August brought some truly transformative good news for Turkey, the Kurds, and Turkey’s immediate neighborhood in the Middle East. On Aug. 10, the Turkish Parliament passed a law establishing a legal framework for the dissolution of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Kurdish militant group, and creating a phased pathway for reintegration of its members into society.
For more than four decades, the Kurdish issue has run like an electrified barbed wire through conversations in Turkey. The armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish government has killed around 40,000 militants, soldiers, and civilians, and cost Turkey losses estimated to be around $2 trillion since 1984. Following peace talks, in July 2025, the PKK held a symbolic weapon-burning ceremony, starting a process of disarmament and moving toward ending the armed conflict.
The law offers legal protections to former PKK militants who have not committed specific crimes and helps suspend prison sentences for some members of the group. Thousands of sympathizers, activists affiliated with the PKK, and Kurdish politicians have been living in exile in Europe and elsewhere to escape legal prosecution. The law opens a path for them to return to Turkey. And the passage of this law in the Turkish parliament with broad support is a transformative step toward lasting peace and the creation of a new social contract between Turkey and the Kurds, domestically and regionally.
How to make peace
In the past decade, Turkey established clear military dominance in the fight against the PKK. Changes in military technology, intelligence, and surveillance systems, especially the rise of Turkish drones, strengthened the country’s counter-insurgency efforts. Yet Turkey’s military capacity to suppress an insurgency was not the sole factor in persuading the PKK to give up arms. Turkey did suppress waves of Kurdish rebellions in the past without creating space for Kurdish aspirations, and each suppression was followed by a more formidable and more violent rebellion.
Turkey’s embrace of a political process—instead of simply pursuing a decisive military path—to end the conflict made it more acceptable to the PKK leadership and the Kurdish movement. Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, had to persuade his comrades to dissolve their organization, abandon the armed struggle, and choose political struggle. Unfavorable broader regional trends against armed militancy may have helped convince Ocalan and his comrades to make that consequential choice.
The legitimacy of the political solution, in the eyes of the Kurds, determines its sustainability and transformative impact. The current peace process seeks to end the insurgency and transform the struggle for Kurdish rights and aspirations into a nonviolent political one. It could transform Turkey’s relations with its own Kurdish community and the Kurdish communities in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Leaders of the Kurdish movement believe that they can achieve more through politics than through armed struggle, and that it isn’t only they who are transforming, but that the state, political, and legal systems in Turkey can also change. The promise of the future, rather than being beholden to the grievances of the past, is the way forward.
The Turks and the Kurds managed it without relying on foreign peacemakers or mediation. The disarmament and demobilization process for the PKK was designed, executed, and monitored domestically, without involving any foreign mediators. The talks were held between Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, Ocalan, and several other leaders of his group based in the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan and across Europe. The process involved the Turkish parliament and political parties through a Parliamentary Committee, formed in Aug. 2025 to work on legal and political dimensions of the PKK’s dissolution, which helped garner broad support for the peace process across political divides in Turkey.
Turkey and the Kurds have entered a new phase that demands greater buy-in for the peace process from politicians, lawmakers, ordinary people, and from the institutions that will implement the new law. To ensure the peace process has broader societal support, the political class will need to make clear why it matters and what it promises. The stakes of getting that right are high for Turkey and extend beyond its borders.
Seeing like a state
The nation-state in the 20th century largely adopted a conception of nationhood based on a single identity and was intolerant, assimilationist, or exclusionary toward other identities. The effect was to politicize and mobilize the very groups it sought to submerge. This was true of Turkey as well. The Turkish Republic was based on a single identity and an overly centralized state with its own insecurities, largely stemming from the traumatic experience during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Today, Turkey needs a new conception of the nation-state that is inclusive of different identity groups, and a new idea of a strong state that is premised on broader societal legitimacy. Centralization coupled with exclusion is a recipe for societal discontent, which weakens, rather than strengthens, the state. Turkey’s real challenge is building an inclusive national identity that recognizes distinct identity groups without losing the thread of what binds them together. The task of the ongoing Kurdish peace process, and the Kurdish politics that will follow it, will be to achieve exactly this: an inclusive notion of national identity capacious enough to accommodate Kurdish identity and aspirations.
The current political mood in the Middle East and elsewhere is not one of militant groups and insurgencies. The broader trend runs toward their integration into state structures or their disarmament and demobilization. How these processes of demobilization and integration are carried out will be highly consequential. If they rely solely on coercion, rather than embracing persuasion and the prospect of mutual transformation, disarmament risks being a prelude to the next cycle of violence, waged under new names and banners.
Demobilization of insurgent groups succeeds when it rests on the prospect of mutual transformation. The armed groups dissolve themselves and remake themselves as political actors, who cease to be adversaries of the state and work as agents of its transformation.
The state and the polity, in turn, must transform alongside them, arriving at a more inclusive conception of national and geopolitical identity. In Turkey, it would mean embracing Kurdishness and honoring Kurdish political, democratic, and cultural rights, and regarding the Kurds outside of Turkey’s borders not as threats but as allies.
The PKK’s demobilization will reshape Turkey’s threat perception, and with it, Turkey’s approach to Kurds in Iraq, Syria, Iran and their countries. Already, in step with the pace of the PKK disarmament, the language used by Turkish officials and Kurdish actors across the region towards each other has improved significantly.
Fruits of peace
Turkey and its neighborhood have already benefited from the peace process and the demobilization of the PKK. That process faced two formidable tests in Syria and Iran and passed both. Turkey treated the PKK’s demobilization at home and the integration of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—led by a Kurdish militia with close ties to the PKK—into the Syrian state as parts of a single process.
After the fall of the Assad regime, reuniting a fractured Syria became one of the most formidable tasks for the new government. The SDF controlled almost a quarter of Syrian territory. Limited fighting and military pressure earlier in the year helped shift the balance, stripping the SDF of a large portion of the land it had held.
What helped make the SDF’s integration into the Syrian state relatively smooth was the peace process already underway in Turkey, given the SDF’s close ties to the PKK. August brought two momentous developments: Turkey’s parliament passed the landmark legislation providing for the disbanding of the PKK, the reintegration of its fighters and the dismissal of charges against thousands of its sympathizers and prisoners; and the SDF announced its own dissolution.
A parallel drama played out during the Iran War. There were fears that the Iranian Kurdish militant group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, or the PJAK, might join the American war against Iran. Given its close ties to the PKK, such a move could have weakened the PKK’s commitment to disarmament and risked a new phase of conflict among Turkey, the PKK, and the PJAK. Despite pressure from the Trump Administration and Israeli plans to draw them into the conflict, Iranian Kurdish groups stayed out of the war. The peace process in Turkey was a major factor in persuading them to remain on the sidelines.
Together, the Syrian and Iranian cases reveal the power of political imagination and legitimacy in advancing national security. In both instances, Turkey has achieved more through political engagement than through military force. Any national security doctrine devoid of political imagination or legitimacy remains incomplete. The tests posed by Syria and Iran have demonstrated the PKK’s commitment to demobilization, confirmed that its decision is strategic rather than merely tactical, and helped build trust between Turkey and the PKK.
This process will also have considerable implications for Turkey’s relations with major powers. No issue has bedeviled Turkish-American relations more than the Syrian civil war did before the collapse of the Assad regime. At its core, that crisis reflected the conflicting American and Turkish approaches to the Syrian Kurds, specifically the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a PKK affiliate that, with American military advice and support, was later rebranded as the SDF.
By enabling the SDF’s integration into the Syrian state, the PKK’s demobilization has removed the most formidable sticking point in Turkish-American relations, clearing the way for closer cooperation between the two countries in Syria and beyond. Ocalan framed the recently passed Turkish law as the first step of a 1000 kilometer journey. The Turkish model, and the peace it promises, are still a story in the making. Despite the milestones already reached, formidable challenges remain, demanding persistence and commitment.
No two conflicts or two peace processes are alike. Yet the central message is universal: peace is possible and leadership matters. Long-running conflicts around identity are not fates to be endured but political questions to be settled. In a world still defined by war and insecurity, the story of peacemaking is, inherently, a global one.
