Securitizing the Kurdish Question in Turkey Through the Societal Security Sector : A Constructivist Perspective

الملخص

The Kurdish question has been one of the most enduring and complex challenges to the nation-state building process in Turkey since the establishment of the Republic in 1923. Historically framed within a realist, state-centric security paradigm that emphasizes territorial integrity and military responses to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) insurgency, the conflict has resulted in profound human costs, political instability, and tensions in Turkey-EU relations. The traditional security approach, however, fails to adequately address the identity-based dimension of the conflict.

This article aims to re-examine the Kurdish question not as a conventional military threat, but as a societal security issue. Drawing on the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, the study seeks to analyze how Kurdish ethnic identity has been constructed and securitized as an existential threat to Turkish national identity.

 The study employs a qualitative, theoretical analysis based on the securitization theory developed by Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, grounded in social constructivism. It applies the core components of securitization — securitizing actors (the Turkish state, political and military elites), referent object (Turkish national identity, language, and the principle of indivisibility of the state), existential threat (Kurdish demands for cultural-linguistic rights and political recognition), and extraordinary measures (constitutional bans, Law for the Reestablishment of Order, Resettlement Law, Articles 3, 14, 42 of the 1982 Constitution) — to trace the evolution of the issue from the early republican assimilation policies to the post-Cold War period.

The analysis argues that the securitization of Kurdish identity is a product of the post-World War I nation-state model and the civic-nationalist project that conflated all citizens into a homogeneous Turkish identity. While the post-1999 period witnessed a partial desecuritization attempt through cultural reforms, the societal security dilemma persists, as the state's efforts to sustain its traditional patterns of language and culture directly clash with Kurdish claims for recognition as a founding element of the Republic.