After Turkey switched to the multi-party system, central and peripheral analyses gained great popularity in the country. The fact that different provincial powers and people with Islamic sensitivity were engaged in politics, particularly during the Democrat Party period, was described in such a framework. When it came to the 1980s, this approach lost some of its credibility, as Turkey underwent a development move, the number of political parties reached around 50 and the new provincial bourgeoisie and the Islamic segment found their own place in many parties.
During the same process, however, a different dynamic began emerging in a secretive fashion leading Turkey to be addressed within the framework of the center and periphery once again. There were two actors of this new dynamic. One of them was more religious groups that constituted roughly half of orthodox thought who corresponded to two-thirds of the whole population in number. Even though the multi-party tutelary system took people to the center by making them parts of "secular" networks, the religious segments desired to move toward the center through their own social and economic networks. The other actor was Kurds, who had chance to take part in the public sphere by embracing their own identity and defending their identity rights. It is useful to underline that all this has close ties to global and postmodern paradigms. As the periphery became "important" on its own, identity pluralism began to be perceived as "acceptable" and it was promoted.
It is impossible to overlook that both parts of this new dynamic developed and even achieved an "extreme" self-confidence during the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) period. Such a boom in self-confidence led to interesting consequences that created the new balances of the day. It is possible to describe the most critical development in the segments with Islamic sensitivity as the "liberation" of their Islamic identity. The new administration that followed the military coup of Sept. 12, 1980 developed its own legitimacy with the doctrine of a "Turkish-Islamic Synthesis," which put forth that there was an almost organic transitivity between these two identities. The situation was not really symmetrical, because such a "synthesis" actually aimed to Turkify Islamic sensitivity and to beset religionists by making them a part of Turkish nationalism. The catharsis that was experienced by Islamic segments of society after the postmodern coup of Feb. 28, 1997, and subsequent AK Party governments broke this synthesis to a considerable extent. Today, Islamic identity is positioned in the center independently from Turkish identity, which does not necessarily imply that Muslims object to "Turkishness" or that they feel less Turkish, but rather it suggests that Islamic identity no longer "needs" Turkish identity at all. This is also the ideological and physiological basis that explains that the AK Party is able to move toward the resolution of the Kurdish issue and display a strong will on the matter.
During the same period, Kurdish identity, which also moved from the periphery to the center, underwent a similar dynamic. Until the late 1990s, the Kurdish political movement formed its identity mainly around armed uprisings. This arose from a process in which merely the active members of the movement could become "Kurds" as they openly declared it. The alternative of peace, which was proposed by the AK Party government, relieved the Kurdish community and the "obligation" of being a Kurdish nationalist in order to defend Kurds' cultural rights and rights as citizens was removed. Thus, half of Kurds got a chance to express themselves within the AK Party. Currently, not all Kurds vote for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), but they can be just as demanding and rigid as the HDP on the matters of cultural rights.
In short, the postmodern period led identities to settle in the center in socio-political terms. Religious Turks moved away from Turkish nationalism and religious Kurds became distanced from Kurdish nationalism, which led to the emergence of a ground for multiple interactions.
