938401

research-article2020
CAC0010.1177/0010836720938401Cooperation and ConflictÇelik

Original Article

Cooperation and Conflict

Agonistic peace and

1­–18
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720938401
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720938401
analysis of a failed peace journals.sagepub.com/home/cac

process and the role of

narratives

Ayşe Betül Çelik

Abstract
This study analyzes how peace processes in socio-political environments that do not support
‘confronting the past’ (CTP) initiatives are affected by the exclusion and delegitimization of
alternative narratives different from dominant ones concerning the nature and history of ethnic
conflicts, focusing on Turkey’s failed peace process as a case study. It pays specific attention
to the resistance against acknowledging alternatives to dominant narratives by considering the
role played by bystanders and antagonistic citizens, who are not directly part of the conflict but
nonetheless support it by remaining passive or directly/indirectly supporting dominant narratives.
Driven by agonistic peace theory, the article shows how failing to turn these groups into agonistic
citizens through some form of agonistic CTP initiative and allowing a space for alternative
narratives can result in the fragility of efforts towards a transition to peace.

Keywords
agonistic peace, confronting the past, ethnic conflict, Kurdish issue in Turkey, narratives, peace
processes

A wealth of literature on peace processes shows their fragility. Although there is no sin-
gle factor accounting for success of peace processes and peacebuilding, one of the most
important among factors that make them fragile is political exclusion (Call, 2012), espe-
cially of minorities. While scholars have paid attention to whether and how minorities’
perceived or actual deprivation of an expected opportunity to participate in state admin-
istration was addressed during peace processes (Westendorf, 2015; Wolff, 2009), facili-
tating the public expression of their conflict narratives has largely escaped attention.

Corresponding author:
Ayşe Betül Çelik, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Sabancı University, Orhanlı, Tuzla, Istanbul 34956, Turkey.
Email: bcelik@sabanciuniv.edu
2 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

Moreover, when this has been addressed, the emphasis has mostly been on the necessity
of creating shared histories through negotiating these narratives with hegemonic ones to
open a new page of co-existence (Staub, 2006), mostly ignoring how peace processes are
affected by the exclusion and delegitimization of such narratives, and by the resistance
of different groups to accepting their presence in socio-political environments not sup-
porting ‘confronting the past’ (CTP) initiatives.
Agonistic peace literature emphasizes the importance of turning antagonist/enemy
groups into agonistic ones/adversaries (Aggestam et al., 2015; Maddison, 2014; Mouffe,
2000; Shinko, 2008). First, in such transformations it is essential that historically delegit-
imized and unaccepted conflict narratives also find a public space to be expressed with-
out necessarily being accepted by the whole society. Such expression helps change
certain groups, who reject alternative narratives or remain silent against injustice, and
consequently support the conflict without necessarily being directly part of the armed
conflict. Second, peaceful transformation of conflicts also necessitates turning these
groups into agonistic citizens so that not only do they allow this space for alternative
narratives (without necessarily accepting such narratives), but also such transformation
changes the conflictual relations (especially between the minority and majority groups)
to make peace efforts more powerful.
Establishing peace requires working at various levels of damaged relations: between
state and individuals, state and groups, and among various groups in the society. A holis-
tic and thick approach to peace requires designing different mechanisms to transform
these damaged relations. Peace processes can fail due to many reasons concerning these
levels and contextual factors affecting the process: lack of political will of the conflicting
parties, focusing solely on the political elite level, poor peace process design, not being
able to respond to changing political and social environment, resisting to spoiler effects,
and so forth. Most studies on peace focus on the power of the parties in conflict, their
negotiation (or lack thereof), and the behavior of the state and the armed group
(Westendorf, 2015; Wolff, 2009), limiting such perspectives to establishing only thin/
negative peace centred around the decision-making level. Such focus undermines the
necessity of transforming group relations at the societal level, especially concerning the
role narratives play in affecting inter-group relations. This prevents developing a thick/
positive peace, but can also affect other levels of peacebuilding. For example, failure to
design mechanisms to allow alternative narratives to find a public space and to use this
space to turn antagonistic citizens into agonistic ones hinders developing policy recom-
mendations about CTP mechanisms at the mid-level leadership and designing them at
high-level leadership. As argued by Bashir, ‘neutralizing history’ by breaking with the
past, and ‘bracketing history from politics’, ‘follows the logic of the perpetrators’ (2016:
21). Therefore, there is a need for a political will to support CTP initiatives at various
levels of peacemaking. Such an approach does not imply that transforming inter-group
relations through allowing space for alternative narratives and transforming antagonists
are the most crucial needs for peace processes to succeed, but that the failure to under-
stand the resistance against alternative narratives contributes to their fragility.
This article is an attempt to address the gap in literature in terms of understanding the
resistance against acknowledging alternatives to dominant narratives, by analysing
Turkey’s failed peace process. Its main argument is that in fragile peace processes, such
Çelik 3

resistance by antagonistic groups and lack of an agonistic dialogue to turn them into
agonistic citizens adds to the likelihood of failure of the peace process, along with other
factors. The article builds on the arguments of Maddison (2014) and Aggestam et al.
(2015) on agonistic peace and dialogue. Maddison argues that a sustained, intensive, and
relational work, which she calls ‘agonistic dialogue’, is needed to transform societies and
to engage across deep differences to facilitate better inter-group relations. Following the
‘political, plural, and open-ended nature of peacebuilding theory and practice’ suggested
by Aggestam et al. (2015: 1,737), this article further argues that the failure of a sustained
dialogue as a political project with a strong political will to allow plural and open-ended
narratives to be heard at the societal level during the peace process in Turkey contributed
to the escalation of violence after the failure of that process.
The next section will discuss CTP processes, and the role the antagonistic narratives
play in peace processes dealing with ethnic conflicts, followed by a brief history of the
peace process in Turkey, and an analysis of the need for CTP at the societal level. The
article will conclude with a discussion of what the Turkish example can tell us in terms
of agonistic peace and CTP.

Agonistic peace and CTP in peace processes

Working from agonistic democracy theories, and building on Mouffe’s work (2000),
scholars recently coined the term agonistic peace/peacebuilding to refer to ‘creating a
political space in which a friend/enemy relationship can be reframed and transformed
into one of legitimate adversaries’ (Aggestam et al., 2015: 1,738). Conflict is a natural
part of inter-group relations, and agonism is ‘attentive to the social and cultural interde-
pendence of identities’ (Shinko, 2008: 478) and acknowledges identity conflicts as inevi-
table but transformable to agonistic relations.
Agonistic peace literature argues that transition to peace need not be a consensual
process but one that allows the establishment of agonistic relations between the histori-
cally antagonistic groups. It rests on the assumption that difference of opinion between
conflicting parties is so deep that it is hard to achieve consensus on certain issues in the
society. Thus, it is important to let these conflicting narratives co-exist rather than trying
to find total consensus, and celebrate ‘diversity by means of a conflict-ridden pluralism’
(Tekdemir, 2016: 652).
In many societies, while conflict parties in peace processes address the institutional
(e.g. power-sharing arrangements) and legal aspects of the conflict (e.g. constitutional
reforms), they undermine inter-group relations, especially when groups have not engaged
in open confrontation with each other. In contrast to cases where groups have openly
fought each other and accused each other as perpetrators, in cases where there is an
armed conflict between the state and an ethnic group (as in the case of asymmetric con-
flicts like that of Turkey), many hegemonic narratives, which are accepted by leaders and
the majority of the society as valid stories (Bar-Tal, forthcoming), focus on the assumed
‘peaceful relations’ among groups. Peace processes consequently emphasize the need for
forward-looking inter-group relations rather than promoting societal CTP efforts since
this can open the Pandora’s box. In fact, narratives—while serving as guidance to further
collective practices—also provide ‘a description of past events, an epistemic basis for the
4 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

justification of present objectives and policies’ (Bar-Tal, forthcoming: 5). In this sense,
when counter-narratives are not accepted by the society, this can support the continuation
of the present state policies, and facilitate the rejection of the minority groups’ demands
for peace.
At the same time, when efforts to listen to citizens’ narratives are imposed as a top-
down mechanism without a strong and sustained political will and the depth and inten-
sity such processes would require (Maddison and Diprose, 2018), dominant group
members can perceive peace processes as projects of dividing the country, manipulation
by foreign powers, a plan of high treason, and so forth. Moreover, such efforts can also
disregard how minorities’ narratives are easily dismissed by the members of privileged
groups in the society since they do not necessarily aspire to bring these groups into an
agonistic dialogue aiming at an understanding of difference rather than creating a shared
conflict history (Maddison, 2014), and because such groups have little to gain from
including minorities in dialogue and collective narratives (Strömbom, 2019).
CTP can be considered as one of the most contested aspects of peace processes since
it accompanies other elements such as responsibility, compensation, apology/forgive-
ness, re-thinking national history and re-designing political institutions and laws so that
such injustices would never happen. It ‘validates the experience of the victims’, and such
validation is essential if victims are to transcend the history of domination and abuse and
prevent its re-occurrence (Rouhana, 2004: 37). In this sense, CTP has both backward-
and forward-looking goals: while making unheard narratives public, it also aims at mak-
ing democracy more inclusive by producing counter-narratives to the hegemonic
institutionalized and national history, and re-designing politics to give more voice to
ethnic groups.

Dominant narratives, bystanders, and antagonistic citizens

Transition to a peaceful society requires re-establishment of group relations in a way that
ensures mutual recognition of the Other and its own history. In this process, the role of
the bystanders and antagonistic citizens becomes very crucial. Especially in asymmetric
conflicts, such as ones like the Kurdish issue, where minority groups have less power
vis-à-vis the state, which has historically been favoring the majority, such recognition
can be challenged by the majority groups. In such cases, agonistic citizens do not recog-
nize the existence of a societal dimension of the conflict and can prevent the challenges
against dominant narratives, which serve as barriers for agonistic peace.
The concept of bystandership was introduced by scholars of the Holocaust to describe
the civilian population passively tolerating and supporting atrocities committed against
the Jewish population (Lucic, 2013), and was extended to groups in conflict keeping
silence against the wrongs done by any party against any other. Different from a conflict
party, who directly engages in an open violent confrontation with an Other, bystanders
remain silent by witnessing the conflict (Staub, 1993), and are ignorant of the pain of that
Other. However, their passivity makes it easier for them to distance themselves from the
victims (Staub, 1993) and close their ears to their narratives. Although the line between
the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders is imprecise and ‘any non-resisting bystander is
also guilty of oppression and that everyone, even the primary oppressor, is ultimately a
Çelik 5

victim of an oppressive system’ (Hill, 2010: 29), we can talk about the bystanders’ role
in conflicts as adding to the oppression by their passivity, omission (Hill, 2010), and pas-
sive support of repressive regimes. Thus, the range of bystandership can include those
who unintentionally remain silent as well as those who, by socialization and being
exposed to dominant narratives, believe in the conflict-supporting acts and narratives.
With their silence and inattention to alternative narratives, they contribute to what
Khoury (2016) calls the ‘narrative wars’. Driven by the agonistic peace approach dis-
cussed above, therefore, we can argue that transforming bystanders into agonistic citi-
zens who do not reject alternative narratives by exposing them to these narratives is an
important aspect of peace processes, especially in cases where the conflict has mostly
taken place between a state and an ethnic minority.
What happens in asymmetrical conflictual power relations in such ethnic conflicts is
that society only hears about the ‘terrorism of the ethnic group’ without listening to the
sufferings of ethnic minorities, preventing disengagement from one’s own ethnocentric
narratives and perceptions. If and when such narratives find an epistemic opening to be
voiced, bystanders emphasize the need for a forward-looking perspective rather than sup-
porting the establishment of social and political mechanisms to address past injustices.
Bystanders stay passive against contemporary and historical wrongs, which encour-
ages perpetrators who see their actions ‘as acceptable and even right’ (Staub, 1993: 316).
Their role of indirectly supporting the dominant conflict narratives can contribute to the
continuation of the status quo that privileges them. The definition of a bystander may
also include antagonistic minorities who support conflictual acts and antagonistic narra-
tives. However, studies show that in asymmetric conflicts, minorities are mostly sup-
portive of democratic norms, such as equality, liberty, and acceptance of difference
(Gürses et al., 2020)—the elements of agonistic peace (Mouffe, 2000). Also, antagonis-
tic narratives of the minorities may not be strongly expressed, especially in countries
where the state criminalizes such discourses, leading minorities to refrain from their
public expression.
Even though bystanders may not necessarily have an antagonistic position, they,
nonetheless, are not agonistic, either since they close their ears to the alternative narra-
tives or do not accept their legitimacy. However, turning bystanders (who are less con-
cerned about the fate of others experiencing inequality, even violence) and antagonistic
citizens (overall) into agonistic citizens is an under-appreciated aspect of a transition to
peaceful societies (Staub, 2003: 11). Such transition not only enables them to question
their prestigious positions in the society but also breaks their resistance to listening to the
alternative narratives without necessarily accepting them. However, turning them into
agonistic citizens during a peace process is a hard task, since it:

entails differing risks in terms of threats to national identity and national narrative, political
restructuring, and permanent political loss. The risks and costs for the high-power group are
generally greater, because by definition, rectification of the injustice involves upsetting a status
quo and ending the perpetrators’ dominance . . . The more powerful party usually develops a
system of defense mechanisms against moral arguments, and its members can become immune
to the moral case of their victims [or the victims of the state mechanisms they support]
(Rouhana, 2004: 38–39).
6 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

Thus, it can be difficult for these groups, who have been educated and informed by
nationalist discourses, to engage in a dialogue with the historical ‘enemy’ in what
Ramsbotham (2010) calls ‘radical disagreements’. Long-lasting ethnic conflicts result in
‘conflicting perceptions, embattled beliefs, hardened attitudes, opposed “truths,” seg-
mented realities, contrasting mental worlds, antithetic ideological axioms, incompatible
beliefs, alternative mental representations, differing views about reality, divergent dis-
cursive representations, [and] different discourse worlds’ (Ramsbotham, 2010: 286).
These narratives supporting conflict justify, explain, and rationalize violence and its con-
tinuation (Bar-Tal, forthcoming).
Both individual and socio-cultural factors can support dominant antagonistic narra-
tives. Historical de-valuation of a group (through such narratives as ‘minorities betrayed
us!’), present negative stereotypes and beliefs, strong respect for authority and tendency
to obey authority, commitment to a violent ideology (Staub, 1993), and increasing secu-
rity concerns in the shadow of violence and mobilized by nationalist sentiments of lead-
ers, can desensitize people and move them to remain passive (as in the case of
bystandership) or even support violence towards a group through their antagonistic posi-
tions. In addition, because there is a possibility that the power position of the dominant
group may be lost through acceptance of other possible narratives and because re-
humanization of the Other can increase representation of these groups in the institutional
structures, their resistance may increase—although this would not necessarily be a con-
scious choice.
In ethnic conflicts, the nationalist ideology of the dominant group produces a ‘sacred
history’ and motivation to kill and be killed for the nation, making it hard for bystanders
to accept major divergences. In holding this line, they indirectly support the conflict,
even though they may not be voluntarily engaging in a direct armed confrontation with
the Other. To transform these relationships, such groups need to be encouraged to accept
each other’s legitimacy (Rouhana, 2004), and to listen to each other without necessarily
agreeing with each other’s position. Listening and understanding enable people to recog-
nize that the Other has a story, re-humanizing the demonized enemy, and shattering sim-
plistic, polarizing good-versus-evil narratives. An epistemic openness to listening to the
adversary’s narratives can thus play an important role in broadening the transformation
of the conflict, by bringing alternative stories to the attention of the public (Bashir, 2009:
55), and turning some bystanders and antagonistic citizens into civic friends by under-
standing the needs of the ethnic groups whose rights have been violated. Such dialogue,
however, needs to take place in a secure environment, be sustainable, and be supported
by a political will. Agonistic peace, as argued by Strömbom (2019), requires that politi-
cal will to change institutions be linked to the affective dimensions of processes of rec-
ognition and acknowledgment (not necessarily acceptance). In the absence of security in
a peace process that ignores the relational and affective aspect of the conflict through
short-term policies that are not carefully designed, such dialogues can provoke violent
reactions rather than providing epistemic openings between these groups. Moreover, if
peace processes fail, such fragility can increase intercommunal violence and encourage
states to increase securitization measures.
What complicates the possibility of such agonistic dialogue attempts even further is
the multiple and complex past injustices done to different groups in a society. While CTP
Çelik 7

requires accepting the uniqueness of the group members’ experiences due to their mem-
bership in that group, when peace processes exclude injustices done to other groups and
focus solely on mistakes along one identity line (e.g. ethnic identity), they can be resisted
by those who feel like second-class citizens. Such an approach creates a sense of ‘hierar-
chy of pains’, and the feeling that the Other’s pain is not important enough to be con-
fronted. Agonistic CTP practices imply that there will not necessarily be a shared
representation of history or a common language to refer to the conflicting events, thus
parties in conflict might choose different reference points from the past to justify their
positions.
In reaching out to all members of the society and listening to these stories, the tools of
communication, such as the media, have tremendous responsibility in shaping public
opinion so as to reflect the whole picture of the conflict. Especially in long-lasting con-
flicts, people learn and pass on to the next generation these learned causes of conflicts
(understood as ‘terrorism’ for the dominant group and ‘suppression’ for the minority in
ethnic conflicts). If parties’ cognitive efforts for epistemic understanding of the conflict
situation are reinforced by media through ‘selective information processing and biased
interpretation of acquired information’ (Bar-Tal, 2000: 353) or if the state blocks com-
munication about the Other’s reality to the general public, the conflictive ethos (Bar-Tal,
2003) becomes harder to transform. Consequently, peace efforts at this level can only
lead to civic friendship if communicative and cognitive channels are opened.

Methodology
In making the above arguments, this article makes use of the reports of the Wise People
Committees (WPCs) composed of 67 people from academia, journalism, civil society,
politics, business, cinema, and the music industry selected by the Turkish government
from a list prepared during the second phase of the peace process (2013–15). WPCs
facilitated a space to discuss the history of the conflict to understand how citizens per-
ceive it as well as to provide an opportunity for the government to learn the demands,
fears, and needs of the different parts of the society.
Specifically, WPCs aimed to explain the peace process to the society and ask about
their opinions. Since they did this by bringing together the diverse group of people, they
facilitated a societal dialogue, and, as the reports show, WPCs’ intervention in these dis-
cussions allowed the minority narratives to find a public space. However, as they did not
have a structured agonistic peacemaking design and because these attempts were short-
lived, they failed to turn bystanders and antagonists into agonistic citizens. Nevertheless,
WPC reports provide invaluable data to analyze what kinds of narratives were expressed
for or against the peace process, and to what extent these reflect opportunities for agonis-
tic peace. The analysis below uses these narratives to analyze the extent to which alterna-
tive narratives are resisted/accepted, and understand what prevents different groups
developing an agonistic peace perspective vis-à-vis each other.
The data also include reports of the civil society organizations that facilitated inter-
group dialogues between identity groups in Turkey, reports/books of the Wise People,
and the public talks of leaders as reflected in the media during the peace process since
2005, when the first signals of the Kurdish Opening were given by the then prime
8 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

minister (PM) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. WPC reports present original data generated by
the committee members and are first of their kind in Turkey, since never before had the
government initiated such a project to visit the ‘ordinary people’ and ask about their
opinion and feelings about the conflict. Using these data is also important since it allows
an analysis that supplements analyses focused on the elite level, and provides grassroots
data to understand whether agonistic peace ‘can be deepened all the way throughout the
society’ (Strömbom, 2019: 10).

Turkey’s Kurdish Opening

Inasmuch as the talks between the Turkish state and the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan,
(Kurdistan Workers’ Party) (PKK) and its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, tended to
dominate public discussions during Turkey’s so-called ‘Kurdish Opening’ between
20091 and mid-2015, concerns for societal peace—especially in some form of CTP ini-
tiatives—have also been publicly voiced by some actors. However, despite these efforts,
not much has been done to address various issues of societal conflict in Turkey, espe-
cially its historical injustices component, and turning bystanders into agonistic citizens.
In 2005, the then PM Erdoğan, in a public talk in the Kurdish-city, Diyarbakır, argued
that the Turkish state has made mistakes in the past while addressing the Kurdish issue.
However, it was not until four years later, in 2009, that the ‘Kurdish Opening’ was
announced by the Ministry of Interior Affairs with the intention to end the armed con-
flict. Yet, the Opening contained no concrete plan to address the multi-layered issues of
the conflict, especially its societal aspect. Further, even though the state had been in
dialogue with the PKK allegedly since the mid-1990s, when recordings of talks between
Turkish officials and PKK representatives in Oslo were leaked over the Internet, the
government disowned the process and delegitimized the talks.2
In early 2013, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) (AKP)
government started a new wave of talks with the PKK and Öcalan, this time with the help
of the pro-Kurdish Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (Peace and Democracy Party) (BDP),
which shuttled between the imprisoned Öcalan, the PKK in the Kandil Mountains, and
the Turkish intelligentsia. More importantly, this time, in an effort to increase the public
support for the peace process, the government also formed the WPCs to serve in the
seven official regions of the country. WPCs allowed an epistemic opening for CTP at the
societal level, although such attempts remained as listening to anger, along with stories
of pain and sorrow. Even though the then PM Erdoğan promised that the peace process
would also be shaped by the results of these reports, he did not even publicize the reports.
It was through the civil society organization Uluslararası Kültürel Araştırmalar Merkezi
(International Cultural Research Center) (UKAM) that the data on these meetings
became accessible.
With the re-start of the peace talks, there were also some unexpected incidents that
affected the fate of the peace process. The gathering of different political groups protest-
ing in Gezi Park in Istanbul, which spread to most of the country in May–June 2013, is
one such incident. Although these protests were short-lived, they facilitated the Turkish–
Kurdish rapprochement, but increased the government’s sense of insecurity. The original
protest against the de-pedestrianization of Taksim Square and building a big shopping
Çelik 9

mall later became a protest against the government’s increasing restrictions on freedom.
As protests became violent, the government called them ‘civilian revolts’ to overthrow
the government.
The second negative turn in the peace process came during the 2015 general elections
and peaked right afterwards. The tension between the two important actors of the peace
process, the AKP and Halkların Demokratik Partisi (Peoples’ Democratic Party)
(HDP)—the successor of the BDP—during the election period prevented a peace coali-
tion between them in the post-election period. The PKK ended the truce in July 2015,
claiming that the government had not taken the necessary moves; and the government
conducted numerous military operations in the Kurdish regions, resulting in 129 deaths
in just one month. There was also an increase in social polarization between Turks and
Kurds, especially in western parts of the country (Çelik, 2015). In the increased tension
between re-elections and with the killing of 102 people in the Ankara peace rally, the
Kurdish issue returned to a violent phase. After 2015, intercommunal violence increased,
coupled with increased security measures in the Kurdish-dominated regions.

CTP and the peace process in Turkey

Until 2005, the Turkish state’s official stance in the Kurdish issue had been one of
neglect: that this issue was mainly a problem of ‘terrorism’, and that the state had not
been involved in any violation against its Kurdish citizens. Erdoğan’s 2005 speech in
Diyarbakır is historical in this sense not only because it signalled the opening of a new
era, but also because it was the first acknowledgment of past wrongs:

Every country made mistakes in her past. It does not fit us to deny past mistakes .  .  . A big state
and a strong nation is the one which has the confidence to confront its mistakes and sins, and
walk to the future . . . (Hürriyet, 2005).

However, shortly afterwards, in December 2005, Erdoğan retreated to the official dis-
course to argue that ‘there is no Kurdish problem, there is a terrorism problem’.
Erdoğan’s retreat shows the strength of the dominant narratives about the conflict in
the country. However, there are multiple histories of the Kurdish issue, believed and nar-
rated by different groups in Turkey. These narratives can be detected in the public talks
of the politicians, in the civil society, and WPC meetings. Most of these narratives neglect
past mistakes and present societal tensions, while emphasizing the need for a forward-
looking perspective. If and when non-Kurds referred to the past in the Kurdish issue,
they argued that one should see more commonalities than differences between Kurds and
Turks. In these meetings, the Turkish participants often assumed a unity and commonal-
ity between them that is rarely in evidence. The hegemonic narrative in these gatherings
was that ‘Turks and Kurds are brothers’, and that the main problem was the PKK’s sepa-
rationism. Below are examples of the most repeated clichés (most commonly uttered by
Turks) that one heard in the workshops discussing the Kurdish issue in Turkey:

Our nation is for the brotherhood. It is for the unity [of the nation] . . . We need to give each
other trust (Ekopolitik, 2009: 32).
10 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

We have a common past. Turks and Kurds have common stories. It was our common ancestors
who died fighting in the War of Dardanelles (Ekopolitik, 2009: 8).

This [resolving the conflict] is a matter of imagining the future .  .  . Everybody is willing to live
together; I see this . . . Thus, there is no need to discuss the past (Ekopolitik, 2009: 53).

Research in inter-group relations between Turks and Kurds shows that, despite what
is believed by many, Kurds and Turks hold strong negative images about each other.
Turks also express greater negative attitudes, including higher social distance, less toler-
ance, higher nationalism, and less support for minority rights, as well as more out-group
negativity (Bilali et al., 2014). ‘Terrorists,’ ‘uneducated’ and ‘ignorant’ are the most-cited
words by Turks to describe Kurds, while for Kurds, Turks are mostly known to be ‘fas-
cist’, ‘oppressive’ and ‘extreme nationalist’. Also, while Turks mostly define the Kurdish
issue as terrorism and secessionism, and manipulation by foreign powers, Kurds see it as
insufficient level of democracy and the suppression of their rights (Ok, 2011).
This divergence in the understanding of the nature of the conflict suggests that dis-
cussing the Kurdish issue among ideologically different groups (as well as among Kurds
and Turks) is a hard task. The reports of the WPCs show that, while there were many
supporters of the peace initiative, there were also ‘categorically opposed’ ones and ‘those
who approach the peace process cautiously’ (UKAM, 2014). WPCs noted that they
observed a change in the attitudes of some participants after they listened to the other’s
stories about the Kurdish issue, but there were some who remained categorically opposed
to the peace process for a range of reasons including pride in Turkish history, misinfor-
mation about the Kurdish issue, and suspicions that foreign countries and their domestic
allies are trying to divide the country,3 all of which refer to the dominant ‘Turkish’ narra-
tives. Most fears centred on cultural rights, especially the right for education in Kurdish,
the establishment of some sort of autonomy in the Kurdish-populated regions, and
amnesty for PKK members.
Many Turks continued to hold a fear of Kurdish separatism, even though both the
WPC reports from the Kurdish-populated regions (UKAM, 2014) and other surveys
(BİLGESAM, 2009) indicated slightly low levels of such desire among Kurds.
Interestingly, Turks also had a trust issue with the state, fearing that it has secret plans for
‘giving in’ to the PKK. WPC reports show that these Turks perceive the peace process as
losing the war against terrorism (UKAM, 2014), and WPC meetings as a process of ‘los-
ing the Turkish identity’ (Oran, 2014). This ‘learned fear’ (Oran, 2014) was encouraged
by education and media, to the extent that even the death of Kurds was wrongly believed
to be the death of Turks (Oran, 2014; UKAM, 2014). The wise person (WP) Baskın
Oran, for example, reported that for the two months he served in the Aegean region, a
region known to have one of the highest percentages of peace opponents, he kept hearing
that 35,000 deaths were Turks killed by Kurds during the armed conflict in Turkey. In
fact, out of this number, 22,201 were the PKK members and civilians killed, forcefully
disappeared, and those killed under custody (Oran, 2014). For these groups, the first ever
attempt by the state to listen to the fears, needs, and demands of society members was
mostly perceived as supporting terrorism or a project of major powers rather than an
Çelik 11

epistemic opening to listen to how Others perceive the past. They rejected that the
35-year-long conflict in Turkey was a war and that it negatively affected inter-group rela-
tions to the point that especially Kurds in the western cities have experienced verbal and
physical attacks, even lynching by Turks. Rather, they emphasized that it was the ‘PKK
terrorism’ that was trying to divide the Turkish–Kurdish brotherhood, or that their
‘Kurdish brothers’ were being used by the imperial powers. For them, what Turkey had
gone through was not war, since war could only be fought between states (thus legitimate
actors). Therefore, one could not talk about peace, as argued by the participants of the
WPC meetings below:

Whose peace? Is Turkey fighting with another country? We are living brotherly with Kurds, but
fighting a terrorist organization (Central Anatolian WPC, UKAM, 2014: 58).

The Turkish nation has not declared war against anybody. We, Kurds and Turks, are living here
together (Oran, 2014: 24).

[A participant who insisted that the civil society meeting should start with the national anthem]:
This is an American project . . . Nobody can divide Turks and Kurds. We have been living
together for a thousand years (Oran, 2014: 85).

Are you going to continue addressing this issue [solely] as the Kurdish issue? Or will the WP
also get the democracy problems, and problems of labour in their agenda? (Oran, 2014: 91)

We are brothers. Really, this thousand-year-long togetherness is a historical reality. We had

been the people who managed this togetherness even though in the last century we had some
problems. We can do it again . . . I think we need to act altogether, by seeing the bigger future,
by seeing the blessings of togetherness (Ekopolitik, 2009: 33).

These hegemonic narratives show that, first of all, allowing multiple narratives about
the conflict seems to have led to either divergence on what the conflict is about or a false
belief that Kurds and Turks did not have any conflict in the past. They also show the
necessity that in societies where there are multiple historical wrongs done along different
identity lines (ethnic, sectarian, class, gender, etc.), exclusion of narratives and practices
to accommodate these differences (such as those about labour in the above example)
would challenge peace processes.
One of the biggest psychological barriers to the peace process was Turkish ‘national
pride’, gained through the Republic’s definition of Turkishness.4 Such an antagonistic
approach to the Other and its version of the past could be detected in the terminology
different groups adopted. While, for example, in the public discussions that the WPCs
initiated, Turks commonly referred to the sufferings of the Turkish ‘martyrs’ in the ‘fight
against terrorism’, Kurds usually referred to the suffering they have endured as a result
of not being able to exercise their group rights and having lived in a state of emergency
for years. Only the eastern and southeastern Anatolian WPCs reported the need to lift
12 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

emergency measures in the Kurdish-populated regions, to re-define ‘terrorism’, and to

establish truth commissions (UKAM, 2014).
These reports show that both Kurds and Turks carry years of anger, frustration, and
fear related to the conflict, which were sometimes expressed in very hostile and threaten-
ing ways. People from the predominantly west and north of Turkey were afraid that the
country would be divided by ‘both internal and external enemies’. Kurds in eastern and
southeastern Anatolia, on the other hand, expressed difficulty in understanding this par-
ticular concern stemming from the ‘West’ (UKAM, 2014). Similarly, a study to measure
public support for the Kurdish Opening found that around 46% of Turks were concerned
that the Opening would lead to division of the country, with a higher proportion of con-
cern (75%) among those who defined themselves as nationalists (BİLGESAM, 2013).
As argued by the WPC reports, WP in some cities in western Turkey were met with
claims that they were ‘agents of imperial powers who have hidden agendas over Turkey’,
‘work[ing] for the government who is trying to impose a presidential system’, and that
‘this is a setup to release Öcalan’ (UKAM, 2014). Meanwhile, the WPC report for south-
eastern Anatolia, where Kurds make up the majority, for example showed that ‘the vital
part of the peace process is the understanding and digestion of what has happened to
Kurds by Turks’ (UKAM, 2014: 20).
Both the WP and the Kurdish minority in the western cities of Turkey have been
exposed to communal violence during the peace process. For example, on 26 April 2013,
a group of 300 people, after protesting the Aegean WPC, tried to attack a member of the
committee (Sabah, 2013). Almost all WPCs serving in the western and northern parts of
the country have reported protests against them as well as threatening language used
against Kurds in the meetings (UKAM, 2014). Agonistic scholars emphasize the fact that
creating the sense of commonality (‘we’-ness) in conflictual societies ‘is a difficult, frag-
ile and contingent achievement of political action’ (Schaap, 2006: 258). However, when
peace processes do not turn antagonists into agonists, they can even become perpetrators
of violence. As discussed above WPCs did not follow any formal peacemaking method-
ology, were not continuous as suggested by agonistic dialogue, and their work was
dependent on the political climate—so much so that when Erdoğan declared that the
peace process was over, during the 2015 national elections period, Turkey witnessed an
increase in the communal violence against the HDP election offices.
Almost as soon as the WPCs completed their work, the Gezi events started and the
government gave the police extraordinary rights to push the protesters back, which made
some WP not believe in the government’s intention to support the peace process (Oran,
2014). The Gezi events were extraordinary in the sense that many identity groups came
together to protest against the past injustices. A slogan used in the protests, for example,
by a woman with make-up bruises on her face was ‘I am a Kurd in Lice, a Turk in Gezi,
a Georgian in Şavşat, an Arab in Hatay. I am the people who have always been hit!’ This
slogan was emphasizing not only the state repression against various identity groups in
different places/events, but also the necessity to unite against state repression. Although
in the later days of the protests some Kurdish groups withdrew from the protesting
groups, the protests nonetheless led to a bottom-up rapprochement between Kurds and
some ‘white Turks’.5 Perhaps for the first time during the peace process, as explained by
Uluğ and Cohrs (2017), these Turks started understanding the pains of Kurds, saying that
Çelik 13

if the police could do this to them in Istanbul, God knows what they did to Kurds in the
Kurdish regions in the 1990s.
The peace process started to decline in 2015, with Turkey entering into national elec-
tions. Coupled with increasing polarization between the pro-government groups and
other political parties during the election period, was misinformation about what was
happening in the Kurdish-dominated regions and hatred around the Kurdish issue, to the
point that some rejected mourning for the people who died in the October peace rally in
Ankara, blaming them for being pro-PKK and trying to take over the government through
a coup.
Around the same time, armed confrontation between the PKK and the state in the
southeast city centres led to massive destruction and killings. However, most Turks
actively supported the state’s acts, arguing that the state was fighting against terrorism. It
was within this context that a group of scholars formulated a document with the title ‘We
will not be a party to this crime’. On 11 January 2016, 1,128 academics in Turkey and
abroad with various identity backgrounds made public their declaration directed against
the government to cease the violence and state of emergency in the southeast of the coun-
try, and get back to the peace table. The declaration caused a public uproar when Erdoğan
accused the signatories of treason. The Academics for Peace, as they called themselves,
declared that they would not remain silent against the human rights violations in the
Kurdish cities. It was a historic moment in Turkey when such a large group of people
declared their stance against state violence—that is, developing an empathy towards the
Kurdish minority witnessing state violence. Yet, the crackdown following the declaration
shows that as long as there is no political epistemic opening to talk and listen to the
Other’s version of ‘reality’ and a political will to support such attempts, such people can
easily become labelled as terrorists.
Various socio-psychological barriers also existed to turn bystanders and antagonistic
citizens into agonistic ones, such as the social stigmatization and discrimination of
Kurds. For example, both the findings of Başer and Çelik’s study (2014) with Kurdish
youth in Diyarbakır and the report of the southeastern Anatolian WPC (UKAM, 2014:
23) show that Kurds have requested the banning of TV shows portraying Kurds as terror-
ists and criminals. Similarly, the eastern Anatolian WPC report, for example, recom-
mended that the word ‘terrorism’ should not be used in reference to the Kurdish issue
(UKAM, 2014: 16) and that the state should change the names of public places that
recognize those who used violence against Kurds.
Rouhana warns about the possible implications of historical responsibility for the
acquired privileges and dominant identity of the antagonists and bystanders from the
dominant groups, who will inevitably have to lose some of the privileges they unjustly
gained (2004: 37). This fear of a loss of privilege and a ‘wound to national pride’, and
recently the fear of losing the power position (for the pro-governmental groups), as shown
by the examples above, are also what prevent many Turks from accepting the stories of
Others in Turkey. In fact, this is exactly why in recent years some scholars and journalists
have argued that the Kurdish issue should be redefined as the ‘Turkish issue’. For these
people, labelling the issue as ‘Kurdish’ wrongly points to Kurds as the source of the con-
flict; whereas it is Turks’ assumed moral superiority and their belief that Kurds threaten
the security of the state that legitimize the support for a more militaristic and nationalistic
14 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

position on the part of the state (Berkan, 2013; Ergil, 2012). Although labelling the con-
flict this way also scapegoats one group, which may heighten the conflict, it nonetheless
points out the miscommunication, or more correctly the lack of communication, between
the two groups, where one side believes in one, and only one, ‘truth’ taught to them
through the narratives of the state and media, and/or rejects to listen to the Other’s story.
At this point, there is a need to underline a possible danger in the societal CTP process
in long-lasting ethnic conflicts. As argued by Bar-Tal (2003), the conflictive ethos in the
society about who is right/wrong needs to be eliminated by opening up a channel of dia-
logue. However, as Little warns us, such openings may well open up and create new
forms of disagreement as traumatic events are narrated, and they may not ‘perform the
transformative role imagined in agonistic accounts or even open up rhetorical spaces to
enable thinking about the future’ (2012: 87). For the transformative function to take
place, such processes need to be carefully designed and supported by the political will of
the leaders. They should also take into account possible risks. One of these risks may be
allowing people to express their fears and angers, without designing mechanisms to
direct these emotions towards constructive expression methods, such as in structured
dialogues. As argued by Mouffe (2000), they also have to somehow institutionalize the
ethico-political principles of liberty and equality to keep the contestation open. This is
needed for the development of societal understanding (not necessarily respect) of differ-
ence to achieve pluralistic democratic order.
The WPCs were not trained to channel this anger, and thus failed to teach different
groups to ‘disagree respectfully’ (Daly and Sarkin, 2007). They also met numerous peo-
ple only once over the course of a month, and did not have the objective of bridging the
differences between these different groups. Last, but not least, because they were not
structured, they could not facilitate norms of liberty and equality as required by agonistic
peace environments. Besides these negative drivers, however, the WPCs’ work also
showed the urgent and extreme necessity of bringing together people of diverse identities
to prepare the societal peace process. The eastern Anatolian WPC report, for example,
noted that ‘in meetings where people of different opinion were brought together, it is
observed that the level of tolerance has increased’ (UKAM, 2014: 39).

Conclusion
The failed Kurdish peace process shows that establishment of mutual acknowledgment
and legitimacy between not only formerly fighting parties, but also different societal
groups, is the hardest task of peace attempts in ethnic conflicts. For countries in the pro-
cess of ending ethnic conflicts, acceptance of the existence of multiple narratives and the
ability to listen to the Other’s story may be a more immediate need than any other issue
for bettering inter-group relations. In conflicts that are long-lasting and resistant to reso-
lution, beliefs about the nature of the conflict and the major events that shaped it are
often one-sided and selective because they serve the needs of some groups to view them-
selves as just, righteous, humane, and moral, as well as providing a palatable narrative
that justifies contemporary circumstances (Bar and Tal, 2003). Polarized groups in con-
flict usually choose different reference points from the past to justify their positions,
especially if the medium of communication (school curriculum, media, etc.) actively
Çelik 15

teaches only one side of the story and accords moral superiority to one party in the con-
flict. Thus, it is important that these groups are enabled to discuss and listen to each
other’s stories in an effort to transform ‘a relation of enmity [and ignorance] into one of
civic friendship’ (Schaap, 2005). Listening to and trying to understand the historical
enemy/Other without necessarily agreeing is a requirement of agonistic peace processes
(Schaap, 2005) as it serves to legitimize the adversary’s identity even though there may
not be a mutual understanding of the past.
The failed peace process in Turkey also shows that often bystanders and antagonistic
citizens develop defence mechanisms not to accept the legitimacy of alternative narra-
tives. While epistemic opening to counter-narratives of the historical past may bring
understanding and recognition, it can also lead to threat and anxiety for these groups
(Rumelili and Çelik, 2017). In ethnic conflicts, the persistence of violence by the state and
the armed groups can feed this threat. If societal dialogue projects are not planned care-
fully with a long-term vision and institutionalization of liberty, equality (Mouffe, 2000),
and understanding, they cannot turn antagonistic groups into agonistic citizens, and alter-
native narratives cannot find legitimacy at the societal level. Also, as long as there is no
political epistemic opening and a sustained political will to support societal CTP attempts,
they can even increase violence and fear when peace processes fail.
Such defence mechanisms also develop because of socialization through official his-
torical narratives and media portrayal of ethnic groups, which depict the excluded groups
as ‘inferior, irrational, unreasonable’ (Bashir, 2009) and ‘terrorist’ (Bilali et al., 2014),
preventing the transformation of antagonists into agonist citizens—a condition needed
for effective agonistic peace.
Last, but not least, withdrawing the politico-institutional supports from CTP attempts
(Maddison and Diprose, 2018), when not thoroughly considered, can bring countries
back to violence. Therefore, it is important that a greater number of people own the peace
process and that this process be comprehensive, transparent, and well-designed. Turkey’s
peace process so far has failed to achieve this because it has mostly neglected the prob-
lems that may emerge at the societal level, as this article has discussed.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Senem Aydın-Düzgit, Zeynep Gülru Göker, Bahar Başer, and
Devrim Sezer for their invaluable comments on the earlier drafts of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Ayşe Betül Çelik https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0762-1841

Notes
1. The Opening was declared by the then Ministry of Interior in 2009, but ‘socialization’ of the
peace process was initiated in the second phase of the peace process, starting in 2013.
16 Cooperation and Conflict 00(0)

2. Before the leak, PM Erdoğan called the talks with the PKK ‘inglorious’, and after they were
released he argued that ‘the government did not talk to the PKK, but rather the state’ (Mynet,
2011).
3. Known commonly as Sevres Paranoia/Syndrome, these fears are beliefs that there are exter-
nal powers, trying to challenge the Turkish state’s territorial integrity and implement the pro-
visions of the 1920 Sevres Treaty signed between the Allied and the Associated Powers. Even
though this treaty was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, signed between Turkey and the
Allied Powers on 24 July 24 1923, the fear that Turkey’s borders are under threat of such
reconfiguration still exists among many Turkish citizens and officials.
4. The Turkish Republic defined Turkishness as the overarching citizenship identity, although
the citizenship was called by an ethnic identity (Turkish) and policies favored this group.
Such definition is a replacement of multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Ottoman empire’s under-
standing that classified subjects not according to their ethnic identities/origins but their reli-
gions (Muslims/non-Muslims).
5. This is a term used to refer to the mostly urban, secular, republican Turks who have higher
education levels.

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Author biography
Ayşe Betül Çelik is a Professor of Political Science and Conflict Resolution at Sabanci University
in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work focuses on ethnic conflict, forced migration, reconciliation, gender
in peacebuilding, and peace processes.