Periodisations of the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party rest on qualitative turning points. Periodisation is cast as penalised optimal segmentation, a shortest-path problem, solved exactly by pruned dynamic programming on 1,461 weeks of event data. The optimum recovers five of six documented turning points, but a pre-specified circular-shift test cannot distinguish this from chance (p = 0.123). Post hoc, simulations show low power, lower with the seasonal cycle than without it; modelling or removing that cycle lowers p to 0.006–0.010, and a greedy solver would have reported a valid positive; none survives correction for multiple testing.