Visibility without power

Conflicts over identity, belonging, and political participation in the twenty-first century are no longer resolved exclusively through overt repression. Increasingly, they are managed through more complex forms of governance, strategies that combine integration, visibility, and the simultaneous containment of political claims. Recognition and control are no longer opposites; they operate in tandem.

A similar shift can be observed in the handling of the Kurdish question. While repression, prosecutions, and the imprisonment of Kurdish political actors remain a reality, a longer-term strategic recalibration is also emerging. Recognition, dialogue, and cultural visibility now coexist with ongoing security measures, embedded within a preventive order policy aimed at control, depoliticization, and the preservation of regional influence.

The return of the Kurdish question in a changing order

Turkey finds itself in the midst of a strategic repositioning within a rapidly transforming regional and global order. The political architecture of the Middle East, established after 1923, is increasingly losing its stability. Borders once considered immutable are being challenged by war, state fragmentation, resource scarcity, and geopolitical rivalries. In this context, the Kurdish question is once again moving to the center of political and strategic calculations.

With a population of around forty million, the Kurds constitute one of the largest ethnic groups in the Middle East, and, in the long term, potentially the largest within Turkey itself. They inhabit contiguous border regions across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, areas rich in oil, gas, water, and mineral resources. Military conflicts have shown that these territories can neither be permanently controlled nor politically pacified. At the same time, new forms of cross-border Kurdish solidarity, self-organization, and political imagination have emerged, particularly in northern Syria.

This creates a structural dilemma for Turkey: domestically, the Kurdish question remains framed as a security issue; regionally, it is evolving into a significant power factor. The response is no longer purely repressive, but increasingly strategic and multifaceted.

Repression and dialogue: Negotiations without publicity

Despite new formats of dialogue, repression persists. The arrest of elected Kurdish politicians, the dismissal of mayors, the prosecution of activists, and restrictions on Kurdish media and civil society structures continue to shape reality. The security logic has not been abandoned.

At the same time, contacts between the Turkish state and the imprisoned former PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan have resurfaced. Little is publicly known about the content, scope, or objectives of these discussions. Transparency is largely absent. It remains unclear whether Ocalan acts as a political interlocutor, a symbolic figure, or a strategic instrument.

Yet precisely this coexistence of repression and dialogue suggests a strategic recalibration. From an analytical perspective, Öcalan may serve a functional role within a preventive order policy: as a reference figure to channel Kurdish demands, discipline political actors, and mitigate potential radicalization. These talks thus represent less a break with past policy than its extension.

Preventive order policy: Integration without sovereignty

Preventive order policy describes a strategy aimed at incorporating potentially influential actors into existing structures at an early stage in order to limit future shifts in power.

In the Kurdish context, this means political integration without collective self-determination. Kurdish participation is permitted as long as it remains within the framework of the existing state order. Kurds may act as individuals, found parties, hold office, participate politically, provided they do not advance structural demands such as autonomy, federalism, or constitutional recognition. Such demands are not treated as legitimate democratic claims but are instead framed as security risks.

For younger generations, this produces a subtle yet powerful learning process: success is achieved not through collective rights, but through individual adaptation. The Kurdish question is thus decollectivized and translated into personal life strategies.

The Regional dimension and the question of power

This preventive order policy is not confined to domestic politics. It is closely tied to regional ambitions. From Ankara’s perspective, the emergence of a durable Kurdish self-administration in Syria, similar to the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, constitutes a strategic threat.

Such a development would internationalize the Kurdish question, institutionalize Kurdish political agency, and exert long-term influence on Kurds within Turkey. Accordingly, Turkey has sought to prevent the consolidation of an autonomous Kurdish entity in northern Syria through military interventions, diplomatic pressure, and political influence.

At the same time, more subtle instruments are being developed: internal strategies of political integration, cultural recognition, and psychological management aim to ensure that external Kurdish governance models do not become attractive reference points. Preventive order policy thus operates simultaneously as domestic and foreign policy.

Exporting order: The Syrian model

A further development is becoming visible: elements of Turkish order policy are being transferred to regional contexts. In Syria, in particular, a model appears to be taking shape that formally acknowledges Kurdish presence while rejecting collective political self-determination.

In the course of the re-consolidation of state structures in Damascus, an approach is emerging that prioritizes individual integration over institutionalized autonomy. Kurds are to be included as citizens, but without their own political institutions, territorial self-administration, or independent security structures.

The logic is clear: recognition, but without structural consequences. Kurdish identity is culturally tolerated, yet politically constrained. For Turkey, such a development offers strategic reassurance, as alternative Kurdish governance models lose their appeal and cross-border political imaginaries weaken.

This points toward a converging regional order in which different states arrive at similar responses to the Kurdish question.

The Iranian perspective: A transferable model

Against this backdrop, it appears plausible that a comparable approach could, over time, gain relevance in Iran. The structural conditions are similar: a politicized Kurdish population, longstanding demands for autonomy, and a state that interprets collective rights as a threat.

Already today, Iran combines limited cultural tolerance with political repression. A preventive model - integration without collective rights - could systematize this approach, reducing international criticism without opening the central question of power.

Should such a model consolidate regionally, a transnational order logic would emerge: the Kurdish question would no longer be addressed through open confrontation, but through controlled recognition and structural depoliticization.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq: A fragile semi state

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq represents a distinct case within the regional configuration. Unlike other Kurdish populations, it has developed a form of institutionalized self governance that approaches the characteristics of a semi state. For many Kurds across the region, it has long functioned as a symbol of political possibility and collective aspiration.

Yet this relative stability is increasingly under pressure in the context of an emerging regional reordering. Competing visions of order are colliding across the Middle East. An Israeli American conception seeks to reshape the region and redefine existing power structures, while European actors, in particular Britain and France, remain more inclined to preserve the state system that emerged after the First World War. At the same time, the Sunni Shia divide continues to deepen, reinforcing fragmentation among societies and political entities. These fault lines are not merely ideological, but are embedded in broader geostrategic and geopolitical interests. Within this contested environment, the Kurdistan Region risks becoming less an autonomous actor than an object of external influence and instrumentalization.

This island of hope for Kurds worldwide is therefore exposed to both internal and external vulnerabilities. Internally, political fragmentation, economic dependency, and institutional weaknesses limit its capacity for coherent governance. Externally, competing regional powers have little interest in the consolidation of a stable and fully sovereign Kurdish entity. While Kurdish identity and cultural expression are less directly threatened than in other contexts, the erosion of state like structures poses a different kind of risk. The challenge is no longer denial of identity, but the gradual weakening of political capacity.

Visible but depoliticized: Culture in the service of order

This strategy becomes particularly evident in the cultural sphere. Kurdish music, festivals, television channels, and cultural events are more visible today than in previous decades. State actors frequently emphasize that they have “nothing against Kurdish culture.”

Yet this visibility is functionally limited. Kurdish culture is accepted as folkloric diversity, not as a carrier of political meaning. Historical experiences, collective trauma, and narratives of resistance are excluded from public discourse. Culture is aestheticized rather than historicized.

What was once a medium of collective self-assertion becomes an element of state-managed diversity. Kurdish identity is not denied, but it is stripped of its political dimension.

Music: From voice of resistance to background sound

This transformation is particularly evident in music. Kurdish songs once carried prohibited language, political memory, and collective experience. Today, they are present on streaming platforms, television, and festivals, but in altered form.

Explicit political content recedes, while themes of love and melancholy dominate. The music remains Kurdish in sound, yet loses its orienting force. For many young listeners, Kurdish becomes an aesthetic mood rather than a political stance.
This shift is not merely cultural, it is part of a broader policy that integrates cultural expression in order to neutralize its political content.

The language of the future and the language of origin

The most enduring effects of this strategy unfold at the level of language. Kurdish is no longer systematically prohibited. It may be spoken, sung, and used in media. At the same time, Turkish, Arabic, or Persian remain the exclusive languages of education, administration, science, and social mobility.

This creates an implicit hierarchy: the state language becomes the language of the future, Kurdish the language of origin. The shift occurs not through coercion, but through rational choice. Those seeking advancement adopt the dominant language. Kurdish gradually loses institutional relevance and intergenerational transmission.
What appears as an individual decision is, in fact, structurally produced, a central mechanism of preventive order policy.

A new Kurdish identity between recognition and neutrality

From the interplay of political integration, cultural visibility, and linguistic hierarchy, a new form of Kurdish identity emerges. It is recognized, but not secured. Visible, yet politically constrained. Permitted, as long as it does not articulate structural claims.

Preventive order policy replaces open assimilation with incentives for adaptation. Identity is not erased, it is administered and reshaped.

Between adaptation and self-assertion

This scenario does not describe an inevitable outcome, but a possible strategic reading of current developments. Preventive order policy is not a closed system, and Kurdish societies are not passive objects of state planning.

Historically, Kurds have repeatedly developed subtle forms of self-assertion, through language, education, media, transnational networks, and everyday practices. It is likely that such forms will continue to evolve.

The future of Kurdish identity will therefore not be determined solely by state strategies, but by the ongoing interplay of adaptation, resistance, and reinvention.
Whether recognition without rights leads to stabilization or to new forms of collective self-assertion will not be decided in negotiations, but in the everyday lives of future generations.

Dr. Jan Ilhan Kizilhan is a psychologist, author and publisher, an expert in psychotraumatology, trauma, terror and war, transcultural psychiatry, psychotherapy and migration.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.