Turkeyification
Abdullah Öcalan's post-imprisonment philosophy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Turkeyification (Turkish: Türkiyeleşme) or Turkeyification Strategies, refers to Abdullah Öcalan's post-imprisonment political shift away from pursuing Kurdish national minority rights and toward promoting the democratization of Turkey, encouraging the Kurdish political movement to integrate Kurds into existing Turkish political structures.[1][2] Critics argue that this approach represents a continuation of the Turkish state's long-standing policy of Turkification (Türkleştirme).[3]
According to the Middle East Institute, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) was founded as part of Öcalan's "Turkeyification" project, as it emphasized broader issues in Turkey beyond Kurdish autonomy or minority rights, particularly democratization.[4]
Research
In their book Kurdish Paradox of Statelessness: Öcalan’s Confederalism and Turkeyification Strategies, published in 2025, Kamal Soleimani, who received his Ph.D. in Islamic and Middle Eastern history from Columbia University, New York,[5] and Behrooz Shojai, a researcher and lecturer at the Uppsala University,[6] critique Abdullah Öcalan's political shift, particularly his adoption of Turkeyification and Democratic Confederalism, arguing that, paradoxically, his new paradigm could lead to the assimilation of Kurds and Kurdish politics within the current framework of the Turkish political system without guaranteeing linguistic, cultural, or autonomy rights, while criticizing "sympathetic scholarship" on Öcalan's behalf, as well as calling on a comprehensive reassessment of "Öcalan's project."[7]
Soleimani and Shojai argue that an overlooked aspect of Öcalan's post-imprisonment politics is his policy of Turkeyification. They distinguish it from the Turkish state's earlier policy of Turkification (Türkleştirme), which aimed at the forced ethnic assimilation of non-Turks. While Turkeyification is presented as promoting loyalty to Turkey rather than ethnic Turkish identity, they argue that in practice it does not differ significantly from Turkification. They point out that Öcalan recognizes the legitimacy of the Turkish state, its borders, and its constitution, including Article 66, which defines all citizens as Turks. They also note that he has described the official recognition of the Kurdish language and the creation of a federal system as "dangers" or aspirations for a Kurdish nation-state as an "expression of a kind of capitalist distortion" and obsolete. At the same time, his hostility does not similarly extend to the existing Turkish state; in his own words, he is rather ready to "serve the Turkish state." For these reasons, they describe his policies, which integrate Kurds without guarantees for linguistic, cultural, or autonomy rights, into the Turkish state as Turkeyification, a form of voluntary Turkification rather than a departure from the state's assimilationist tradition.[7][8][9]