Despite the escalation of violence and conflict in Turkey, peace continues to be high on the agenda of the Kurdish political and women’s movement and many progressive Turks, particularly Turkish feminists. This proposed paper is based on the hypothesis that there has not been any real meaningful official peace process in Turkey. In contrast, official peace negotiations so far have deepened divisions not just between Turkish and Kurdish politicians, but more importantly, between and within communities. The aim of the negotiations – especially for the governing parties, currently the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – has been to monopolise power and violence. The various peace negotiations since the 1990s were not about risk-taking to make peace – but about risk-avoidance to maintain the status quo, and specifically to maintain current actors’ grasp on power. In this paper, I will argue that gender-based mobilization as part of a shift away from nationalist struggle to a vision of radical democracy at local, national and transnational level has been significant in articulating a desire for peace, creating common platforms for action and representation across and within ethnic communities. In terms of peace-building, it would be too simplistic to consider whether and how many women sit at the negotiating table of official negotiations, although that question is certainly emblematic of prevailing gender norms and power dynamics within any given context, including Turkish-Kurdish peace negotiations. In this paper, I will explore the significance of gender for understanding conflict and achieving peace. More specifically, my research intends to shed light on the way that peace is articulated and put into practise by actors whose conceptualization of conflict extends beyond national, ethnic and political violence to gender-based violence and conflict. I do so by looking at the specific empirical case of activists, politicians and intellectuals working for peace in the context of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Through a historically grounded and in depth qualitative research amongst Turkish and Kurdish women and men working towards and for peace, I address the question of how nationalism, peace activism and gender-based activism intersect. The multi-sited qualitative research for this article took place between February 2015 and January 2016 in four different locations: Diyarbakir, Istanbul, London and Berlin. I carried out in-depth, open-ended interviews with 40 respondents, including women’s rights activists, MPs, co-mayors, academics, journalists, and lawyers, in addition to seven focus group discussions.