An Alternative to Nationalism: The Kurdish Movement in Turkey

This paper will analyse the Kurdish movement’s embracement of democratic confederalist ideology from a security perspective. The purpose of this study is to understand why the Kurdish movement turned from ethnonationalism to an anti-statist ideology. I argue that the Kurdish movement embraced democratic confederalism in a bid to facilitate the de-securitization of the Kurdish issue. The Kurdish movement in Turkey was born as a nationalist, anti-colonialist independentist movement. The Turkish government responded to the Kurdish issue by securitizing it and hence, considered only military responses to address its long-standing minority issue. However, in the 2000s, the Kurdish movement embraced democratic confederalism, an ideology that rejects nationalism and separatism, in favour of local self-government within existing state borders. Through this attempt to relocate the Kurdish issue from the security sphere to the ordinary political sphere, the Kurdish movement hoped to achieve a political settlement between the Turkish government and the Kurds.