EU conditionality and desecuritization nexus in Turkey

Abstract

Borrowing the Copenhagen school's lexicon of desecuritization the present paper appraises the EU's role as a desecuritizing agent for Turkey with a particular focus on security speech-acts about Kurdish separatism' and political Islam'. Taking up the illustrative cases of silencing the military and abandoning limits to freedom of speech reflected in EU-Turkey accession documents this paper observes the ways in which the EU membership conditionality has been an important catalyst for Turkey's desecuritizationsyet argues that the EU's impact is limited due to the necessities of the interplay between various desecuritization agents/processes as well as the existence of EU conditionality efficacy factors.