minority’s search for it in recognition of difference. Until these are translated into a shared language of rights, representation, and institutional guarantees, a peace process may produce a new form of conflict management rather than resolution. Disarmament is an important condition for reducing violence but not a sufficient one; success must also be measured by changes in the legal definition of citizenship, guarantees of collective rights, and real distribution of authority. The decisive test is how the August 2026 law is implemented. Future research can test the theory comparatively in the Basque Country, Quebec, and Catalonia.