Armored vehicles patrolling the streets, men with black masks and long barrel weapons opening fire at civilians in front of homes, tea houses and mosques, children standing behind shattered windows of bullet-riddled buildings, and the sound of unremitting shelling.

This is what daily life under military curfew looks like for the people of Silvan, Cizre and Nusaybin, Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey.

While the Kurdish people clearly feel dragged into a civil war, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu stated that the curfews were not a matter of police operations, but were imposed for the sake of “public order.” Referring to the demonstrations organized by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in solidarity with the people’s resistance in Silvan and other places, Davutoglu said that there is no need to make a “show” out of it, and that the operations will continue until the southeastern part of the country has been completely “cleaned from terrorists.”

When states speak of public order and stability, especially framed with an anti-terror rhetoric, this usually means that some anti-democratic policies are trying to be legitimized. Turkey has become well known for its infamous security paranoia that is constantly expressed through radical nationalism and violent repressions against Kurds. Thus, the Turkey-Kurdish conflict has always been described solely through an ethnic narrative between Turks and Kurds. The political nature of the conflict is often suppressed or disregarded.

The situation in the country escalated after June 7. Following the HDP’s electoral success, President Erdogan and his AKP failed to reach the needed absolute majority in order to change the constitution and in turn transform the existing parliamentary system into a presidential one. Early elections were set for Nov. 1.

In the lead up to the elections, the Turkish state stepped up its repressions against HDP supporters, as well as attacked PKK quarters in Qandil with F16 military jets, killing many civilians in Zergele village. Once again an entire people was labelled as terrorist, and state violence and repression was carried into urban cities in the southeast of the country with elected mayors finding themselves in the political crosshairs. For instance, Cizre Mayor Leyla Imret, and HDP member, was suspended by the Interior Ministry as part of systematic political persecution. She was accused of provoking the youth/”terrorist propaganda,” shoot-to-kill curfews were imposed, and tortured bodies displayed in public.

Upon this, urban districts of Kurdish cities declared autonomy one after another in August 2015. The failure of state institutions within the cities combined with the state’s attempts of mass-killing were reasons put forward by the people. On many occasions before, several guerrilla groups had claimed autonomy over the very same provinces. This time however, it was an urban organization and mobilization of civilians seeking to build self-defense mechanisms based on the principles of self-governance.

State violence has increased the more resistance grows in the cities. This is clearly seen in the amount of combat tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and air raids, as well as the brutal images of dead bodies being tied to the back of armored vehicles and dragged through the streets, or pregnant women and old men shot dead in front of their houses. Curfews in Kurdish cities most certainly always come with a rising death toll.

Turkey might be the next country to find itself in civil war.

This is not because the Kurds defend nationalist interests in favor of separation – as is the false proclamation propagated by the Turkish state. But because Turkey is confronted with political tensions due to a clash of two attempts of regime change.

The Turkish-Kurdish conflict has gone beyond its ethnic dimension. It has become a conflict of two fundamentally different visions for the future of Turkey and the region: An authoritarian presidency put forward by the AKP government on the one side, and “democratic autonomy” defended by the Kurdish movement side-by-side with non-Kurdish progressive forces on the other.

The ruling AKP government published a proposal for a presidential system in November 2012. According to it, the president should have the power to appoint and dismiss governors and ministers, as well as half of the constitutional judges, to dissolve the Parliament without any significant condition other than the president’s will and to enact edicts without Parliament’s consent. The Turkish version of an executive presidential system therefore would mean the personification of political power, hence the concentration of power expressed in an authoritarian system based on a single man.

In an already highly centralized state, with a constantly rising demand for decentralization and self-determination, this kind of a electoral putsch most certainly has an anachronistic character. While the government in Ankara puts all its energy into how to most effectively transform the system into single-man authoritarianism, the HDP, as well as the Kurdish movement and its allies, continue to promote a civil, democratic and libertarian alternative based on the principles of a democratic autonomous model put forward by Abdullah Öcalan, the leader and ideological father of the PKK, who has been held in solitary confinement since April 2015.

The idea behind democratic autonomy is to circumvent the authority of the state by developing grassroots structures based on civil liberties and women’s emancipation put into practice by bottom-up, participatory administrative bodies. This concept aims to prevent any kind of political hegemony in shaping a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural society, without completely disregarding the state as such. While this new understanding of governance has been successfully established in Rojava amid the Syrian war, the democratic resistance in Turkey against the hostilities of the Turkish state is more and more becoming one with the resistance in Rojava and Shengal.

One of the first declarations of autonomy was made in the Kurdish city of Sirnak on Aug. 11 following the murder of three civilians by a special operations team in the district of Silopi. The declaration stated, “No appointed governor shall rule us in this way … We will govern ourselves from now on and won’t allow anyone rule over us.”

Symbolically speaking, the reference exhibits the clash between the AKP’s vision of an autocratic presidency and the will of the larger Kurdish population. The conflict is political because it determines the status of not only Kurdish people but the future for democracy in Turkey and the wider region.

The current resistance in Kurdish cities is not because of a temporary political conjuncture, but rather the accumulation of a struggle for political status on the basis of democratic equality – a century-long struggle.

Rosa Burç, 25, is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Department of Comparative Government, University of Bonn. Her research is on Nation-States and Theories of (Post-) Nationalism.