This volume presents the collaborative work from the two-day workshop titled “Fixing the State of Art: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Contemporary History of Turkey,” held in November 2020 at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. The primary objective of this gathering was to delineate the field of contemporary history of Turkey and explore how various academic disciplines contribute to it. This workshop was the first of three organized by the Scientific Network for Contemporary History of Turkey, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation).1
Writing contemporary history raises several important questions: What is the contemporary history of Turkey? When does it begin, when does it end? How does it differ from earlier periods? What makes it distinctive? Since readers will find a fuller discussion of these questions in my article below, I will only offer a basic observation at this point. This volume responds to the fact that the history of Turkey in the second half of the twentieth century has rarely been the subject of retrospective scholarly analysis. Most studies were written by contemporaries, yet the accumulation of these works over the years has not resulted in a systematic historiography of the period. The vast majority of studies on Turkish history have focused either on the “old” contemporary history—namely, the Young Turk and Kemalist periods—or on the “youngest” period, i.e., the AKP era since the 2000s. Indeed, while research on the early republic is expanding rapidly and studies on nearly every aspect of present-day Turkish society and culture are thriving, research on Turkey in the post-1950s period remains remarkably limited and is, as one Turkish Studies scholar rightly observed, “typically relegated to a few rushed pages in general monographs.”2 Even though this observation overlooks relevant German- and French-language scholarship, its overall premise remains fundamentally sound. These reasons have led both the Network and the essays in this volume to focus on the post-1950s period. The immediate present is intentionally excluded, as it—being an ongoing and unfinished period—resists reliable historicization. Instead, the volume turns to the largely neglected “intermediate” period of Turkish contemporary history: the years and decades between the post-1950s and today. By centering this timeframe, the volume seeks to place Turkey’s current trajectory in historical context and to highlight the challenges involved in writing its history.
With that in mind, readers can better appreciate why the starting point of both the Network and its inaugural workshop was driven by a frustrating fact: the near absence of historiography on Turkey’s second half of the twentieth century—especially in comparison to the numerous studies produced in other disciplines. Bridging this gap requires a shared discussion among scholars from various fields who engage with the contemporary history of Turkey, even if many would likely not use the term “historiography” to frame their work. The central idea of this discussion may be summarized as follows: once we grasp the main findings from different academic disciplines, we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of Turkey’s recent past. From the outset, it was clear that such a discussion had to assess the current state of the art in each participating discipline and critically examine its theories, concepts, and methods, along with their respective analytical strengths. Cultural anthropology, for instance, poses different questions and employs distinct approaches than political science—each grounded in its own methodology. The same holds true, of course, for other disciplines as well. The inclusion of social sciences in historicizing the past is not uncommon. By drawing on concepts and analytical tools from these adjacent fields, the historical discipline can sharpen its “own quest for objectivity and narrative strategies.” Notable examples of such adaptations include concepts and analyses of modernity developed by social scientists, which historians commonly utilize to shape their historical accounts.3 In this sense, this volume invites reflection on the ways in which historians and social scientists are mutually engaged in each other’s work, and whether and how they can jointly contribute to the historicization of contemporary history.
Thus, the objective of the volume is twofold. First, readers will be informed about findings, research trends, problems, and open questions in each of the represented disciplines concerning the contemporary history of Turkey, particularly with regard to gaps, limitations, and possibilities. Second, building on this, the disciplines themselves are subjected to critical reflection by historicizing them as intellectual undertakings in a constant process of construction and reconstruction. This is done, among other things, by analyzing each discipline’s history in relation to contemporary history, disciplinary cultures, idiosyncrasies, and interdependencies. This includes, with varying emphases, the specific disciplines’ changing relationship to national and international politics and to master narratives of the state.
The authors of the volume are leading experts in their fields, drawing on diverse academic backgrounds and working in different countries. Their combined expertise and interdisciplinary perspectives give the volume both depth and range in its exploration of Turkey’s contemporary history. Against this backdrop, the authors lay out the key contributions of the disciplines most centrally involved in studying Turkey’s recent past—historiography, political science, Turkology/Turkish Studies, and cultural anthropology. While their emphases differ, they trace the main research questions, theories, approaches, methods, paradigm shifts, and major scholarly debates and controversies that have shaped the field over the past half century.
To clarify, this volume does not aim to offer a history of the disciplines themselves. Instead, it examines how each discipline has contributed to our understanding of Turkey’s recent past. For this reason, the editor regrets the absence of essays on sociology (though it is fortunately addressed here and there in the volume, especially in Jenny White’s contribution) and, even more, on economics and economic history. This disciplinary imbalance points to the broader hegemonic position cultural studies has come to occupy within the humanities and social sciences in recent decades. The “cultural turn” has undoubtedly produced valuable insights, but it has sometimes done so at the cost of sustained attention to material, structural, and economic factors. An emphasis on discursive representations, symbols, and meaning-making has too often taken precedence over the analysis of social structures, class dynamics, and lived material conditions. The resulting marginalization of economic and social history, as well as political-economy perspectives, is particularly visible in current research on Turkey.4 Bringing these approaches back to the center is essential if we want a fuller and more balanced account of contemporary history.
Compounding the issue is the fact that the contemporary history of Turkey remains weakly professionalized. It is neither in Turkey nor abroad a distinct academic discipline, nor a recognized subfield within history departments that would typically assume responsibility for historicizing the recent past. To be sure, contemporary history as a professional field emerged relatively late in many European and North American countries as well. There, World War II generally became the pivotal reference point for contemporary-historical analysis, even if national traditions differed in focus and emphasis.5 The development of historiographical professionalization has followed different paths across countries, shaped by distinct national circumstances, historical traditions, academic cultures, and past experiences. For the further development of contemporary history in most parts of Europe, the historic rupture of 1989—marked by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and its profound global repercussions—was pivotal.
Turkey’s historical rupture did not come in 1989 but rather in 1980, when the military coup and the political, social, and economic upheavals that followed seemed to usher in a new era. Although these transformations did not give rise to contemporary history as a formal academic discipline in the way that 1989 did elsewhere, the topics of Turkey’s recent past have gained considerable public interest and visibility during the “history boom” of the last three decades. Too often, however, the popularization of history has outpaced empirically grounded knowledge. The focus has frequently been less on source-based, methodologically rigorous research than on ideological, political, or religious interpretations—at times even outright appropriations. Nevertheless, such works have acquired a prominent place in public debates on contemporary history, serving as resources for competing narratives and explanations among a growing number of interested actors. Given the scarcity of explicit contemporary-historical research on Turkey and the field’s still-rudimentary development, the present volume therefore turns to the contributions of other disciplines on which an emerging contemporary historiography might productively build. After all, as this volume argues, contemporary history is a field whose different facets are typically explored by a range of disciplines and university subjects, each bringing its own methods and vantage points. Internationally, Turkish studies institutes have become the main institutional framework for research on Turkish history—and, at times, on contemporary history in a broader sense as well. These considerations point to the need for a comprehensive examination of the disciplinary foundations of scholarship on Turkey, alongside new developments in academic organization and knowledge production, including the often-implicit normative assumptions that accompany them. The present volume responds to this need by giving equal weight, on the one hand, to work produced in Turkey within the “core” or “systematic” disciplines, and on the other, to research conducted at Turkish studies institutes abroad.
The evolution of the latter requires a few preliminary remarks. Unlike in most European and North American contexts—where the humanities and social sciences have proliferated into highly specialized disciplines—area studies centers and Turkish studies institutes often take on research tasks that elsewhere would be distributed across many fields, including history and contemporary history. A careful assessment of what Turkish studies has contributed, and where it may have developed blind spots, is therefore essential for understanding how it has shaped contemporary historical knowledge of Turkey.
While it is beyond the scope of this introduction to explore the full breadth of these discussions here, this volume adopts the conventional distinction between Turkology as a discipline and Turkish studies as a research field. Without forestalling the discussions in the individual essays, Turkology, in the traditional sense, focuses primarily on linguistic and philological research on Turkic-speaking peoples, past and present. Its scope is broad, encompassing subjects such as Old Turkic epigraphy, Uyghur studies, Siberian studies, Central Asian and Mongolian studies, Islamic-Turkic history, and the study of Soviet and post-Soviet Turkic republics, to name only a few.6 Turkish studies, by contrast, is not usually treated as a distinct discipline in its own right, but rather as a broad framework—or umbrella term—covering work in the social sciences and humanities on modern Turkey. Turkish studies institutes are therefore as heterogeneous as the scholars who staff them, coming from a range of fields, though political science—especially international relations—tends to predominate. The implications of this political-science orientation are among the issues examined in depth in this volume. In particular, the contribution by Samim Akgönül and Onur Bülbül traces the shift at the University of Strasbourg from traditional Turkology to a more contemporary, Turkish-studies-oriented program, and highlights the challenges this transition has entailed.
Unlike Turkology—which draws on a centuries-old tradition and has its roots in the diversification of Oriental studies in the early twentieth century—Turkish studies is a comparatively new institutional formation. It emerged in the context of the Cold War, with the United States taking a leading role in its development.7 Turkology is currently facing institutional decline and risks being absorbed into Turkish studies, effectively turning into a primarily Turkey-oriented field.8 The designation of Turkish studies as a subfield under the broad umbrella of area studies, and the boundaries separating it from the traditional disciplines, have been shaped over decades through academic and political norm-setting processes. This has had far-reaching implications for knowledge production. Correspondingly, this long-standing dichotomy between traditional disciplines and area studies (and, by extension, Turkish studies) has generated a range of normative assumptions. The epistemic limits of these assumptions are now coming under closer scrutiny and, in some cases, sharp criticism.9 Indeed, as critics have often noted, political decisions and institutional arrangements do not necessarily align with the empirical realities of the area or country under study. Area studies in the United States and Western Europe therefore drew substantial criticism for their political instrumentalization during the Cold War, when they were frequently folded into bloc rivalry and served as part of the ideological contest—at times functioning as a “scholarly weapon … in the overarching political conflict.”10 Critics have faulted area studies institutions for their closeness to the state and their tendency to align with government agendas.11 In the specific context of the Cold War, Turkish studies experts, for instance, were accused of adhering to what some have called “false theories,” such as modernization theory, and of promoting development and progress along Western—particularly American—models.
From a scholarly perspective, the most prominent criticisms focused on methodological negligence and overly atheoretical approaches. About two decades ago, Donald Quartaert and Sabri Sayari voiced similar concerns about Turkish studies in the United States. While acknowledging the field’s remarkable growth and increasing diversification, they pointed to narrow specialization, Turkey-centered self-referentiality, descriptivism, and a weak engagement with theory as its main shortcomings.12 Indeed, criticism of Turkish studies for its lack of comparative analysis and limited connection to global history is as old as the field itself.13
In effect, these criticisms have accompanied area studies as a whole since its inception. Bo Petersson, himself an area studies scholar, likewise counts among the most common critiques of area specialists a tendency to culturalize or essentialize their objects of study, and to overemphasize national particularities at the expense of comparative and global contexts.14 Some argue that area studies are outdated, atheoretical, methodologically unsophisticated, and no longer necessary in a global scholarly community in which researchers from different regions can collaborate “without need of any mediating/meddling area specialists.”15
A common critique of area studies scholars—and, by extension, Turkish studies scholars—is that US and other Western researchers, including “areanists,” have often proclaimed supposed universals and applied concepts, theories, models, and analytical trends derived from Western European or US experience to non-European societies. In this context, Edward Said’s critique of Western scholars, publicists, and artists—echoing since the late 1980s in Subaltern, Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies—underscored their inability to study the Muslim Orient on its own terms. Put simply, Said argued that the “West” constructed the “Orient” as an exotic and inferior other, thereby positioning itself as culturally superior.16 Lack of space precludes going into the controversial debates surrounding Said’s Orientalism here. The impact of the intellectual edifice of Orientalism on scholarship on Turkey, however, has been enormous, with far-reaching analytical and methodological consequences that are discussed—at different levels of detail—in the chapters that follow.
The authors likewise address the continued prevalence of the modernization paradigm which, contrary to the claims of many (mostly Western) scholars, is far from dead in research on Turkey. As this volume shows, scholarship on Turkey either never fully abandoned modernization theory in its original form or, at best, reworked it by incorporating other paradigms of transformation. This has produced a range of revised modernization concepts, including “first” and “second” modernity, values modernization, and multiple modernities, to name only a few.17
Political and scholarly shifts over the past few decades have produced a new configuration of area studies. The end of the Cold War—widely hailed as the start of a post-ideological era—initially triggered a parallel decline of interest in the field. Yet the accelerating pace of globalization, together with major events linked to 9/11 and the subsequent US-led “war on terror,” soon rekindled Western interest in (new) area studies. This renewed attention has come with substantial adjustments: a shift in geographical focus (for instance, from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East, and later to the Pacific and Southeast Asia) as well as new ideological inflections. Today, area studies practitioners are generally no longer met with the level of criticism and disapproval that once accompanied the field’s politically charged history. The Cold War-era associations have been partly worked through, and the theoretical and methodological foundations of area studies—long seen as a weak point—have noticeably strengthened. As a result, the field’s objects of study have expanded and diversified. New research areas have emerged in this process, including diaspora and migration studies, which move beyond strictly bounded physical spaces and have become integral to contemporary area studies.18 According to Sebastian Conrad and Andreas Eckert, leading scholars of global history, research in area studies serves as a corrective to the once-dominant “Rise of the West” narrative. It has also encouraged a growing convergence between area studies and contemporary efforts to develop a non-Eurocentric, empirically grounded understanding of world and global history.19 That said, individual area-studies fields—East European Studies, South Asian Studies, African Studies, Middle East or Near East Studies, Islamic Studies, Latin American Studies, Turkish Studies, and so on—are neither internally homogeneous nor alike in their overall profiles. They differ in their political, institutional, and intellectual histories; in their trajectories and agendas; in their respective strengths and weaknesses; and in how they relate to the systematic disciplines.20
Despite the substantial distinctiveness of individual area-studies fields, it can be said in broad terms that they are currently attracting considerable interest, especially within—and in dialogue with—global history.21 Area or regional studies are valued for their deep contextual knowledge and, in particular, for the advantage of engaging with sources in the vernacular.22 While this may not be the most flattering formulation, area-studies experts are generally recognized as highly sought-after providers of region-specific knowledge. Moreover, area studies is often seen as an epitome of inter- and multidisciplinarity—qualities widely regarded as prerequisites for high-quality research in today’s academic landscape.23 In recent decades, area studies has increasingly shifted toward cultural studies, or has come to coexist with it in the form of postdisciplinary institutions. At the same time, numerous intersections have developed between area studies and the core disciplines, especially in postcolonial studies. This is due, among other things, to the cultural turn, which blurred disciplinary boundaries and enabled more collaboration across fields.
However, while the cultural turn has encouraged the accumulation of knowledge, it has also produced an uneven distribution of that knowledge, with significant differences in both quality and quantity across countries. One major outcome of this process has been the reinforcement of representations that suggest a homogeneous unity among non-Western regions.24 The prevailing framework of knowledge production is often organized around the notion of cultural areas (not to be confused with area studies), a concept typically applied to regions outside the so-called “Global North” or “West” (e.g., the Arab world, the Muslim world, Latin America, and so on). These notions rest on essentialist and other problematic premises that tend to obscure specific national developments. They also complicate both comparativism and interdisciplinarity, since disciplinary logics often relegate the non-Western world to a secondary position. These particularities have consequences not only for knowledge production but also for the organization of scholarship itself, as the Middle East scholar Eberhard Kienle observes:
Perhaps it is indeed the explicit division of the world into two realms, that of the center governed by the logic of disciplines and that of the periphery governed by the logic of “cultural areas,” which perpetuates and sustains the class society in the social sciences.25
From this perspective, the relative lack of interest in research fields in the “Global South” may partly stem from the perception that knowledge production in these regions does not always follow the methodological standards or engage the theoretical debates that shape scholarship on the “North.”26 Given this context, the volume’s historiographical focus on Turkey—and on the ways it may connect to, draw on, and adapt global patterns of knowledge production—is not only valid but essential.
Taken together, these developments reflect what Louis Menand has called the “Humanities Revolution” and the rise of the corporate university, gaining momentum particularly during the post-1975 period. In his internationally acclaimed—though also heavily criticized—book The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand offers a vivid account of how these academic trends unfolded in the United States. His analysis is also relevant, albeit with variations and time lags, to the European research landscape—and, I would add, to scholarship on Turkey. In The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand describes a two-stage revolution that gave rise to non-departmental fields of study and research such as women’s studies, cultural studies, science studies, LGBTQ studies, postcolonial studies, and others.27 As Menand argues, academic work increasingly gravitated toward paradigms that defined themselves in explicit opposition to the traditional disciplines. By the 1990s, this shift had developed into a “movement in two only partly related directions: toward interdisciplinarity, and toward what might be called postdisciplinarity.”28
According to Menand, a key feature of this “academic revolution” has been the displacement of the “cold scientific method,” associated with “disinterestedness,” “objectivity,” “reason,” and “knowledge,” by a different set of epistemic priorities: “interpretations” rather than facts, “perspective” rather than “objectivity,” and “understanding” rather than “reason” or “analysis.” An emphasis on “universalism” and “greatness,” he suggests, has given way to an emphasis on diversity and difference; scientific norms that once prevailed in many of the “soft” disciplines have increasingly been met with skepticism; and attention to “objects” has been replaced by attention to “representations.”29
Although the “Humanities Revolution” and its effects are seldom explicitly reflected upon in Turkish scholarship, they nonetheless exercise a profound influence on the field, not least for modern and contemporary historiography. The present volume should therefore be read not only as an effort to map the research content and institutional contexts of contemporary Turkish history, but also as an attempt to open a broader scholarly discussion of the methodological and research-policy issues raised here. As the volume shows in detail, the disciplines engaged with Turkey’s recent past are strikingly diverse in their political, institutional, and intellectual histories—often in ways that resist neat placement within traditional disciplinary taxonomies. This situation aligns, in many respects, with Louis Menand’s diagnosis of “postdisciplinarity,” particularly in relation to historiography, as I discuss further in my own contribution.
The volume opens with Cengiz Günay’s contribution, which provides the contextual framework. He examines the structural factors that shaped the emergence and evolution of political science in Turkey, and traces the major debates, approaches, theoretical perspectives, and research agendas that have defined the field over the last few decades. Günay’s essay shows that political science in and on Turkey has come to function as “the” discipline for historical research. This is neither problematic nor illegitimate—after all, contemporary history is not the exclusive domain of historians. The problem, rather, is that the period after roughly the 1950s—especially its social, sociological, and economic dimensions—has largely gone unexamined, whether by historians, political scientists, or other disciplines.
In my own contribution, I analyze research on contemporary history from the perspective of the historical discipline. The article outlines the historical and political contexts of writing the history of one’s own time, examines the institutional frameworks of historical scholarship and the dominance of political science approaches, and considers the challenges this creates for historical research. It also addresses questions of periodization, prevailing narratives, thematic foci, and modes of historical interpretation. Finally, against the backdrop of the history boom of recent decades, I show how history has become a contested resource, increasingly subject to reinterpretation by a widening range of actors. Building on this, the article analyzes the transformation of history into memory and explores the implications and dynamics of this process within and beyond academia.
Both articles focus in particular on the histories of two “core” disciplines—political science and historiography in Turkey—by examining their disciplinary cultures, idiosyncrasies, and interdependencies. They also consider the actors involved, inside and outside academia, and trace their intellectual, institutional, and political roots. Finally, with different emphases, Günay and I examine how each discipline’s relationship to national and international politics, and to the state’s master narratives, has changed over time.
In her article, Jenny White offers an overview of the history of anthropological studies in Turkey. She traces major currents in anthropological debate and shows how they have shaped the objects, subjects, and agendas of contemporary research on Turkey, including the scholars involved and the kinds of questions they have pursued. White underlines the importance of historicizing cultural anthropology not only to understand how global intellectual trends, state concerns, and national ideologies have influenced Turkish culture and society, but also to provide a guide for interpreting political, economic, and social change since the early republic. A central thread of her discussion is the succession of theoretical models and paradigms that have emerged over time, mirroring wider scholarly debates and shifting historical circumstances that generate new questions and demand new explanations. At the same time, White is skeptical about how far cultural anthropology in Turkey has been able to take up and adapt to these evolving research agendas. As she concludes, despite the richness of the literature, “anthropology remains unfamiliar in Turkey, a small, fragmented and silent discipline with no public profile.” She also judges the contribution of anthropological (and sociological) work to contemporary history to be relatively limited, since it is only rarely subjected to systematic historicization.
Jan-Markus Vömel explores an important research area of contemporary history-writing: religion/Islam and secularism, which has been attracting sustained attention since the 1990s. He pays particular attention to the larger paradigms—most notably modernization theory—that have structured scholarship in this field. These paradigms, he shows, have not been static: they have shifted with the emergence and decline of dominant scholarly approaches and with changes in the empirical landscape itself, such as historical turning points and socio-cultural or political transformations within Turkey. Vömel maps the field across three phases. The first runs from its inception to the 1980s, when modernization theory and the Kemalist narrative largely defined research both in Turkey and internationally. The second stretches from the 1990s to around 2010, marked by the rise of Islamism as a challenge to established assumptions and by the spread of post-Kemalist revisionism. The third phase, from roughly 2010 to the present, is characterized by the waning of overarching paradigms and the coexistence of multiple new approaches.
Onur Bülbül and Samim Akgönül describe how Turkology has undergone significant institutional and substantive transformations in recent years. Drawing on their positions as a faculty member and a PhD student in the Département d’études turques at the University of Strasbourg, they offer an insider’s perspective, outlining the field’s scope and key characteristics. They begin by tracing its historical evolution, discussing the specific imprint of “French Turkology” in the twentieth century and highlighting the figures—scholars, adventurers, and orientalists alike—who helped shape the discipline. They then turn to longer-term shifts over the last four centuries, charting the move from a primarily linguistic-philological and ethnological orientation toward a cultural-studies perspective that has become increasingly influential in recent years.
Rounding off the volume, historian Stefan Plaggenborg contextualizes the findings of the preceding chapters within the broader problematic of contemporary Turkish history research.
Of course, given the vastness of the field, the present volume cannot offer a comprehensive survey of all disciplines that contribute to the study of contemporary Turkish history. Nevertheless, its deliberately selective and problem-driven approach allows it to address the core areas of the field in a focused way, even if other disciplinary perspectives might also have been included. As mentioned, two contributions that had already been commissioned—on economic history and Kurdish studies—could not be completed, a gap that I, as editor, deeply regret. Furthermore, given its focus on contemporary history, some overlaps in the essays have been inevitable. These overlaps have been intentionally preserved to highlight contrasting interpretations from various disciplinary perspectives of similar phenomena.
In summary, this volume seeks to spark a scholarly debate about the latter half of the twentieth century that has been marked by a kind of historiographic amnesia. In the absence of a systematic historiography on which it could build, the volume approaches this terrain indirectly by examining the contributions, insights, and effects of adjacent disciplines on the study of Turkey’s recent past, and by identifying their potentials, limitations, and blind spots. A central guiding question is whether—and to what extent—the work discussed here can nonetheless contribute to the historicization of this past, even when written by contemporaries who did not set out to historicize, but rather to intervene from within their own disciplinary vantage points. This perspective also extends to non-academic, popular, and journalistic accounts, which can broaden our understanding of the period. Read today, they constitute historical sources in their own right—sources that now call for their own historicization.
We view this book not as a comprehensive account, but rather as a provisional product of fruitful scholarly dialogue that we hope will be further advanced by its appearance. If this collaborative volume succeeds in stimulating scholarly debate and fostering future research, it will have taken an important step toward strengthening this field of study in the Turkish context. While the focus is on Turkey, the findings may also offer useful points of comparison and wider insights for countries and regions beyond Europe and North America that, like Turkey, still face the task of engaging more systematically with their own contemporary histories.
Berna Pekesen is a historian and the founder and speaker of the DFG-Scientific Network for the Contemporary History of Turkey at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, where she formerly taught Modern Turkish History. She is a Review Editor for the Turkish Historical Review. Her academic career includes research stays in Bochum, Hamburg, and Basel. She has published extensively on modern and contemporary Turkey, with a particular emphasis on nationalism, nation-building, political violence, social history, and historiography. Her publications include two authored books on the 1934 anti-Jewish pogrom (2012) and Nazi propaganda (2014), as well as the edited volume Turkey in Turmoil: Social Change and Political Radicalization During the 1960s (2020). She is currently preparing a volume on the social and economic history of Turkey.