Continuation by other means

Clausewitz, the colonial order, and the terms of peace between Kurdistan and Turkey

Today is Labour Day. For more than a year the mountains along the Qandil-Gara-Cudi axis kept their own counsel. The guns had fallen quiet, but not the will behind them. Then Murat Karayilan said the peace talks were frozen. In a war measured for forty-two years in prisons, graves, mountains, and ruined cities, he stripped the whole offer down to its tactical core: disarm first, trust later, disappear now, negotiate never.

Four days earlier, Abdullah Ocalan had spoken from Imrali in another register. He spoke of a road by which the war might leave the mountain and enter the law.

Between those two statements lies more than four days. There is an abyss there. On one side stands a theory of peace. On the other, the memory of power. One speaks the language of transition, of democratic integration, of the next phase. The other asks the first question Clausewitz would ask of any peace: on whose terms, and to what end? Karayilan’s answer is merciless. If one side keeps its prisons, its courts, its army, its laws, and its right to decide later what peace will mean, while the other is told to surrender the only leverage that ever kept the question alive, then this is not peace, but the structure of capitulation being dressed in its vocabulary.

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II.

Everyone who has read military analysis has heard the Clausewitz paraphrase: war is the continuation of politics by other means. Few have read the full passage:

“That war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase ‘with the addition’ of other means because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs. The main lines along which military events progress, and to which they are restricted, are political lines that continue throughout the war into the subsequent peace”

War is not the wreck of political intercourse. It is one of its older tongues. Men reach for it when they mean to press a claim past argument, to find the measure of another will, to put a better price on the settlement that will come after. Even ruin is not holy in itself. It is worth only what policy can make of it. And lesser wars are often no less political for being less absolute, for they may seek not the enemy’s extinction but some ground, some strongpoint, some hard fact laid on the table when the talking starts. So when the guns go quiet, do not ask whether politics has resumed. Ask what policy has been speaking through the guns all along.

The Turkish state has given the present opening a name: terror-free Turkiye. But the underlying pattern is older. Peace held when it served the strategic interests of the elites conducting it, and it broke when those interests no longer overlapped. A strategic peace. A temporary bargain sustained only so long as negotiation offers more to those in power than renewed war. In that sense, collapse is no deviation from the process. It is the process.

After Ocalan’s capture in 1999, the PKK declared a ceasefire and withdrew from Turkey. Ankara made no structural concessions. Secret talks in Oslo between 2008 and 2011 collapsed without agreement. The 2013–2015 Solution Process, the most substantive negotiation in the conflict’s history, was initiated because Erdogan needed Kurdish votes to achieve the parliamentary supermajority required for his presidential constitutional project. He said so openly in February 2015: if voters wanted the peace process to continue, they needed to deliver 400 seats to the AKP.

The process produced one concrete output, the Dolmabahçe Protocol, a signed memorandum committing both parties to negotiate cultural rights, self‑governance, general amnesty, and constitutional guarantees, which Erdogan personally vetoed before it could take effect. When the AKP lost its parliamentary majority on June 7, 2015, the process ended the same week. Within five months, Erdogan had launched military operations against the PKK, assumed the posture of nationalist champion, and won back his majority in snap elections. The reason the process ended is identical to the reason it began. When the electoral calculus shifted, peace was discarded in days.

As Demirtaş himself had already warned, the peace process had been reduced to a bargaining chip.

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III.

Here is where the argument must turn, and where intellectual honesty requires saying something uncomfortable. If peace held only so long as it served the strategic interests of the elites conducting it, then the real question is: what changed? Part of the answer lies in Syria. For the Turkish state, the question was never the mountains alone. It was primarily the Kurdish-led autonomous project in north-east Syria, which sat near the center of Ankara’s strategic anxieties. When the January 29 agreement under the pressure of an HTS-led offensive cut back that administration’s territorial, military, and economic autonomy and pressed it toward integration on terms set elsewhere, one of the principal pressures bearing on Erdogan’s coalition eased with it.

That altered balance helps explain what followed. Karayılan’s observation that the absence of legal steps, mocked the reality on the ground and human reason was not rhetorical. It was a diagnosis. Once the strategic overlap began to disappear, negotiation no longer offered more to those in power than drift, delay, and renewed coercion. The impossible demands followed from that. Disarm first, vacate positions, trust later. In a region still saturated with force, that is not a serious road to peace but the management of collapse.

And that is where Beşikçi’s framework outlined in “Îskana Mecbûrî Ya Kurdan” closes the circle. The problem is not only that the state refused to legislate peace when the balance shifted. It is that the legal order itself was built through the domination it now claims it can resolve. In his account, the current order is the political continuation of an elite structure formed through the dispossession of Kurds and other non-dominant peoples, starting from the 1934 Resettlement Law. The contradiction between the dominant Turkish nation and the Kurdish nation has always been part of the architecture of power. So when the overlap of interests disappears, what remains is the older structure beneath it: one cannot approach the question of the colonized nation through the framework laid down by the dominant nation.

Karayilan calls it a frozen process. The more precise word is older.
Surrender has always been offered in the language of peace. The language does not change that.