Something important has changed in Türkiye’s effort to end PKK terrorism. Parliament has adopted a legal framework for disarmament and reintegration. A board chaired by the vice president has begun overseeing its implementation. Soon afterward, the YPG announced that it would dissolve itself as an independent military structure in Syria.
The mistake would be to read these as separate developments. They belong to the same political and regional transformation.
The PKK’s armed presence inside Türkiye has been sharply reduced, its room for maneuver in Iraq has narrowed, and the autonomous military structure built by the PKK-linked YPG in Syria has lost its viability. Inside Türkiye, meanwhile, the process enjoys a wider political base, has moved into Parliament and now rests on a legal and institutional framework.
This domestic-regional nexus explains why disarmament has become possible now. Türkiye is not simply trying to collect the PKK’s weapons. It is closing the routes through which the organization has repeatedly rebuilt its power when it came under pressure in one particular arena.
To assess the depth of this change, I borrow and adapt Ekinci’s 2013 three-level framework. Incremental change alters policies without changing the structure that produces the conflict. Pathbreaking change disrupts that structure and pushes the actors onto a different course. A paradigmatic shift goes further. It changes the definition of the problem, the position of the actors and the boundaries of legitimate political action.
