Exiting the insurgency: the PKK’s strategic exhaustion in Turkey, 2016–2025

This study advances the concept of ‘strategic exhaustion’ to explain how the PKK or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, disarmed and disbanded itself in 2025 following decades-long bloody armed conflict. The event took place in the absence of a decisive military defeat of the insurgent group or entering into a negotiated settlement. Rather, the mechanism of ‘strategic exhaustion’ eventually drove the organization towards disbandment. Exhaustion emerged under a condition of prolonged stalemate, where cumulative military offensives, technological asymmetry, spatial constraints and declining political gains progressively eroded the utility of prolonged armed movement. Instead of complete victory or defeat or liquidation as we see in other insurgency cases, PKK’s case study demonstrates the mechanism of exiting the insurgency not through negotiated settlements but disbandment or disengagement.