When Frantz Fanon (1961) framed the legitimacy of anti-colonial armed struggle in The Wretched of the Earth, he likely did not imagine that his arguments would resonate, some seventeen years later, with a movement: Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK—Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), which would adopt armed resistance in the context of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey. Important scholars from Kurdish Studies as a specialization, such as Martin van Bruinessen, Sardar Saadi, and Hamit Bozarslan, have found Fanon’s framework crucial in interpreting the Kurdish armed struggle, particularly for those working in anthropology and cultural studies. However, since its establishment, the PKK’s armed struggle against colonialism has marked a turning point this past February. I argue this is not only significant for the organization itself but also a crucial moment of disarmament for debates on identity politics.
The simultaneous end of the Cold War and the palpability of identity politics—especially within American academia—gave rise to new disciplinary orientations, often building upon but also transforming older paradigms. This new turn certainly encouraged scholars to reconceptualize the Kurdish issue by resorting to postcolonial theoretical arguments to decolonize the powerful narratives about it. This paper, though, is not an attempt to tell the history of either the PKK or the wider Kurdish leftist armed struggle in Turkey, both of which have been well covered in detailed elsewhere (Bozarslan 2001; Çelik 2020). Yet this is not an essay on Kurdish life, struggles and alienation in Turkey’s urban peripheries, widespread in cities such as Istanbul (Göral 2017; Üstündağ 2019). Rather, this piece engages with a very specific political moment: tarihi çağrı (the historic call) made on February 27, 2025, by Abdullah Öcalan—PKK’s founder and imprisoned leader—who urged the organization to ‘dissolve’ itself.
In a public statement read in Kurdish by Ahmet Türk[1] and in Turkish by Pervin Buldan[2], Öcalan declared that the PKK had reached the end of its historical mission. He argued that outcomes such as separate nation states, federations, administrative autonomies, or ‘culturalist solutions’—products of excessive nationalist drift—can no longer offer answers to the “historical sociology of society.”[3] On could interpret this statement as a clear distancing from identity-based solutions, at least for the Kurdish left in Turkey.
Efforts to frame the Kurdish issue as a colonial problem and to emphasize “culturalist” solutions, as Öcalan did in the emergence and lifetime of PKK, have rarely found traction within the Turkish left. Even if I trace the genealogy back not only to the founding of the PKK but to earlier Kurdish student initiatives like the Revolutionary Cultural Eastern Hearths (DDKO—Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları) in 1969, I find this erasure. The approach of the Turkish left to the Kurdish question—often reduced to the label of the ‘Eastern problem’—remains ensnared in outdated paradigms. Indeed, many factions within the Turkish left, particularly those shaped by the 1968 political generation, have regarded the Kurdish armed movement either as a state-manipulated project or as a ‘real’ threat to revolutionary unity or resistance across Turkey. As my field notes illuminate, this perception effectively denies the Kurdish people’s legitimate demands for autonomy and cultural recognition, casting them as distractions or disruptions to the broader revolutionary cause of a nation-state.
This dynamic inevitably leads us to Gayatri Spivak’s (1985) critical question: Can the subaltern speak? In this context, the Kurdish armed struggle becomes an exemplary case of subaltern voicing that is systematically obscured—whether by Turkish nationalists or leftists. Türkmen (2021) extends this argument by ethnographically showing how even well-meaning multicultural policies or pan-ethnic alliances, such as the idea of “under the banner of Islam” fail to create the conditions necessary for subaltern articulation.
Öcalan’s call for the PKK’s dissolution, coupled with the shutdown of its key publication Serxwebûn—which had been active since 1979—and the broader geopolitical shifts following the collapse of the Kurdish peace process in 2015, drew particular attention in 2025. These developments coincided with changes in the Middle East, especially in Syria, where regime shifts and international power reconfigurations refocused attention on Rojava. As Küçük (2025) argues, such texts must be read not only for what they say but also for what they omit. Even if not explicitly stated, the call implicitly references demands for mother-tongue education, the end of state-appointed kayyım (trustee) in Kurdish municipalities, and broader recognition-based rights. However, as Küçük warns (2025), the concept of recognition can itself become a colonial instrument if not critically interrogated—it risks re-subordinating the subaltern under the guise of inclusion.
Nancy Fraser (2000), a central figure in theorizing recognition, argues that it should be understood in relation to, rather than in replacement of, ‘redistribution.’ She emphasizes that claims for recognition, when decoupled from material justice, may obstruct the pursuit of social equality, particularly if they reinforce a “false consciousness” (Fraser 2000, 22). In this light, Fraser’s call for a dual focus—simultaneously on redistribution and recognition—is crucial for imagining a socially just future (Fraser 2000, 23). Moreover, she asks whether recognition serves or brings social justice or simply self-realization, warning that institutionalized misrecognition constitutes a grave and inevitable injustice (Fraser 2000, 26).
As I have mentioned, critiques of the PKK’s potential dissolution from within the Turkish left—ranging from nationalist to supposedly internationalist perspectives through my ethnographic observations—often stem from a view that regards the Kurdish actors as junior partners or naïve subjects in a larger game. Yet, as Küçük and Fraser show, recognition is not a neutral or benign act. It must be decolonized, understood not as a hierarchical granting of visibility but as an embodied and collective demand. For people whose lands have long been colonized and whose resistance has been vilified, justice lies not in external validation but in the recognition of their own epistemologies of justice.
Considering these theoretical debates and the entanglement with the Kurdish issue, my own engagement with the topic is rooted in what I call ‘the anxiety of Turkishness’. This identification can be considered as taking Ünlü’s (2016, 397) concept of the “Turkishness contract” one step further. As Ünlü argues, this contract constitutes the cognitive and perceptual framework through which “Turks” understand themselves and the world—one that is historically saturated with ethnic affiliation, particularly Sunni-Muslim identity. Building on this, I want to highlight a particular form of anxiety—especially evident among the Turkish left as well as Turkish nationalists—which stems not simply from the presence of Kurdish identity politics, but from the potential disruption of the foundational coordinates of Turkishness itself.
As I have noted above, “Turkishness” here should not be understood merely as an established identity category, but as a normative structure that even the Turkish left finds itself bound to. For both nationalists and segments of the left, the Kurdish issue has long been framed as a question rather than a political actor or interlocutor, and this framing has important implications. For nationalists, it challenges the imagined unity of the civic Turkish nation; for the left, it fragments the universalist promises of class politics.
The recent announcement regarding the possible dissolution of the PKK was a moment that could have been interpreted by both camps as a step toward peace or reconciliation. However, it was instead met with strong skepticism and even resistance—especially on social media platforms like Twitter (now X) and through my ethnographic research with the members of 1968 political generation. While nationalist responses centered on distrust and the impossibility of Kurdish disarmament, the Turkish left rejecting the move revealed another layer of discomfort: the unease with the idea of ending identity-based struggle altogether, particularly when it is addressed via direct negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan.
I argue that this response reveals an unwillingness—conscious or not—on the part of the Turkish left to confront the end of a form of identity politics they have long criticized. It is not necessarily the end of armed struggle that disturbs them, but the potential collapse of a subaltern political horizon that helped define their own critical position. This paradoxical discomfort is rooted in what I describe as the anxiety of Turkishness: a fear that, even without subscribing to nationalist ideologies, recognizing Kurdishness as a political identity on equal footing with Turkishness destabilizes the very ontological security of Turkishness itself.
Thus, both camps—nationalist and leftist—continue to engage with Kurdish politics (often under the umbrella of a pro-minorities party, DEM—Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party) in ways that are structured by this anxiety. The fear is not only of redistribution or even recognition in a multicultural sense, but of having to confront Turkishness as just one ethnic identity among others—stripped of its hegemonic status. For Turkish nationalists, this constitutes a challenge to their imagined civic unity; for the Turkish left, it raises deeper contradictions in their critique of identity politics. In this sense, the puzzle is ontological for nationalists, and a political and epistemological dilemma for the left.
References:
Bozarslan, Hamit
2001 Human rights and the Kurdish issue in Turkey: 1984–1999. Human Rights Review, 3(1), 45-54.
Çelik, Adnan
2020 The Armenian genocide in Kurdish collective memory. Middle East Research and Information Project, 295.
Fanon, Frantz
1961 Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: François Maspero
Fraser, Nancy
2000 Rethinking recognition. New left review, 3, 107.
Göral, Özgür Sevgi
2017 Enforced disappearance and forced migration in the context of Kurdish conflict: loss, mourning and politics at the margin (Doctoral dissertation, Paris, EHESS).
Küçük, Bülent
2025 Dekolonyal Tanıma. https://ilketv.com.tr/dekolonyal-tanima/ (accessed June 29, 2025)
Küçük, Bülent
2025 Bölünme endişesi ve farklı kalma dengesinde barış çağrısı. https://ilketv.com.tr/bolunme-endisesi-ve-farkli-kalma-dengesinde-baris-cagrisi/ (accessed June 29, 2025).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
1985 Can the Subaltern Speak? Wedge.
Türkmen, Gülay
2021 Under the banner of Islam: Turks, Kurds, and the limits of religious unity. Oxford University Press.
Ünlü, Barış
2016 The Kurdish struggle and the crisis of the Turkishness contract. Philosophy & Social Criticism 42.4-5, 397-405.
Üstündağ, Nazan
2019 The Kurdish Movement. Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey: Conversations on Democratic and Social Challenges, 155-168.
[1] Ahmet Türk is a prominent Kurdish politician in Turkey. He has served as a member of parliament for several terms and is known for his role in pro-Kurdish parties and his advocacy for a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue.
[2] Pervin Buldan is a distinctive figure in Kurdish politics in Turkey. As a longtime parliamentarian and co-chair of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), she is known for her strong advocacy of Kurdish rights, gender equality, and democratic pluralism.
[3] Turkish version of the text: https://www.diken.com.tr/ocalanin-aciklamasinin-tam-metni/ (accessed June 29, 2025).