How come the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state restarted a dialogue? This piece attempts to make sense of this dialogue not as a domestic anomaly, but as a symptom of a broader global transformation. As the crisis of the liberal international order gives way to a global war regime, all political actors are compelled to reposition themselves. What is unfolding in Turkey, thus, is not a resolution of conflict but a renegotiation of its terms in face of the ongoing global chaos. This renegotiation, I sustain, is structured by assigning new meanings to “anti-imperialism,” “fraternity,” and “paradigm” whereas these concepts previously justified direct confrontation between the two sides of the conflict.
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The word “peace” carries a difficult ambivalence at the core of a central division. On the one hand, in mainstream International Relations, it is commonly defined as the absence of war—that is, a condition in which political entities do not inflict physical violence upon one another. In this sense, it appears to address a basic human desire for safety, and thereby seems to invoke a quasi-natural human condition. On the other hand, any instance of peace is deeply entangled with the political structures that make it possible. In the existing modern world, peace—particularly in the narrow sense of non-war—is never a natural occurrence; it is always produced through political and social struggles, through negotiations, and through the layered settlements that follow. What renders this problematic is that peace is inseparable from the positions of the “winner” and the “loser” in any historically situated struggle. In this sense, every form of peace is also the imposition of a structure of violence: the winner dictates the terms of peace, and these terms consolidate privileges for some through forms of domination directed at others.
As simplistic as it might initially sound, the structure of our current colonial/modern world system exemplifies this dynamic. Consider Fanon’s reading of peace: it is nothing but the colonial regulation and legitimation of violence against the colonized. In this framework, peace becomes a name for acceptable violence—violence that is legitimized and operationalized through world political processes. The victor, in this configuration, is unambiguously the former colonizer. Despite the formal end of colonialism, neo-colonial economic structures and the enduring coloniality of power continue to shape the global order in ways that systematically privilege the former colonizers. What appears as peace and prosperity for some is, for others, a condition marked by ongoing violence, military interventions, extractivism, and famine. Beyond that, this structure imposes a trajectory where the colonized are compelled to ‘develop’ in the image of the West. Not only is this structurally unfeasible—given the West’s ongoing hegemonic control that continously reproduces its privileges—but the very possibility of a peace untethered from structural violence has been historically foreclosed by the colonial configuration of the postcolonial world: borders drawn, privileges allocated, and political elites installed through these processes. Ultimately, we are speaking of a world order in which the possibility of peace—as the absence of war—is entirely dependent on the unconditional acceptance of existing power hierarchies.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ conclusions on the paradigm of war are indispensably important. For him, the paradigm of war refers to a mode of conceiving humanity and social relations that privileges war as a foundational logic. The coloniality of power, which undergirds this paradigm, is not incidental but structural—emerging through the historical trajectory of modernity itself. Modern institutions such as the state, the inter-state system, international law, and dominant conceptions of the human are direct products of colonial power. They are not neutral developments but formations that arise through conquest and colonization, and are stabilized through the continuous operation of a war logic. The world is thereby mapped, both conceptually and materially, as battlefield and as the afterlife of battlefields. War ceases to be an exceptional rupture and becomes the defining feature of existing politico-social structures. Within this configuration, any definition of peace premised on the absence of structural violence is rendered untenable. It is precisely this paradigm of war that constitutes the architecture of the world as we know it.
The role of nationalism and the nation-state is central to the paradigm of war. In the global North, the legitimacy of the nation-state is so firmly entrenched that the hierarchical and coercive structures it relies on are rarely questioned. But at this point this is secondary to the concerns of this piece. In the global South—or, more accurately, in states that do not fully belong to the global North—the nation-state operates as a distinct structure of violence. First, it rests on arbitrary borders imposed by colonial powers. Consider, for instance, the effects of the Sykes-Picot Agreement on the Middle East. It is also a structure that formalizes sovereign equality among states while legitimizing deep, informal inequalities between peoples. One only needs to ask whether Belgium and Congo could ever be equal in material or political terms, despite their formal status as “equal” states. Internally, postcolonial state formations reproduce the logics of colonial modern power by legitimizing specific politico-social groups at the expense of others: the question is not only whether Baloch people could ever be equal to other Pakistanis, but whether Muslims and Hindus in India, or non-Muslims and Muslims in Turkey, have ever stood on equal ground. These and countless other examples reproduce the conditions under which the paradigm of war sustains itself and continuously regenerates conflict-prone terrains.
But this paradigm of war cannot continue in its existing form—not anymore. The collapse of the liberal international order is now fully underway. Originally, this order claimed to rest on liberal notions of rules, institutions, and international cooperation. It began to take shape in the aftermath of the Second World War, consolidated with the end of the Cold War, and gradually morphed into a neoliberal project marked by economic aggression and militarised governance. From the 2010s onwards, the crisis of this order became increasingly visible, and today we speak not just of its crisis but its end. Three interconnected processes have driven this collapse: internally, liberal representative democracies began to generate authoritarian political trajectories. Trump’s United States is the most visible case. Externally, the rise of Asia—particularly China—has begun to reorder global political and economic relations in ways that gradually displace the West from its hegemonic position. Simultaneously, mass protests and insurgent movements across the globe, from the Arab uprisings to Black Lives Matter, have exposed, delegitimized, and at times dismantled the very structures of domination that once sustained the liberal international order. What we now face is not a transitional moment but what Hardt and Mezzadra have called a global war regime. The liberal order, for all its limitations and hypocrisies, once provided a thin regulatory frame for international relations. But even that frame has disintegrated. What remains is a global terrain of chaos, in which various forces scramble to navigate the crisis and recalibrate their political practices in a world no longer structured by liberal hegemony.
These are the global conditions under which renewed dialogues have emerged between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state. Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Grey Wolves, represents a fascist and racist mobilization rooted in Turkish supremacy, with ideological genealogies that stretch back to the last century of the Ottoman Empire. What does this global reconfiguration mean for the respective positioning of the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state? I approach this question through the contested meanings of three central concepts that structure the current phase of the conflict: anti-imperialism, the fraternity of Turks and Kurds, and the new paradigm. I illustrate that these concepts function in two entirely different registers: for the Turkish state—as spoken through the mouth of Bahçeli—they signal nothing beyond the survival of the state itself. For the Kurdish movement, however, they open the possibility of consolidating and advancing its broader political project.
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The different meanings of “anti-imperialism”
The central divergence between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state on the question of anti-imperialism lies in the distinction between nationalist and left/anti-colonial traditions. The nationalist approach is essentially aligned with the paradigm of war as discussed by Maldonado-Torres. It is grounded in the perceived existential threats facing the imagined nation amid regional and global turbulence. Here, anti-imperialism functions not as a critique of domination per se, and it does not challenge the structural forms of domination in the region. Rather it functions as a defensive discourse aimed at securing state survival in the face of shifting geopolitical configurations.
In contrast, the left anti-colonial perspective—articulated through the ideological and political positioning of the PKK—understands anti-imperialism as a critique of the colonial constitution of the regional state system and the forms of violence it enables. This includes the homogenizing nationalism of regional states, the reproduction of millennial patriarchal structures, and the restructuring of national capitalisms to benefit entrenched elites. In this frame, anti-colonialism calls for a fundamental transformation of society, not the preservation of territorialized domination.
Still, the divergence between these conceptions does not preclude convergence in practice. The state has not abandoned its project of hierarchy, nor has the PKK relinquished its struggle for liberation. But the geopolitical conditions have produced a moment in which cooperation, however temporary, becomes strategically necessary.
Different meanings of “Kurdish-Turkish fraternity”
One of the central dynamics of this process is the discourse of Kurdish-Turkish fraternity. For the Turkish state, this fraternity was invoked as a necessity during the independence war but then largely disappeared through the colonial domination of the Kurds, until the emergence of the Kurdish liberation movement in the 1970s. Since then, it has functioned mainly as a rhetorical device to deny Kurdish fundamental rights. The Islamist version of this discourse has been similarly instrumentalized, not only to disappear the Kurdish identity within the Turkish Islam, but also to erase the very existence of non-Muslim peoples—a logic that underpins the Armenian genocide. The Turkish state’s notion of brotherhood is encapsulated in the phrase “Kurds and Turks are like flesh and nail.” The Kurdish response exposes the asymmetry: “The Turks are the flesh, the Kurds are the nail; flesh is permanent, but the nail can be cut off and discarded.”
From the perspective of the Kurdish movement, fraternity is reconfigured through the principles of radical democracy. This is reflected in every political formation established by the movement, most visibly in the Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK) and the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party). Here, the intellectual premise is that antagonism among national, religious, or confessional groups is not intrinsic but is produced by power. The emphasis is then on organizing collectively against structures of domination.
The process underway is not the product of the state abandoning its logic of exclusion, but rather a recognition that the elimination of the Kurds is no longer feasible, domestically or regionally, thus opening the way for a tactical engagement. For the Kurdish movement, by contrast, the aim is to leverage this moment to advance a substantive fraternity grounded in radical democracy and genuine social multiplicity.
Different meanings of “paradigm”
Another key concept shaping this process is that of a “new paradigm.” As a concept, paradigm refers to a set of assumptions, values, references, and practices. It provides the cognitive and normative framework that helps interpreting the truth to make some while excluding others. In the context of the Kurdish question, the state’s paradigm has long been defined by a security logic: Kurds were constructed as a separatist threat and as a barrier to the imagined homogeneity of the Turkish nation. This position mandated assimilation into Turkishness and militarised a century long politico-social problem, a rather unambiguous articulation of the paradigm of war. Opposed to this, the Kurdish movement developed an anti-colonial paradigm: Kurds as a distinct nation with the right to self-rule. While the model transformed from a Kurdish nation-state to democratic autonomy, the foundational claim to political self-rule remained.
What marks the current moment is not a complete shift in paradigms, but a mutual recognition of their limits. The Turkish state, confronted with its inability to eliminate the Kurdish movement, has stepped back to consider forms of engagement. The Kurdish movement, in turn, has acknowledged the limits imposed by the overwhelming power asymmetry. What emerges, then, is not a fully articulated new paradigm, but a shared conviction that the existing ones have exhausted their possibilities. Coexistence, rather than confrontation, becomes the provisional ground. Though what is being explored remains largely undefined, and thus, it would be premature to speak of an accomplished paradigm shift but the convinction on both sides is that the paradigm should shift.
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All in all, the current process between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state must be understood in the context of a tranformation from the paradigm of war to a global regime of war. The paradigm of war indicates a peaceless world, where space is configured as battlefield between nation-states, or more broadly, between containers of modern domination. It is a structure legitimized by various nationalisms that justify state violence in the name of integrity and survival. This framework has long been foundational to the architecture of modern world politics. Yet we are now witnessing an unprecedented transformation: the emergence of a global war regime, marked by violent renegotiations of existing world political settlement. This shift is directly linked to the collapse of the liberal international order. To be clear, the paradigm of war is not over. Rather, the instability produced by this collapse has compelled political actors across the globe to reconfigure their approaches to war and peace, conflict and cooperation, in an attempt to survive the broader turmoil.
My argument, then, is straightforward. The process unfolding in Turkey is embedded in this global transformation. Both the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement have begun to reinterpret core political concepts—anti-imperialism, fraternity, and paradigm itself. This mutual, if uneven, reconfiguration is precisely what has made the current process possible.
