One of the biggest challenges to democratizationin Turkey has been the failure of the state to recognize the ethnic and civil rights of Kurds as equal citizens. The Kurds began an armed revolt in 1984, which exposed the Kurdish problem as the Achilles heel of the nation-state project of the founding fathers. The insurrection dismantled the myth of the ethnically Turkish nation-state, while providing an opportunity for cultivating a more inclusive democracy where ethnic differences could be accepted as building blocks of a more diverse nation-state. Since the early 1980s the Kurds have become politically more powerful, and the Turkish state has come to recognize the Kurdish reality, which it had long denied. A democratic solution to the conflict, however, is still missing.

On the Kurdish side, the goals of the armed revolt and of Kurdish civilian politics evolved over time.