EU conditionality and desecuritization nexus in Turkey

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 desecuritizations; yet 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.