This book narrates and analyzes a century of the Turkish education system and textbook indoctrination starting from the foundation of the Republic until today. It divides the history of Turkish education into five periods: Single party government (1923–1950), Menderes' Democrat Party government (1950–1960), the 1960 coup generals and their successors' governments (1960–1980), the Turkish-Islam Synthesis oriented Atatürkist governments (1980–2002) and finally the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government (2002–). By using the content analysis method, this book exposes Kemalism's metamorphosis into "Turkish-Islam Synthesis" influenced Atatürkism. For the first time, Cohen Yanarocak analyzes the indoctrination of this post-1980 official ideology through history, religious studies, civics, and national security knowledge textbooks. It goes beyond the Atatürkist period and examines the gradual but drastic Islamization of the whole curriculum and school textbooks at the expense of Atatürkism under the AKP. In this framework, this book highlights the recent penetration of controversial concepts such as Neo-Ottomanism, Jihad, and Pan-Turkism into the current Turkish school textbooks. Certainly, the ramifications of the current textbooks will influence the lives of millions of people. Therefore, this book functions as a crucial manual to understanding the current political environment in Turkey.

Gradually since 2003, Turkey's autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to make Turkey a great power -- in the tradition of past Turkish leaders from the late Ottoman sultans to Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Here the leading authority Soner Cagaptay, author of The New Sultan -- the first biography of President Erdogan -- provides a masterful overview of the power politics in the Middle East and Turkey's place in it. Erdogan has picked an unorthodox model in the context of recent Turkish history, attempting to cast his country as a stand-alone Middle Eastern power. In doing so Turkey has broken ranks with its traditional Western allies, including the United States and has embraced an imperial-style foreign policy which has aimed to restore Turkey's Ottoman-era reach into the Arabian Middle East and the Balkans. Today, in addition to a domestic crackdown on dissent and journalistic freedoms, driven by Erdogan's style of governance, Turkey faces a hostile world. Ankara has nearly no friends left in the Middle East, and it faces a threat from resurgent historic adversaries: Russia and Iran. Furthermore, Turkey cannot rely on the unconditional support of its traditional Western allies. Can Erdogan deliver Turkey back to safety? What are the risks that lie ahead for him, and his country? How can Turkey truly become a great power, fulfilling a dream shared by many Turks, the sultans, Ataturk, and Erdogan himself?

This study seeks to explain the impact of historical narratives on the inclusiveness and pluralism of citizenship models. Drawing on comparative historical analysis of two post-imperial core countries, Turkey and Austria, it explores how narrative forms operate to support or constrain citizenship models.

After the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2002, the AKP grew into an authoritarian government as it politically and culturally oppressed citizens and institutions. In Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat, Burcu Yasemin Şeybenargues thattheatre was deliberately targeted because theatre institutions and companies embodied the cultural program of the statist and Kemalist cultural policy that has continually excluded Muslims and various religious and ethnic minorities. Although the AKP claimed to be replacing the top-down, discriminatory, and secular statist and Kemalist theatre system with a facilitative and inclusive one, the AKP gradually adapted a more authoritarian system, as evidenced by their efforts to close and defund theatres, ban plays, and force theatre artists to exile. Despite the AKP’s increasing oppression, Şeybenstudies contemporary Turkish theatre to establish that a few theatre institutions, companies, and artists have managed to survive and develop democratic cultural policies and strategies that will outlive the AKP government.

Turkey has gone through significant transformations over the last century—from the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk era to the Republic of today—but throughout it has demonstrated troubling continuities in its encouragement and deployment of mass violence. In particular, the construction of a Muslim-Turkish identity has been achieved in part by designating “internal enemies” at whom public hatred can be directed. This volume provides a wide range of case studies and historiographical reflections on the alarming recurrence of such violence in Turkish history, as atrocities against varied ethnic-religious groups from the nineteenth century to today have propelled the nation’s very sense of itself.

This is a work of excavation of the modern history of Turkey, with the Kurdish question at its center, unearthed and exposed in Çandar’s captivating narrative. The founding of a Turkish nation-state in Asia Minor brought with it the denial of the distinct Kurdish identity in its midst, giving birth to an intractable problem that led to intermittent Kurdish revolts and culminated in the enduring insurgency of the PKK. The Kurdish question is perceived as a mortal threat for the survival of Turkey. The author weaves a fascinating account of the encounter between Turkey and the Kurds in historical perspective with special emphasis on failed peace processes. Providing a unique historical record of the authoritarian, centralist and ultra-nationalist—rather than Islamist—nature of the Turkish state rooted in the last decades of the Ottoman period and finally manifested in Erdoğan’s “New Turkey,” Çandar challenges stereotyped and conventional views on the Turkey of today and tomorrow. Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds combines scholarly research with the memoirs of a participant observer, richly revealing the author’s first-hand knowledge of developments acquired over a lifetime devoted to the resolution of perhaps the most complex problem of the Middle East.

Historical revisionism refers to any reinterpretation of recorded history, but whether this practice is beneficial, harmful, or somewhere in between is hotly contested. While allowing newly discovered evidence and facts to enter the historical record may seem benign, the reinterpretation of existing facts to reflect contemporary morality is a far more controversial aspect of the topic. Many also worry this could lead to historical facts being distorted, as has been the case with Holocaust denial. This volume discusses the different forms and causes of historical revisionism along with the ethical, social, and scholarly concerns related to the issue.