Dimitar Bechev on Turkey, Russia, China and the ‘scramble for Europe’
September 29, 2026
Turkey Book Talk #279 – Dimitar Bechev, Director of the Dahrendorf Programme at St Antony’s College, University Oxford and Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe, on “The Scramble for Europe: Russia, China, and Turkey Challenging Regional Order” (Oxford University Press)
The book questions whether Turkey can be placed alongside Russia and China as a direct competitor to the EU, with a fundamentally different view on the challenges posed by an increasingly unstable world. As Bechev writes: “The argument is straightforward: Whereas formerly the trio was on the receiving end of order-building from the EU, it is now in the business of reshaping and rearranging power hierarchies, institutions, and norms in Europe.”
The conversation asks what has changed since the formal launch of Turkey’s EU accession process in the 2000s, and whether the current situation of low-expectation, pragmatic engagement – with fundamental disputes left unresolved – was always inevitable.
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Marc Sinan Winrow on Turkey and the ‘liberal international order’
September 15, 2026
Turkey Book Talk #278 – Marc Sinan Winrow, post-doctoral research assistant at the London School of Economics, on “Turkey and the Liberal International Order: Hegemony, Contestation and the Politics of Articulation Since 1919” (Agenda Publishing, Edinburgh University Press)
The conversation addresses Turkey’s position on the edge of the Western-led international order over the past century, as well as Ankara’s view of the threats and opportunities posed by today’s mounting turbulence.
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Benjamin Fortna on change and continuity in Ottoman and Turkish history
September 1, 2026
Turkey Book Talk #277 – 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)
In just over 200 pages, the book spans the emergence of the Ottoman Empire to the present day. The interview addresses the challenges of trying to fit so much into such a compressed form, appealing to a popular readership, and the recurring themes that emerge over the course of so many centuries.
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Işılay Gürsu on archaeology and public perceptions in Turkey
August 18, 2026
Turkey Book Talk #276 – Işılay Gürsu, assistant director at the British Institute in Ankara, on “Public Dialogues in Archaeology: New Methodologies from Turkey” (Bloomsbury Academic).
The book explores the Turkish public’s views of the country’s rich archaeological heritage, the hunt for hidden treasure at historic sites across the country, and efforts to repatriate ancient artefacts that were pilfered generations ago.
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Turkey Book Talk #261 – Burcu Karahan of Stanford University on her translation of “One Thousand and One Kisses: The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories” (Translation Attached).
The collection brings together 65 stories blending risque humour and bold eroticism, first published anonymously in weekly instalments in 1923-24. The stories are a fascinating time capsule of a vanished age, but much remains unknown about who was behind them and the circumstances of their publication.
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Mehmet Gurses on the transformation of Turkey’s Kurdish issue
December 23, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #260 – Mehmet Gurses, director of Kurdish Studies at the University of Central Florida, on his article “Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict Transformed”, recently published in the journal Current History.
The article places the PKK’s emergence and transformations in a historical context over the past four 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
December 9, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #259 – Reuben Silverman on “The Rise and Fall of Turkey’s Democrat Party: The Cold War and Illiberalism, 1945–60” (Cambridge University Press).
It is an excellent book about a fascinating period in Turkish history. But it is a one that is often misremembered or misinterpreted in Turkey today.
Whether intended as criticism or praise, Erdogan’s AKP government is often placed in the lineage of the Democrat Party and Adnan Menderes, prime minister for 10 years before being overthrown in a military coup in 1960. However, as the book shows, “the line from the Democrat Party to the present day is neither as straight nor as flattering as Erdogan would have it be”.
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Seçil Daǧtaș on religious difference in Turkey’s Hatay
November 25, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #258 – Seçil Daǧtaș, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo, on “Under the Same Sky: Everyday Politics of Religious Difference in Southern Turkey” (University of Pennsylvania Press)
The book is an ethnographic study of what Dagtas describes as “the social reproduction of religious differences” in Turkey’s uniquely diverse Hatay province.
The conversation also addresses the impact of the deadly 2023 earthquakes that devastated the region, as well as over a decade of war in neighbouring Syria.
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Please support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #257 – Senem Aydın-Düzgit, professor of international relations at Sabanci University and director of the Istanbul Policy Centre, on her article “Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics in Populist Competitive Authoritarianism: The Case of the May 2023 Elections in Turkey,” published in the journal South European Society and Politics.
The conversation looks at how Erdogan uses foreign policy, defence policy and strongman diplomacy to burnish his reputation and reinforce public backing for the regime in Turkey. This strategy comes amid greater opportunity, as growing geopolitical uncertainty opens doors for ambitious players to reshape the international system based on raw power politics.
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Please support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Nora Fisher Onar on Turkish political history beyond binaries
October 28, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #256 – Nora Fisher Onar, Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at University of San Francisco, on “Contesting Pluralism(s): Islamism, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond” (Cambridge University Press).
The book aims to “challenge the received wisdom that a binary contest between ‘Islam’ and ‘secularism’ is the driving force in Turkey’s politics”. It voices the same scepticism about other binary divides often used to explain Turkey’s political history, instead proposing an alternative theory of alliances between pluralist and non-pluralist forces that shift over time.
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Turkey Book Talk #239 – Selim Koru, analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in US, on “New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury)
The book dives deep into the stark worldview driving Turkey’s regime change over the past couple of decades, and its profound implications for the country’s domestic and foreign policy.
It places Erdogan’s “New Turkey” in the context of a global trend of civilisation-fixated, far-right movements thriving in the US, Russia, India, Hungary and elsewhere – a pioneer of the emerging anti-liberal world order.
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Check out Selim’s Substack Kulturkampf
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Support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Samuel Hirst on a century of Ankara-Moscow cooperation
December 17, 2024
Turkey Book Talk #234 – Samuel J. Hirst, historian and assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University, on “Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939” (Oxford University Press).
The book examines crucial but sometimes overlooked decades of close cooperation between the young Republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union on key political, industrial and cultural projects. The conversation also discusses later episodes of collaboration between Ankara and Moscow in the 1960s and 70s, as well as the bromance between Erdogan and Putin today.
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Support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
