Turkey Book Talk
Turkey Book Talk features conversations with journalists, academics, and writers about Turkey and its surrounding region. It covers politics, culture, history, and current affairs through interviews tied to books and research. New episodes are released every two weeks.
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Nefise Kahraman on bringing overlooked Turkish classics to new readers
Nefise Kahraman on Translation Attached, which brings lesser known Ottoman and Turkish literary gems to an English-reading audience. Translation Attached just published its seventh book, a volume of 25 short stories by the late author and diplomat Memduh Sevket Esendal (1883-1952).
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Dimitar Bechev on Turkey, Russia, China and the 'scramble for Europe'
Dimitar Bechev on “The Scramble for Europe: Russia, China, and Turkey Challenging Regional Order” (Oxford University Press). The book questions whether Ankara can be placed alongside Moscow and Beijing as a direct competitor to the EU, with a fundamentally different view on the challenges of an increasingly unstable world.
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Marc Sinan Winrow on Turkey and the liberal international order
Marc Sinan Winrow on “Turkey and the Liberal International Order: Hegemony, Contestation and the Politics of Articulation Since 1919” (Agenda Publishing, Edinburgh University Press).
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Benjamin Fortna on change and continuity in Ottoman and Turkish history
Benjamin Fortna, professor of history at the University of Arizona, on “The Shortest History of Turkey: From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic” (Old Street Publishing).
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Işılay Gürsu on archaeology and public perceptions in Turkey
Işılay Gürsu on “Public Dialogues in Archaeology: New Methodologies from Turkey” (Bloomsbury Academic). The book explores the Turkish public's perception and understanding of the country's rich archaeological heritage.
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Onur İnal on the rise of late Ottoman İzmir
Onur İnal on “Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir” (Cambridge University Press). The book shows how the cosmopolitan coastal city of Izmir flourished in the 19th century to become a major link between the Ottoman Empire, Europe and the rest of the world.
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Sinem Adar on Turkey's role in a fracturing Western alliance
Sinem Adar, head of the Centre for Applied Turkey Studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, on Turkey's international profile and domestic political trajectory after its recent hosting of the NATO summit in Ankara.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith on Turkey, Russia and Europe's hinterlands
Hannah Lucinda Smith on “Hinterlands: Journeys through Europe’s Unfinished Frontiers” (Profile Books). The book shows how Eastern Europe, the East Mediterranean and the Caucasus are becoming geopolitical hotspots as revisionist powers like Russia and Turkey look to secure a greater share of the pie.
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Doruk Erhan on the limits of Turkey's shift to autocracy
Doruk Erhan on the crackdown on Turkey's main opposition party. Judicial operations on the CHP have led pundits to warn the country is shifting to a post-democratic system of arbitrary rule, but in recent articles for the Verfassungsblog, Erhan makes a relatively optimistic case for the opposition's path forward.
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Jennifer Hattam on writing the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey
Istanbul-based journalist Jennifer Hattam on her work updating the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey. The conversation touches on the immense amount of work and miles that go into updating the guide, as well as how Turkey has changed since she first did the job.
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Brett Wilson on the myth and reality of modern Turkey's religious reforms
Brett Wilson on his article "Sufi Leaders in the early Turkish Republic: Profession, Privilege, and Persecution (1925-1950)". The piece studies the impact of the 1925 outlawing of Islamic religious orders, challenging the traditional idea of harsh secularist persecution.
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Suzy Hansen on Turkey and an Istanbul neighborhood in the age of Erdoğan
Suzy Hansen on “From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The book focuses on Istanbul's Karagumruk to explore the everyday impact of geopolitical upheaval, economic turbulence and the arrival of Syrian migrants in Turkey.
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Faisal Devji on the crisis of 'global Islam' in Turkey and elsewhere
Faisal Devji on “Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam” (Yale University Press). The book argues that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Islam in countries including Turkey transformed into a modern ideological system like capitalism or communism, but this process has now reached its end.
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Ryan Gingeras on organised crime in Turkey's modern history
Ryan Gingeras, author of “Mafia: A Global History” (Simon & Schuster) and “Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey” (Oxford University Press), on the influence of criminal organisations in Turkey's political and economic life over the decades.
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Mustafa Aksakal on World War I and the end of the Ottoman Empire
Mustafa Aksakal, associate professor of history at Georgetown University, on “The War that Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire” (Princeton University Press)
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Michelle Lynn Kahn on Turkish migration to Germany
Michelle Lynn Kahn on “Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration and Turkish-German History” (Cambridge University Press).
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Murat Yıldız on the Ottoman world of sports, modernisation and minorities
Murat Yıldız, associate professor of history at Skidmore College, on “The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul” (University of Texas Press)
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Berin Gür on the conquest of Istanbul in the Islamist-nationalist imagination
Berin Gür on “The Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture: The Islamist-Nationalist Rhetoric of Conquest and Melancholy” (Routledge). The book explores how the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul is remembered in Turkey's mainstream official narrative and how architecture contributes to this.
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Adnan Khan on the human toll of Turkey's importing of Europe's waste
Journalist Adnan Khan on the spectacular growth of Turkey's plastic waste imports and the role of migrant labour in the sector. His work paints a grim portrait of how the EU-Turkey migration deal and China's banning of plastic waste imports have helped the industry flourish in Turkey - with deadly human consequences.
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Burcu Karahan on sexual freedom and women in late Ottoman fiction
Burcu Karahan on her translation of “One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories” (Translation Attached). The book brings together 65 stories blending humour and eroticism, published anonymously in 1923-24. The stories are a fascinating time capsule of a vanished age, but much remains unknown about who was behind them.
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Mehmet Gurses on the transformation of Turkey's Kurdish issue
Mehmet Gurses on his article “Turkey's Kurdish Conflict Transformed”, published in the Current History journal. The conversation places the PKK's emergence and transformations in a historical context over the past five decades, also weighing up shifts that may be triggered by its current dialogue process with Ankara.
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Reuben Silverman on the rise and fall of Turkey's Democrat Party
Reuben Silverman on “The Rise and Fall of Turkey's Democrat Party: The Cold War and Illiberalism, 1945–60” (Cambridge University Press). Today's AKP government is often placed in the lineage of the Democrat Party, in power for 10 years before being overthrown in a coup in 1960. But as the book shows, the line from the Democrat Party to today is "neither as straight nor as flattering as Erdogan
Seçil Daǧtaș on religious difference in Turkey's Hatay
Seçil Daǧtaș on “Under the Same Sky: Everyday Politics of Religious Difference in Southern Turkey” (University of Pennsylvania Press). The book is an ethnographic study of “the social reproduction of religious differences” in Turkey's uniquely diverse Hatay province.
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Senem Aydin-Duzgit on foreign policy weaponisation in Turkish domestic politics
Senem Aydın-Düzgit on her article “Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics in Populist Competitive Authoritarianism,” published in the South European Society and Politics journal. The conversation looks at how Erdogan uses foreign policy, defence policy and strongman diplomacy to reinforce public backing for the regime in Turkey.
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Nora Fisher Onar on Turkish political history beyond binaries
Nora Fisher Onar on “Contesting Pluralism(s): Islamism, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond” (Cambridge University Press). The book challenges the common belief that a binary contest between "Islam" and "secularism" is the driving force behind Turkey's modern history.
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Sean Mathews on Greece's regional comeback amid rivalry with Turkey
Sean Mathews on “The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East” (Hurst). The book examines Greece's comeback as a regional player, arguing that this has been triggered in large part by neighbouring Turkey's own increasing assertiveness.
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Perin Gurel on the history of comparing Turkey and Iran in the West
Perin Gurel on “Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison: America's Wife, America's Concubine” (Cambridge University Press). The book explores the cultural history of Turkey–Iran comparisons in the West, from Cold War-era modernisation theory to post-9/11 studies of “moderate Islam”.
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Gokhan Bacik on Turkey's citizenship-selling programme
Gokhan Bacik on his article “Selling Citizenship in Turkey: Political Parties, Pragmatism, and Polarization,” recently published in the journal “Nationalism and Ethnic Politics”. The article examines the government's Citizenship By Investment scheme, its economic and social consequences, and the way it has been discussed – or avoided – in the national political debate.
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Amy Marie Spangler on Leyla Erbil's dark vision of Istanbul's history
Amy Marie Spangler on the late great author Leyla Erbil's What Remains. First published in 2011, the book is a multilayered narrative that sweeps from the Byzantine Empire to 20th century Turkey. It is also a dark elegy to the Istanbul of eras past and all that has been lost in its transformation.
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Özgür Özkan on the 'dangerous illusion' of Turkey's PKK peace bid
Özgür Özkan, visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, on the domestic and regional implications of Turkey's push for the Kurdish militant group's dissolution. The conversation digs into issues raised by his recent article “Turkey's Dangerous Illusion of Peace with the PKK”.
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Christopher Dole on psychiatry and disaster in Turkey
Christopher Dole on “Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey” (Stanford University Press). The book examines the psychiatric response to the deadly 1999 Marmara Earthquake, examining the legacy of the earthquake in the lives of its survivors and the Turkish mental health professionals who responded to it.
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Mustafa Kutlay on Turkey's middle power dilemmas
Mustafa Kutlay on his recent Foreign Affairs article “Turkey's Middle-Power Dilemma”, examining the successes and failures of Ankara's bid to carve out a greater role in the emerging multipolar world.
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Bilge Yabancı on Turkey's civil society under siege
Bilge Yabancı on “Civil Society and Authoritarianism: Co-optation, Repression and Contestation in Turkey” (Edinburgh University Press). The book examines the transformation of civil society groups under pressure from mounting authoritarianism.
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Erik-Jan Zürcher on imperial nostalgia in Turkey and Britain
Erik-Jan Zürcher on the uses and abuses of nostalgia for empire in contemporary Turkey and the UK. The conversation is based on Zurcher's recent lecture at the Istanbul Policy Center, “The Poison of Nostalgia”, which compared neo-Ottomanist tendencies in Turkey with the view of empire in Britain's Brexit debate.
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Talin Suciyan on Armenians in Turkey after World War Two
Talin Suciyan on “Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury). The book examines the oral testimonies of Armenians who registered to migrate to Soviet Armenia.
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David Tonge on the enduring hold of Islamic orders in Turkey
David Tonge on “The Enduring Hold of Islam in Turkey: The Revival of the Religious Orders and Rise of Erdogan” (Hurst). The book explores the political, economic and social influence of key Islamic orders in the country over the last few decades.
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Richard Calis on Martin Crusius and the discovery of Ottoman Greece
Richard Calis on “The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius” (Harvard University Press).
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Fiona Mullen on the Cyprus question amid growing geopolitical uncertainty
Fiona Mullen, director of the Nicosia-based Sapienta Economics consultancy, on uncertainty around the future of the decades-long Cyprus divide amid mounting geopolitical uncertainty and regional competition.
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Bilge Yesil on Turkey's narrowing media landscape
Bilge Yesil on Turkey's narrowing media landscape and internet crackdown amid political turbulence, protests and mounting pressure on critics.
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Berk Esen on whether Turkey has shifted from authoritarianism to autocracy
Berk Esen on whether Ekrem Imamoglu's arrest heralds Turkey's shift from competitive authoritarianism to autocracy, dynamics driving the government's crackdown, the international context, and critical choices facing the country's opposition.
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Cuma Çiçek on PKK disarmament and the future of Turkey's Kurdish issue
Cuma Çiçek, author of “The Kurds of Turkey: National, Religious and Economic Identities” (IB Tauris), on the dynamics behind Ankara's push for the PKK's dissolution, what it means for Turkish politics and what it means for the future of the Kurdish issue.
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Selim Koru on Turkey's role in the emerging anti-liberal world order
Selim Koru on "New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country" (IB Tauris). The book dives deep into the worldview driving Turkey's regime change in recent years, and its profound domestic and foreign policy implications.
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Claudia Liebelt on cosmetic surgery and perceptions of beauty in Turkey
Claudia Liebelt on "Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey" (Syracuse University Press). Based on research in beauty salons and cosmetic centres across Istanbul, the book explores the cosmetic sector's extraordinary growth in recent years.
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Brett Wilson on Yakup Kadri's controversial late Ottoman novel 'Nur Baba'
Brett Wilson on his translation of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu's 1922 novel "Nur Baba" (Routledge). The book's account of a debauched Bektashi Sufi lodge caused a sensation at the time, raising eyebrows with its depiction of an immoral, even degenerate religious community in turn-of-the-century Istanbul.
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Omar Kadkoy on the future of Syrian migrants in Turkey
Omar Kadkoy, foreign policy, security and migration program coordinator at Heinrich Böll Stiftung's Istanbul office, on the future of Turkey's Syrian migrant population after the fall of Assad.
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Zozan Pehlivan on climatic shifts behind late Ottoman conflicts
Zozan Pehlivan on "The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century" (Cambridge University Press). The book explores how extreme climate disruptions were a major factor behind tensions between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in eastern Anatolia in the 19th century.
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Samuel Hirst on a century of Ankara-Moscow cooperation
Samuel J. Hirst on "Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939" (Oxford University Press). The conversation addresses key episodes of collaboration between Ankara and Moscow on political, industrial and cultural projects since the early republican era.
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Ralph Hubbell on the work of Turkish literary giant Oğuz Atay
Ralph Hubbell on translating Oğuz Atay's "Waiting for the Fear" (New York Review Books). Atay is widely seen as one the great Turkish fiction writers of the 20th century, but has largely yet to appear in English until now.
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Jennifer Hattam on Istanbul's shifting cultural landscape
Jennifer Hattam reflects on a decade-and-a-half of reporting on Turkey's environmental, political and cultural agenda, as well as wrenching changes in journalism and staying afloat amid Istanbul's relentless urban upheaval.
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Salim Çevik on Turkey's Middle East reset
Salim Çevik on his recent SWP paper "Turkey’s Reconciliation Efforts in the Middle East: Ambitions and Constraints in a Changing Regional Order". The paper examines Erdogan's shift away from trying to overthrow the established regional order towards rapprochement with Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Syria and others.
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Orçun Selçuk on populist polarisation in Turkey and Latin America
Orçun Selçuk on "The Authoritarian Divide: Populism, Propaganda, and Polarization" (University of Notre Dame Press). The book compares Turkey under Erdoğan, Venezuela under Chávez and Ecuador under Correa, showing that Turkey's experience can be more usefully compared with Latin American examples than cases of right-wing populism in Europe or Islamism in the Middle East.
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Ezgi Başaran on the new spirit of Islamism
Ezgi Başaran on "The New Spirit of Islamism: Interactions Between the AKP, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood" (IB Tauris). The book looks at the aspirations of Islamist actors in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia from 2011 to 2013, seeking to understand how they viewed each other and whether they prioritised pragmatism or religious ideology.
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Samim Akgönül on 100 years of Turkish-Greek relations
Samim Akgönül, director of the Department of Turkish Studies at the University of Strasbourg, on "One Hundred Years of Greek-Turkish Relations: The Human Dimension of an Ongoing Conflict" (Edinburgh University Press)
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Çağdaş Üngör on Turkey's geopolitical dilemmas in the Asia-Pacific century
Çağdaş Üngör discusses her recent articles "A Bridge No More? Turkiye’s Geopolitical Significance in the 21st Century" in the journal Survival and "A 'Bridge' Pushed to the Periphery? Turkey's Geopolitical Significance in the Asia-Pacific Century" in Turkish Studies.
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Karabekir Akkoyunlu on religion and democracy in Turkey and Iran
Karabekir Akkoyunlu, Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at SOAS, on "Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey: Tutelary Consolidation, Popular Contestation" (Edinburgh University Press).
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Eugene Rogan on communal violence and the end of the old Ottoman world
Eugene Rogan on "The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World" (Allen Lane). The book examines how in July 1860 Damascus exploded in communal violence when a mostly Muslim crowd tried to exterminate the Christian community, after hundreds of years of relative peace and coexistence.
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Umit Kurt on Gaziantep's forgotten Armenian past
Umit Kurt on "The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province" (Harvard University Press). The book draws on archival sources, memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts and property liquidation records to detail the dispossession of Antep's Armenian community and the transfer of their wealth to Ottoman and later Turkish Muslim elites.
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Ozge Samanci on visualising Istanbul's sociopolitical currents
Ozge Samanci on her graphic novel “Evil Eyes Sea” (Uncivilized Books). The semi-autobiographical story is a murder mystery centred on a group of students at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University in the 1990s. It follows up from her highly successful graphic novel “Dare to Disappoint”.
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Sami Kent on stories from Turkey’s first hundred years
Sami Kent on “The Endless Country: A Personal Journey Through Turkey’s First Hundred Years” (Picador). The book paints a portrait of Turkey by combining accounts of key events with Sami’s personal reflections on growing up learning about his paternal homeland from afar, before coming to work in the country as a journalist.
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Bradley Secker on the pleasures and perils of photojournalism in Istanbul
Istanbul-based photojournalist Bradley Secker discusses his work on migration, LGBT+ asylum seekers in the Middle East and Europe, the difficulties of practicing journalism in Turkey and the broader state of photojournalism.
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Bilge Yesil on Turkey’s global media operations
Bilge Yesil on “Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order” (University of Illinois Press). The book examines how Erdogan's regime has mobilised English-language media to counter foreign criticism and project Turkey as a rising power opposed to Western imperialism, supposedly giving a voice to oppressed Muslims around the world.
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Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky on Muslim refugees in the Ottoman Empire
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky on “Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State” (Stanford University Press). The book explores the forced migration from the Russian Empire of around one million Muslims, who settled in the Ottoman Empire between the 1850s and World War One.
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Emre Toros on Turkey between democracy and authoritarianism
Emre Toros on “Electoral Integrity in Turkey” (Edinburgh University Press). The book weighs up the country's democratic credentials after over two decades of rule by Erdogan's party, painting an ambivalent picture combining both optimism and pessimism.
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Christopher Phillips on Turkey’s place in Middle East turbulence
Christopher Phillips on “Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East” (Yale University Press). The conversation explores the region's shifting rivalries, as well as how Turkey’s push for greater influence in Syria, Iraq and Libya has impacted its ties with other ambitious powers.
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Seda Demiralp on Turkey’s surprise local election results
Seda Demiralp on what the recent local election results mean for Turkish politics. The conversation takes in what the main opposition CHP did right, what the ruling AKP did wrong, the emerging challenge to Erdogan posed by the Yeniden Refah Party, and the performance of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party.
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Andrew Finkel on Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and Sherlock Holmes
Andrew Finkel, a veteran journalist based in Turkey for decades, on his debut novel “The Adventure of the Second Wife: The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Sultan” (Even Keel Press). It is a sprawling story exploring the mystery of Abdulhamid II’s obsession with Sherlock Holmes.
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Bahar Baser on Turkey's brain drain
Bahar Baser on “An Exodus from Turkey: Tales of Migration and Exile” (Edinburgh University Press), co-edited with Erdi Ozturk. The book examines the current wave of migration from Turkey, focusing on the experiences of 21 different public figures living overseas.
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İlkay Yılmaz on the origins of the Ottoman Turkish security state
İlkay Yılmaz on “Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908” (Syracuse University Press). The book examines how paranoia about nationalist, anarchist and revolutionary movements spread during the era of Abdulhamid II, prompting new methods aiming to control subjects of the Ottoman state.
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Alexander Christie-Miller on Turkey and the people of Istanbul’s historic walls
Alexander Christie-Miller on “To The City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul” (William Collins). He worked for many years as the Times of London's Turkey correspondent and his book is a sophisticated meditation on contemporary life and politics in the country.
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Tuğba Tekerek on the crisis in Turkish academia
Tuğba Tekerek on “Provincial Universities: The AK Party’s Backyard Campus" (İletişim). The book examines the government's push to open over 100 universities across Turkey over the past two decades, painting a picture of falling academic standards but increased outlets for the ruling party's religious nationalist ideology.
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Timur Hammond on religion and change in Istanbul
Timur Hammond on “Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul” (University of California Press). The book is a sociological and historical study tracing the changing character of Istanbul's Eyüpsultan district, its industrial and commercial history, and its role in the emergence of political Islam in Turkey.
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İlkim Büke Okyar on Arabs in Turkish popular culture
İlkim Büke Okyar on “Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950: National Self and Non-National Other” (Syracuse University Press). The conversation addresses how Arabs are typically viewed in Turkish popular culture, also examining the impact of the influx of Syrian migrants since 2011 and the Israel-Gaza war.
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Berk Esen on the future of Turkey’s opposition and the fate of its democracy
Berk Esen on the troubled future of Turkey’s democracy and the challenges facing its opposition parties heading into 2024. Berk recently co-authored “Turkey’s New Regime: Competitive Authoritarianism” (Iletisim) along with Hakan Yavuzyilmaz and Sebnem Gumuscu.
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Sinem Adar on Turkey’s dilemmas amid the Israel-Gaza war
Sinem Adar, associate at the Centre for Applied Turkey Studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, on Turkey’s response to the Israel-Gaza war. The conversation builds on her recent article arguing that the crisis shows the limits of Turkey’s regional influence.
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Cihan Dizdaroğlu on Turkey-Greece ties through turbulence and rapprochement
Cihan Dizdaroğlu on “Turkish-Greek Relations: Foreign Policy in a Securitisation Framework” (Edinburgh University Press). The book looks at how ties between Athens and Ankara have gone through various cycles of improvement and deterioration from the early Republic of Turkey to today.
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Alp Yenen on weighing up the Republic of Turkey’s legacy at 100 years
Alp Yenen on “A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments” (Leiden University Press). The book includes 100 chapters, written by over 70 scholars, examining different aspects of Turkey's political, social, cultural and economic history on the centenary of the republic's founding.
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Nilay Özok-Gündoğan on political authority in Ottoman Kurdistan
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan on “The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege” (Edinburgh University Press). The book narrates the rise and fall of the Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman east, as well as how their autonomy was abolished as the empire modernised and centralised from the 19th century.
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Onur İşçi on post-war Turkey-Soviet relations and Ankara’s ties with Russia today
Onur İşçi on “Turkey at a Crossroads: The Soviet Threat and Postwar Realignment, 1945-1946”, published in the journal Diplomatic History. The article reexamines the time when the Soviet Union made military and territorial demands, ultimately pushing Turkey towards Nato. The conversation also touches on Ankara's complicated present-day policy towards Moscow.
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Spyros Sofos on Turkey’s many nationalisms
Spyros Sofos on “Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism” (Edinburgh University Press). The book delves into the ambiguities behind the term “the people” from the late Ottoman era to today, and how religious, secularist, left-wing and right-wing projects have used it for different ends.
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Pat Yale on travelling around Turkey in the footsteps of Gertrude Bell
Pat Yale on “Following Miss Bell: Travels Around Turkey in the Footsteps of Gertrude Bell” (Trailblazer). The book tracks the footsteps of archaeologist, writer and explorer Gertrude Bell, who travelled extensively throughout Anatolia from 1899 until the outbreak of the First World War.
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