Introduction

Turkey has been attracting growing interest from scholars, policy-makers and the public in the Western world. Once mainly the playing field of international relations theorists, Turkey and its social and political changes are today the subject of an increasing amount of interesting scholarly work in sociology, anthropology and the political sciences. This book is an engagement with respected scholars in these fields, who provide us with many insights into the social and political fabric of the country. In particular, this volume engages with the ideological contestations in the country, stemming from the presence of political Islam and rising forms of Kurdish and Turkish nationalisms. However, rather than merely assessing the ideological fault lines, most of the contributors focus on the political and social agents of these competing projects. Different chapters therefore engage with Turkey’s secularist establishment, the ruling AKP government, the Kurdistan Workers Party, (the PKK) and the Institutions of the European Union, with which Turkey, after being on a waiting list for long, has since 2005 finally started negotiating its future membership. In this respect, there is a growing consensus that Turkey’s reforms, which were far-reaching during the early 2000s, have tended to stagnate since accession talks formally commenced, in 2005. Comprehending the difficulties of Turkey in meeting the conditions for membership to the European Union necessitates an understanding of its internal dynamics.