Imagining transitional justice in Turkey’s ongoing Kurdish conflict

This chapter discusses transitional justice in Turkey in the context of the Kurdish conflict and with a focus on the Kurdish populations. It analyses two transitional justice initiatives which illustrate the possibilities and limits of transitional justice for wrongs implicating the state: the 2007–2010 unofficial civil-society-led Truth and Justice Commission for Torture and Maltreatment in Diyarbakır Prison and the 2011 official apology for the 1938 Dersim Massacre. These initiatives have generated some truth and formal parliamentary recognition, inspired some attempts at accountability, and sparked a limited dialogue about past injustices. However, they have not disrupted the narratives on which the Turkish state is founded, as their ability to foster a societal reckoning was circumscribed by strategies of regime survival. Transitional justice is currently a vocabulary available to actors in a shrinking civic space and to the political elite engaged in electoral and authoritarian politics.