Transitional Justice and the Kurdish Conflict

Winner of the 2026 Serbest Best Book Award in Social Sciences in Kurdish Studies

Centralising the experience of victims-survivors and other grassroots actors, this book examines how transitional justice can be used in transforming the Kurdish conflict in Turkey.

Despite 40 years of armed conflict, its violent effects on Kurdish people and the wider society, and strong demands for justice, there is little work on transitional justice in the context of the Kurdish conflict. In response, this book explores the limits and potentials of transitional justice in Turkey’s ongoing conflict by focusing on the perspectives of victims-survivors and grassroots justice activists. Such perspectives have received little attention in the transitional justice literature, even as it has exhibited an increasing interest in contexts where no formal transition has taken place. But, as this book demonstrates, the Kurdish conflict reveals the importance, not only of documenting these perspectives, but in seeing how those most affected by conflict are able to transform their experience into political action. Drawing on Kurdish victim-survivors’ own understandings of their experiences and activists’ perceptions of the potential of transitional justice, the book thereby addresses, and advocates, the transformative potential of bottom-up, grassroots-level efforts to deliver transitional justice goals.

This book will appeal to transitional justice scholars and practitioners, those with interests in the role of social movements, as well as others with interests in the Kurdish conflict or in Middle Eastern politics more generally.