Ihsan Yilmaz, in his Creating the Desired Citizen: Ideology, State and Islam in Turkey, engages with the nation-building literature and argues that “insecurities, anxieties and fears of …Muslim Turks” (p. 2) structured the nation-building projects of the hegemonic ideologies of Kemalism and Erdoğanism in Turkey. As a result, both ideologies approached the Turkish people by placing them within one of three citizenship categories: desired citizens, undesired citizens, or tolerated citizens. Throughout the book, Yilmaz discusses the main characteristics of Kemalism and Erdoğanism in relation to these citizenship conceptualizations.

Kemalism, the founding ideology of the Turkish Republic, aimed to construct a citizen category that Yilmaz calls Homo LASTus. The ideal citizen of Kemalism would be designed to be laic (resistant to threats coming from religion), Atatürkist (under the influence of the personality cult of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), Sunni Muslim (belonging to the Sunni branch of Islam), and Turk (having an ethnically Turkish background). Erdoğanism, which provided an Islamist challenge to Kemalism and replaced its hegemony in the 2010s under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has four dimensions: “electoral authoritarianism as the electoral system, neopatrimonialism as the economic system, populism as the political strategy, and Islamism as the political ideology” (p. 127). Yilmaz calls the desired citizen of this ideology “Homo Erdoğanistus.” The ideal citizen for Erdoğanism “is a practicing Sunni Muslim, believes in absolute authority, sees the Ottoman rule as the greatest era, believes their social purpose is to spread Islam in the public sphere, to provide aid to and deepen ties with Muslim and former Ottoman peoples and to regain Ottoman glory” (p. 165).

Unsurprisingly, Kemalism’s undesired citizens include Islamists, and Erdoğanism’s undesired citizens include secularists. What is surprising is that both Kemalism and Erdoğanism have overlapping undesired citizens: disloyal practicing Muslims and Islamists, leftists, liberals, socialists, non-Muslim minorities, Alevis, and disloyal Kurds.

Yilmaz argues that although Kemalism and Erdoğanism each have their desired and undesired citizens, they both use Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) as a mechanism to cultivate the middle category of tolerated citizens, “Homo Diyanetus.” Since its establishment, the Diyanet, through its sermons and activities, has tried to instill the values of “national unity, solidarity, love of the homeland, Turkish nationalism, existential threats to the nation, militarism, reverence of the state and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and deep respect for the martyrs” (p. 95). However, since 2011, after the Islamists established their hegemony in Turkish politics, the Diyanet started to involve itself in promoting the main ideological pillars of Erdoğanism. Whereas Yilmaz calls Kemalism’s tolerated citizens “Homo Diyanetus 1.0,” he terms Erdoğanism’s tolerated citizens, who are more Islamist and less Kemalist than the first category, as “Homo Diyanetus 2.0.”

Yilmaz’s book contributes to comparative politics and Turkish studies in several ways. First, it conceptualizes different types of citizenship in analyzing the hegemonic nation-building projects of Kemalism and Erdoğanism. Many studies examine citizenship from the perspective of an imagined homogeneous society. Yilmaz’s nuanced analysis of Turkish politics is more sensitive to the state’s different relationships toward various groups in society.

Second, although many studies pit Kemalism and Islamism against one another, Yilmaz finds unexpected similarities between the two. He shows how Kemalism and Erdoğanism, a contemporary version of Islamism, created a similar citizenship form. Although the desired citizens of Kemalists and Erdoğanists differ radically, Kemalism and Erdoğanism marginalized almost the same group of citizens. Furthermore, Yilmaz shows how Kemalism and Islamism are rooted in the Ottoman Empire and evolved throughout republican history. Many scholars have demonstrated these continuities in other contexts, but Yilmaz’s comparison of the two ideologies within a long-term horizon is notable.

Third, a significant contribution of Creating the Desired Citizen is its detailed discussion of the ideology of Erdoğanism. To my knowledge, Yilmaz’s study is the first systematic work that treats Erdoğanism as a full-fledged ideology and documents how it was established through popular culture, education, and the state monopoly of religious services. Yilmaz systematically demonstrates how Erdoğanism emerged as a “political, national, and citizenship identity” (p. 268). In doing so, he analyzes the political strategies of Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party through an examination of Turkish popular culture, the content of educational materials, and Diyanet’s religious sermons. Through his sophisticated analysis, Yilmaz shows how Erdoğan’s strategies “manufacture consent, shape public opinion, advance its political agenda and disseminate a populist-nationalist discourse” (p. 181). By documenting how Erdoğanism emerged and gained ground in Turkish politics, Yilmaz’s work is a significant reference for studying this ideology in the future.

A book that compares two hegemonic ideologies with various citizenship types cannot be devoid of flaws, and Yilmaz’s study has two main weaknesses. First, throughout the book, he uses various theories from “political science, political psychology and international relations to investigate the role of emotions, collective trauma, insecurities … in nation-building and social engineering” (p. 267), but he does not provide a master theoretical framework that structures the analysis of citizenship and nation-building. Yilmaz mainly argues that historical traumas, anxieties, fears, insecurities, and a siege mentality influenced Kemalism’s and Erdoğanism’s nation-building projects and their treatment of various groups in Turkey. However, the book does not identify a causal mechanism through which these emotions (pp. 11–16) influenced Kemalist and Erdoğanist actors. Instead, he suggests that the Kemalist and Erdoğanist elite reproduced these emotions “to sustain political power and control over the social and economic resources of the state” (p. 15). To this end, the elite also securitized “non-Muslims, non-Sunnis, non-Turks, Islamists and leftists” (p. 19). In this narrative, emotions based on fear and anxiety become tools in the elite’s hands, and the study’s primary explanatory variable disappears.

Second, even though Yilmaz’s use of various citizenship types to portray the state’s relationship with multiple groups in Turkey is beneficial, the boundary between Homo Erdoğanistus and Homo Diyanetus 2.0 is not straightforward. Yilmaz writes, “Unlike Homo Erdoğanistus citizen, Homo Diyanetus 2.0 is not fully Islamist and not an Erdoğan loyalist, nor under the influence of the Erdoğanist personality cult” (p. 232). Yet his analysis of the fatwas and sermons delivered by the Diyanet in the 2010s shows little difference from Erdoğan’s nationalist and populist Islamist discourse. In the Erdoğan era, the Diyanet engaged in populist politics and actively joined Erdoğanist efforts to shape desired citizens, in contrast to its past reluctance to promote Kemalism’s secularist agenda.

All in all, Yilmaz makes essential contributions to the study of nation-building and extends our knowledge on the Kemalist and Erdoğanist nation-building projects in Turkey. Those scholars interested in nation-building, citizenship, and the Turkish experience will find the book indispensable. Its scholarly contributions make the book relevant for graduate courses, and Yilmaz’s engaging prose makes it accessible to the policy community and undergraduate students.