The Authoritarian Settlement Playbook: Learning and Conflict Management in Turkey

Existing literature on illiberal peacebuilding analyses authoritarian practices but often treats them as a static alternative to the liberal peace. This scholarship has yet to fully theorize how such strategies are dynamically refined through state learning in response to the perceived failures of prior, more pluralistic approaches. This paper addresses that gap by analysing a critical case: the paradox of Turkey’s simultaneous pursuit of a PKK demobilization process since 2024 alongside an intensified crackdown on the political opposition. It argues this is part of a coherent strategy of ‘learned illiberalism,’ a refined, second-generation model of stabilization designed to achieve pacification while actively foreclosing the political risks of pluralism that derailed the previous, semi-liberal peace attempt. Using a comparative process-tracing methodology, the analysis contrasts the institutional architecture and sequencing of the current process with the 2013–2015 peace process. The empirical analysis reveals a shift from a political bargaining model to an administrative-coercive one, which inverts the logic of concession and coercion to transform a political conflict into a matter of state-managed compliance. This finding allows the paper to specify a key mechanism of authoritarian learning in conflict management, reframing such processes as potentially successful projects of authoritarian state consolidation. It challenges scholars to look beyond the war/peace binary and examine how conflict management techniques are repurposed as core instruments in the modern authoritarian toolkit. This case demonstrates a pathway by which autocracies achieve pacification not by solving political conflicts, but by absorbing them into the permanent administrative and security apparatus of the state, with implications for the durability of both peace and autocracy.