Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds

This event, as part of the LSE Middle East Centre's Kurdish Studies Series, was a launch for Cengiz Çandar's latest book 'Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds'. The founding of a Turkish nation-state in Asia Minor brought with it the denial of the distinct Kurdish identity in its midst, giving birth to an intractable problem that led to intermittent Kurdish revolts and culminated in the enduring insurgency of the PKK. The Kurdish question is perceived as a mortal threat for the survival of Turkey. In this book, Çandar weaves an account of the encounter between Turkey and the Kurds in historical perspective with special emphasis on failed peace processes. Providing a unique historical record of the authoritarian, centralist and ultra-nationalist—rather than Islamist—nature of the Turkish state rooted in the last decades of the Ottoman period and finally manifested in Erdoğan’s “New Turkey,” Çandar challenges stereotyped and conventional views on the Turkey of today and tomorrow. This book combines scholarly research with the memoirs of a participant observer, revealing the author’s first-hand knowledge of developments acquired over a lifetime devoted to the resolution of perhaps the most complex problem of the Middle East. Cengiz Çandar is a distinguished visiting scholar at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. He is a scholar and journalist, and a leading expert in Turkey on the Middle East. As President Turgut Özal’s advisor in the 1990s, Çandar was the main architect of the Turkish-Kurdish rapprochement initiative. Robert Lowe is Deputy Director of the Middle East Centre and co-founder of the LSE Middle East Centre's Kurdish Studies Series. He joined the Centre when it opened in 2010. Robert is responsible for running the Centre's operations, research activities, fundraising and development. He oversees the events and publications programmes, research projects and public outreach. His main research interest is Kurdish politics, with particular focus on the Kurdish movement in Syria.