Communal violence and ethnic polarization before and after the 2015 elections in Turkey: attacks against the HDP and the Kurdish population.

Given its duration and intensity, the decades-old civil war in Turkey between the Turkish state and the PKK has resulted in relatively low levels of lethal inter-communal conflict between Kurdish and Turkish populations. However, around the June 2015 elections an unprecedented wave of systematic anti-Kurdish violence swept across western Turkey. The paper will assess these events in relation to literature on communal riots and electoral violence. It will consider the impact of state led anti-Kurdish discourse and the growth of the HDP, as potential factors that aggravated the dormant tensions and laid the groundwork for widespread inter-communal violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]