ABSTRACT
Turkey tends to be known in the West in rather specific ways: for its being formed out of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, its secularism, its readiness to become part of the European Union, and for its possessing seemingly intractable political problems such as the Cyprus question or a so-called ‘democratic deficit’. The economic and social developments that have changed the country over the past seventy-five years are rarely integrated with these dominant perceptions. Yet they are nowhere more relevant than when considering the evolving circumstances of the Alevis and their changing relations with the Sunni majority.
