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Analyzes Turkey's Kurdish conflict since post-Ottoman nation-building through recent peace attempts, from a novel perspective highlighting the dilemmas of the Turk majority and reshaping our understanding of ethnic conflicts, and offers solutions for a sustainable peace.

Under the Justice and Development Party AKP and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has become one of the most polarized countries in the world, and has undergone a significant democratic breakdown. This article explains how polarization and democratic breakdown happened, arguing that it was based on the built-in, perverse dynamics of an "authoritarian spiral of polarizing-cum-transformative politics." Furthermore, I identify ten causal mechanisms that have produced pernicious polarization and democratic erosion. Turkey's transformation since 2002 is an example of the broader phenomenon of democratic erosion under new elites and dominant groups. The causes and consequences of pernicious polarization are analyzed in terms of four subperiods: 2002–2006, 2007, 2008–2013, and 2014–present. In the end, what began as a potentially reformist politics of polarization-cum-transformation morphed into an autocratic-revolutionary one. During this process, polarization and AKP policies; the politicization of formative rifts that had been a divisive undercurrent since nation-state formation; structural transformations; and the opposition's organizational, programmatic, and personal shortcomings fed and reinforced each other.

Based on a within-case comparative analysis of Turkish democratization since the 1920s and data on elite values, this article develops a general theoretical framework to better explain the moderation of religious and secular politics and democratization. First, it is maintained that the content of moderation and its effects on democracy will vary across countries depending on its domestic and international context -- called a country's 'centre' -- and political rivals' reactions. Second, moderation can further democratization only insofar as it happens with a democratic centre. Third, absent a democratic centre, moderation may involve adoption, retention and reproduction of the centre's undemocratic attributes. In such cases, the challenge of democratization is not moderation per se but the construction of a new, democratic centre by transcending the existing centre. Fourth, moderation is interactive between religious and secular actors, multidimensional and reversible. Turkish democratization began with the moderation of authoritarian-secular actors, but generated only a semi-democracy because the changes were not institutionalized through explicit and formal compromises to produce a fully democratic centre. Turkish political Islamism moderated during the 1990s. But, despite major achievements, democratization remained ambiguous under the rule of moderate Islamists because they compromised and associated themselves with the semi-democratic centre, and secular-religious cooperation failed while some secular actors de-moderated. Adapted from the source document.

From a conceptual-theoretical as well as political perspective, this essay examines the interrelationships between the identity and foreign policy dimensions of Turkey's Kurdish question and makes policy recommendations. Recent domestic and regional developments present both opportunities and great risks for Turkey's social, political and territorial cohesion, peace and stability. In order to utilize the opportunities, Turkey needs to simultaneously achieve two goals. Domestically, it needs to successfully continue its present peace process and achieve genuine democratization. This process should culminate in a state of affairs whereby the complex social and political questions underlying the Kurdish question can be processed through the mechanisms of normal democratic politics and with the participation of legitimate Kurdish political actors. One crucial and insufficiently understood challenge the Turkish state and society have to manage during the peace process is the challenge of how to addressing the identity question, which is the formative basis of Turkey's Kurdish question. This question consists of two separate but interrelated needs. The first is to address the Kurdish need and demands for 'cultural-national' recognition. The second is to address the need for a common national identity encompassing all ethnic-cultural groups, and to acknowledge that many Turks identify with Turkishness as such a common identity, which, they feel, should shape the state's identity. These two challenges can only be met by introducing new and flexible categorizations to which people can feel belonging under different names. In foreign policy, Turkey should consolidate its improved relations with regional Kurds based on interdependence and its redline should be the emergence of a hostile Kurdish statehood in the region, not Kurdish self-rule per se. This, however, should be done without alienating Arabs by defending any particular status for Iraqi or Syrian Kurds. If Turkey fails in these endeavors, however, major destabilizing developments can occur whereby the identity and belonging perceptions of many Kurds as well as Turks can experience significant shifts.

Do political-Islamic elites need to be democrats for participation in democracy, how do their values compare to secular elites', and how do their values change through participation and affect democratization itself? A comparative-systematic content analysis of three Islamic-conservative and two pro-secular Turkish newspapers over nine years shows that, overall, political-Islamic elites adopt democratic political values. Furthermore, they began to view that liberal-democratic rights and freedoms serve their interests. However, value democratization, and, thus, moderation and democratization, is not a linear and inexorable process automatically resulting from participation or socioeconomic development. It occurs through ruptures such as conflicts with secular actors, and interdependently through the interactions of secular and religious actors. Hence, religious actors' adoption of more democracy may paradoxically make some secular actors less democratic. The consolidation of pluralistic democracy requires the emergence of both religious and secular democrats by resolving complex problems of commitment, and of clashes in areas like social pluralism where Islamic values are less open to change.