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The first half of the 2000s was characterised by unprecedented political reform in Turkey encouraged by the prospects of EU membership. These reforms helped to improve the quality of democracy as well as the cultural rights of the Kurdish minority in the country. Yet, the Kurdish problem remains far from being resolved. The paper argues that it is, at least partly, the European Union that bears responsibility for the failure of the government's Kurdish "opening", which, when launched in the summer of 2009, had aspired to solve the Kurdish problem in Turkey. Adapted from the source document.

This article addresses a historical puzzle: Why did the insurgent PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan), which was militarily defeated, which renounced the goal of secession, and whose leader was under the custody of the Turkish state, remobilize its armed forces in a time when opportunities for the peaceful solution of the Kurdish question were unprecedented in Turkey? The PKK's radicalization at a period of EU-induced democratization in Turkey counters the conventional argument that fostering democracy would reduce the problems of ethnic conflict. Explanations based on resource mobilization, political opportunity structures, and cognitive framing fail to provide a satisfactory answer. The article argues that democratization will not necessarily facilitate the end of violent conflict as long as it introduces competition that challenges the political hegemony of the insurgent organization over its ethnic constituency. Under the dynamics of competition, the survival of the organization necessitates radicalization rather than moderation. As long as the insurgent organization successfully recruits new militants, democratization is not a panacea to violent conflict. The findings indicate that research on the micro-level dynamics of insurgency recruitment will contribute to a better understanding of ethnic conflict management. Data come from multiple sources including ethnographic fieldwork, statistical analyses of quantitative data (i.e. spatial clustering and ecological inference), and systematic reading of original documents. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This article maintains that the Kurdish identity is determinant in almost all areas of Turkey's foreign policy. It discusses this significance by using in general the instruments of constructivism and in particular the instruments of rule-oriented constructivism of Nicholas Onuf. In this context, it puts forward three claims. First, Kurdish identity leads to the construction of a collective identity which determines Turkey's relations with its neighbours and near environment. Second, as the subject of a human rights question it causes a negative identification regarding Turkey and thus affects its relations with western states and institutions. And finally, involving the construction process of the Turkish national identity, it excites Turkish nationalism and hence inserts the foreign policy decisions and behaviours in a nationalist framework. Adapted from the source document.