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.

This distinction is useful for Türkiye. Earlier reforms, development policies and legal adjustments represented incremental change. They improved the state’s relationship with its Kurdish citizens but did not remove the armed structure surrounding the question. The 2013-2015 Solution Process was more ambitious. It tried to break with the established security path, yet it did so at a time when the regional environment was strengthening the PKK-linked network.

The current process is different because domestic and regional change are moving in the same direction for the first time. That does not yet amount to a paradigm shift, but it creates the conditions for one.

Shrinking regional ecosystem

For many years, Türkiye viewed the PKK as a domestic security problem with external extensions. Northern Iraq provided sanctuary, logistics and organizational depth, but the conflict’s political center remained inside Türkiye. The Syrian war changed that equation.

The rise of a PKK-linked armed and administrative structure in northeastern Syria turned a domestic insurgency with cross-border sanctuaries into a regional ecosystem. Personnel, weapons, organizational experience and political narratives could circulate between Türkiye, Iraq and Syria. Pressure in one theater no longer meant a decisive loss because the organization could rebuild capacity elsewhere.

This geographical substitution became a central source of resilience. Losses inside Türkiye could be offset by territorial expansion in Syria. Pressure in Iraq could be answered through the military support and international visibility gained during the campaign against Daesh. Any initiative limited to Türkiye risked reducing violence at home while leaving the wider system intact.

This was the central contradiction of the previous Solution Process. Ankara pursued negotiations, withdrawal and eventual disarmament inside Türkiye while the Syrian war opened an entirely new field for the PKK-linked network. Domestic de-escalation coincided with regional militarization.

The earlier process did not fail simply because the parties mistrusted one another or failed to agree on a timetable. It also failed because the regional balance was moving against its domestic logic. Türkiye was trying to persuade the PKK to leave one arena just as the organization was acquiring territory, weapons and international partners in another.

Today, the direction has been reversed. After 2015, Türkiye steadily connected its domestic counterterrorism campaign with military and intelligence pressure in northern Iraq and northern Syria. It began treating the three theaters as one interconnected security space.

The fall of the Assad regime brought a bigger change. The new government in Damascus reclaimed the principle of a unified state and army. The YPG’s dissolution as an independent military force and the integration of its members into Syrian state institutions weakened the territorial foundation of the PKK-linked regional project.

This does not mean that every network or ideological connection disappeared overnight. Yet the organization can no longer safely assume that what it loses in Türkiye will be rebuilt under another name in Syria or preserved indefinitely in Iraq. The mechanism of geographical substitution is closing.

As that regional space contracts, armed struggle also loses its political value. The PKK may retain a residual ability to commit violence, but that is different from possessing a viable strategy. Its costs have increased, its territorial opportunities have narrowed and its ability to turn violence into political leverage has declined.

This is what I mean by strategic option closure. The armed path has not vanished in a technical sense. It has ceased to offer a credible route toward a sustainable political outcome.

What changed in Türkiye?

The regional shift alone would not have produced the current process. Türkiye’s domestic configuration has changed as well.

Military and intelligence superiority forms part of this picture, but it is not the whole of it. The positions of the principal actors have also shifted. The state is moving from suppressing an armed threat toward organizing the transition that follows it. The PKK is losing the ability to claim political relevance through weapons. Kurdish politics now has an opportunity to free itself from the armed organization’s shadow and establish its legitimacy directly through democratic representation.

The changing role of nationalist politics is equally important. During the previous Solution Process, nationalist actors functioned largely as veto players. They narrowed the government’s room for maneuver and mobilized public fears about territorial concessions, amnesty and negotiations conducted under armed pressure.

This time, a decisive part of the nationalist political center is among the initiators and guarantors of the process, even though the nationalist camp remains fragmented, with some parties opposing the initiative and voting against the law in Parliament. That gives the government greater protection against nationalist countermobilization and reassures a significant part of Turkish society that disarmament will take place within the boundaries of national unity and territorial integrity.

There is still a difficult balance to strike. Nationalist ownership can make organizational dissolution politically possible. It can also narrow the space for the legal and democratic normalization that must follow. What helps complete the security phase should not be allowed to block the construction of a post-conflict political order.

The process has also become more institutional. Previous initiatives relied heavily on executive authority, intelligence contacts and political channels whose mandates were often unclear. Today, Parliament has assumed a central role, a law defines the basic framework and the board chaired by the vice president is responsible for coordinating implementation.

This matters because disarmament raises practical and morally difficult questions. Who can return? How will individual responsibility be determined? How will the state verify that weapons, command structures and recruitment networks have actually been dismantled? How can reintegration proceed without weakening the sense of justice among victims, veterans and the families of those killed by terrorism?

Such questions cannot be resolved through vague promises or an informal bargain with an armed organization. They require law, parliamentary legitimacy and credible implementation.

The sequence has changed too. The previous process expected political negotiations and confidence-building to produce withdrawal and disarmament. The current process begins with dissolution, disarmament and verification, then moves toward reintegration and political normalization.

In short, the previous model sought disarmament through political settlement. The current model seeks to open a new political field through disarmament.

Yet political normalization cannot be postponed indefinitely. Each verified step toward disarmament should create room for a measured legal and political step. Otherwise, the state may achieve organizational dissolution without building the confidence needed for lasting social peace.

Previous processes sought to reach disarmament through political negotiations. The current process reverses that sequence by using disarmament to open a new political space. It is therefore producing path-breaking change at the operational level. Yet it will amount to a paradigmatic shift only if Kurdish politics gains greater autonomy from armed organizational influence, the field of political representation becomes more pluralistic, and the state translates its security advantage into a more inclusive framework of citizenship.