In a carefully choreographed ceremony on July 11 in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, 30 members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) symbolically burned their weapons. This unprecedented act was a signal of goodwill toward Ankara amid ongoing peace talks that both sides hope will end Turkey’s decade-long Kurdish conflict.

For years, liberal observers and peace advocates have imagined a resolution to this conflict as a key step in Turkey’s democratization, one that would be accompanied by full civil rights for Turkey’s Kurdish community. The current peace process, by contrast, appears squarely aimed not at liberalization but at consolidating Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s power.

In a carefully choreographed ceremony on July 11 in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, 30 members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) symbolically burned their weapons. This unprecedented act was a signal of goodwill toward Ankara amid ongoing peace talks that both sides hope will end Turkey’s decade-long Kurdish conflict.

For years, liberal observers and peace advocates have imagined a resolution to this conflict as a key step in Turkey’s democratization, one that would be accompanied by full civil rights for Turkey’s Kurdish community. The current peace process, by contrast, appears squarely aimed not at liberalization but at consolidating Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s power.

The question now is whether Erdogan and the PKK can succeed in resetting Turkey’s state-society relations and reshaping the parameters of political inclusion, all without any meaningful steps toward democracy. Put differently, can Erdogan succeed in giving the country’s authoritarianism a multicultural veneer?

Turkey’s relationship with its Kurdish population has historically been shaped by the country’s nationalist and centralized ideology that suppressed ethnic diversity in favor of a singular Turkish identity. The full-scale armed conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, which began in 1984, has claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced communities, and imposed severe political and economic costs. Despite attempts at political solutions since the 1990s, none have gotten this far.

A peace process initiated by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) between 2013 and 2015 collapsed into renewed violence—some of the most intense in the conflict’s history—leaving urban centers in the southeast heavily damaged. Since 2016, Ankara has also conducted military operations in northern Iraq to target PKK bases and in northern Syria to curb the influence of the Kurdish-led autonomous administration. Domestically, this period coincided with intensified anti-Kurdish nationalism, sweeping legal repression of Kurdish politicians, and the erosion of democratic space for Kurdish representation.

The current initiative for dialogue was publicly launched by Devlet Bahceli, the ultranationalist leader of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which governs in alliance with the AKP. Bahceli has long been among the most vehement opponents of a political resolution of the Kurdish conflict. In October 2024, however, he took the country by surprise when he formally

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