Turkey’s latest Kurdish opening is usually described as a peace process. That description may be too narrow.
The more consequential possibility is that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is attempting something larger: not merely ending the conflict with the PKK, but completing the construction of a new Turkish state whose political alliances, security establishment and definition of nationalism are fundamentally different from those of the old republic.
The Kurdish question may be the instrument through which this transformation is taking place.
On August 10, parliament approved the landmark Framework Law governing the PKK’s disarmament and the legal status of some of its members. The legislation passed with an unusually broad majority, including Erdoğan’s AKP, Devlet Bahçeli’s MHP and the pro-Kurdish DEM Party. It provides mechanisms for suspending some prosecutions and sentences and reintegrating former militants after the state verifies that the organization has disarmed.
This alone would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago.
But the most revealing feature of the law may be who ultimately controls the process. Implementation depends on verification by Turkey’s security institutions and the National Security Council. In other words, Ankara is not simply democratizing the Kurdish question; it is absorbing the settlement into a new state-security architecture.
That distinction is crucial.
From the Old State to Erdoğan’s State
For much of modern Turkish history, the Kurdish question was one of the foundations of the security state.
The military, intelligence bureaucracy, judiciary and nationalist establishment derived enormous institutional power from the struggle against separatism. The PKK was not merely an armed enemy. It helped define the boundaries of legitimate politics and even the meaning of Turkish nationalism.
Erdoğan may now be changing that equation.
If the PKK disappears as an armed organization and part of the Kurdish political movement is incorporated into a new political settlement, one of the old security establishment’s most important organizing principles also disappears.
The question then becomes:
Who defines the state after the war ends?
This is why the current process should perhaps be viewed alongside Erdoğan’s constitutional ambitions. Analysts have noted that Kurdish political support could become relevant to future constitutional changes and Erdoğan’s own political future.
Peace and power therefore do not have to be competing explanations.
The process can simultaneously reduce violence, respond to profound regional security changes and help Erdoğan redesign the political system around a new coalition.
But Where Does Bahçeli Stand?
Here the picture becomes more complicated.
It would be misleading to describe the MHP simply as the resistance center against the Kurdish opening. Bahçeli himself initiated the extraordinary political sequence in October 2024 by opening the door to a role for Abdullah Öcalan. He has continued to defend the process and has recently renewed his call for a new constitution.
The more interesting distinction may therefore not be Erdoğan versus the MHP, but between the emerging political order and elements of Turkey’s older nationalist-security establishment.
Some of those networks grew out of a very different conception of the state: fiercely secular, deeply suspicious of Kurdish political autonomy, hostile to political Islam and accustomed to seeing the security bureaucracy itself as the guardian of the republic.
Erdoğan spent his first decade fighting that state.
He later allied with parts of it.
Now he may be trying to subordinate it permanently.
And this is where another apparently unrelated development becomes interesting.
Why Kaşif Kozinoğlu, and Why Now?
Fifteen years after former intelligence officer Kaşif Kozinoğlu died in Silivri Prison, Turkish prosecutors have reopened the investigation into his death.
His grave has been exhumed. Forensic examinations are underway. Former officials have been questioned. Nine suspects had been jailed as of this week, and Doğu Perinçek has given testimony as a witness. Investigators are even examining claims surrounding the portrayal of a Kozinoğlu-like character in the television series Kurtlar Vadisi.
None of this proves that Erdoğan personally reopened the case to intimidate the old security establishment.
That distinction is essential.
But the timing inevitably raises a political question.
Why is a fifteen-year-old intelligence case suddenly being excavated precisely when Turkey is renegotiating the Kurdish question and, with it, the balance of power inside the state?
Some Turkish journalists have advanced an explicitly political interpretation. Adem Yavuz Arslan, for example, argues that the Kozinoğlu investigation may be functioning as pressure on nationalist and Eurasianist networks associated with figures such as Doğu Perinçek and Hasan Atilla Uğur. This remains an interpretation, not an established finding of the investigation.
Yet as a hypothesis about Turkish power politics, it deserves examination.
Because reopening old state files sends a message even before anyone is convicted.
It reminds former security actors that the past can become legally relevant again.
Erdoğan and Öcalan: The Dangerous Image
There is also an obvious political vulnerability for Erdoğan.
Any accommodation with Öcalan creates an extraordinary propaganda opportunity for his nationalist opponents.
The same Erdoğan who spent years presenting the PKK as an existential enemy of the Turkish state now presides over a process in which Öcalan has become an indispensable interlocutor.
Put Erdoğan and Öcalan into the same political frame and a damaging question can easily be posed to nationalist voters:
Who changed—the PKK or Erdoğan?
This may explain why the struggle over the narrative surrounding the process could become almost as important as the negotiations themselves.
There is, however, no established evidence that the old security establishment is conducting a coordinated campaign to portray Erdoğan and the PKK as partners in order to manipulate the next election. That should remain a hypothesis rather than a factual assertion.
But the political incentive certainly exists.
And Erdoğan has reason to understand the danger.
A Kurdish settlement might bring him Kurdish support. It might strengthen Turkey’s position in Syria. It might remove one of the republic’s longest-running security problems.
But handled badly, it could also fracture the nationalist constituency on which his political system has depended.
The Real Bargain May Be Inside the State
This leads to a different interpretation of the entire peace process.
Perhaps the most important negotiation is not simply between Ankara and the Kurds.
Perhaps another negotiation is taking place simultaneously inside Ankara itself.
Erdoğan needs Kurdish cooperation to eliminate the armed conflict and potentially broaden the political foundations of a new constitutional order.
He needs Bahçeli to prevent the nationalist electorate from treating that accommodation as betrayal.
And he needs the security establishment to accept that the state emerging after the PKK will not be the same state that fought it for forty years.
The reopened files of the old republic—including Kozinoğlu and potentially other unresolved cases—could acquire significance in precisely this environment.
Not necessarily because Erdoğan ordered them reopened as instruments of blackmail; there is currently insufficient evidence to state that.
But because in Turkey, control over the past has always been one of the instruments through which control over the future is negotiated.
Peace—or the Founding of a New State?
That may ultimately be the larger story.
Erdoğan inherited a Turkish state built around several old pillars: military guardianship, uncompromising secular nationalism, the Kurdish conflict and a bureaucracy that considered itself partially autonomous from elected governments.
He has spent more than two decades dismantling, absorbing or transforming those pillars.
The military was subordinated.
The presidential system replaced parliamentary government.
The intelligence apparatus became far more central to political power.
The old secular establishment lost much of its institutional autonomy.
Now the Kurdish question—the most durable security paradigm of the old republic—is being rewritten as well.
Seen from this perspective, the process underway is larger than reconciliation with the PKK.
It may be the final stage in Erdoğan’s attempt to replace the old Turkish state with Erdoğan’s state.
The central question is therefore not only whether the PKK will disappear.
It is what kind of state will emerge when it does.
And perhaps most importantly:
Who, inside the Turkish state, will still have a place in it?
