In her book, Contesting Pluralism(s), Nora Fisher-Onar undertakes a multidimensional study that integrates ideas, political agency, and systemic factors in an unprecedented manner; offers a historical account of Turkish politics; and reinterprets previously established benchmarks through a fresh lens and connects them to contemporary political dynamics, thus offering a holistic view of Turkish politics. In this work, Fisher-Onar claims that Turkish political history is best understood via inter-group and/or intra-group alliances between different political groups. In a historical context, she argues that there have been pluralizers and anti-pluralists who arise structural, agential, and ideational factors within the country. Structural factors consist of the system’s economic, demographic, and institutional features whereas agential and ideational factors are considered when an influential leader emerges, whose ideological standpoint shapes political tradition at key moments. Within this framework, the author gives a detailed historical account of how the country’s political groups are situated within the Turkish political spectrum, starting from the Tanzimat period. That being said, the book has a clear and ambitious aim to cover a broad time period in Turkish politics starting from the First Constitutional Period more than 100 years ago.

The book is 333 pages long and consists of eight chapters. Apart from the first two chapters, which explain the book’s theoretical framework and research design, the remaining chapters provide a historical account in chronological order, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Fisher-Onar argues that from the nineteenth century until the early twentieth century a diverse set of actors – including sultans, bureaucrats, military officers, intellectuals, and clerics – engaged in competing projects for imperial survival. These projects were spread across different ideological camps: from Islamo-liberalism, to Hamidian Islamism, to secular liberalism, and finally to pan-Turkist nationalism (pp. 93–94). Each sought to manage the Ottoman Empire’s foundational paradox at the time: the coexistence of Islam as a unifying principle and diversity as a structural reality. In the end, though, it was not pluralism but a unitary nationalist project that emerged from the ruins of the Empire (p. 94).

While the 1924–1982 constitutional order defined the people in civic terms, this voluntaristic conception of citizenship increasingly took on ethno-nationalist traits, shifting the political culture further toward unitary governance. Nevertheless, embedded liberalism – a legacy of the founding ideology – enabled the emergence of pluralist discourses. Such liberalism demonstrates itself through liberal principles, which were adopted from European examples, and makes an appearance in the otherwise unitary and anti-pluralist founding ideology. Such principles and liberalism are remains from the late Ottoman pluralist period (p. 101).

Within this period, shifting alliances between the camps shaped Turkey’s political evolution. First, during the 1920s, a cleavage emerged between pro-secular and statist actors – in which the Republican People’s Party (CHP) was the leading actor – and groups that prioritize popular sovereignty over statism (pp. 101–104). Following that period, the year 1950 marked a transition to multiparty democracy, which was interpreted as a victory of the pluralizers vis-à-vis the anti-pluralist camp, although the Democrat Party as a political movement largely remained primarily an illiberal populist movement (pp. 110–116). With the coups taking place in 1960, 1971, and 1980, the military emerged as the primary guardian for Turkish democracy, aligning with the anti-pluralist camps (pp. 116–124). Lastly, the soft coup of 1997 reaffirmed resistance to pluralizing forces in the country (p. 133). In short, until the end of the twentieth century, Islamo-liberals and secular liberals occasionally aligned against authoritarian statism, while populist and nationalist actors leveraged religious or ethnic unity to consolidate power. The outcome was a dynamic but tense interplay between competing visions of pluralism and homogeneity, religiosity and secularism – each struggling to shape Turkey’s national identity and its place in the world (pp. 134–137).

Between 2002 and 2007, the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) marked the peak of an Islamo-liberal coalition that bridged the pluralist end of both the religious and secular camps, bringing together moderate pro-religious and secular liberal actors around a shared agenda of European Union (EU)-aligned political reform, economic globalization, and greater religious and ethnic inclusion (p. 142). However, the project faced mounting resistance from defenders of the unitary–nationalist order (p. 143). Over time, as the EU leverage weakened and nationalist opposition intensified, the AKP gradually retreated from its commitment to pluralism (pp. 162–172).

During the 2010s, Turkey’s political trajectory was defined by escalating anti-pluralist tensions, culminating in Erdoğan’s shift from his earlier Islamo-liberal pluralism to an assertive form of religious populist nationalism (p. 180). This transition unfolded across key junctures – including the 2013 Gezi Park protests – against the backdrop of a broader retreat from EU-oriented universalism (pp. 180–211). For Onar, the Gezi constitutes a pivotal turning point. Erdoğan used the protests’ failure as a political opportunity to consolidate control (p. 215).

Following the Gezi movement, between 2013 and 2016, Turkey underwent a turbulent period of political rupture and realignment, as detailed through process-tracing. A clash of Islamisms and successive electoral contests drove Erdoğan to entrench illiberal governance as a matter of political survival, hastening the AKP’s shift from its earlier Islamo-liberal and liberal–leftist alliances toward a firmly anti-pluralist coalition of religious and ethnic nationalism. The collapse of the Kurdish peace process further cemented this realignment (pp. 244–247). These cumulative pressures culminated in the July 15, 2016 coup attempt, which marked a critical juncture, allowing Erdoğan to reconfigure state and society in alignment with a securitized vision of national identity (pp. 247–251).

As of Fall 2023, Turkey’s ruling coalition – anchored in the Cumhur Alliance – had consolidated its position in the zones of religious nationalism and ethno-religious nationalism aligned with a unitary political identity and a pro-presidential system (pp. 264–267). Turkey’s two-decade journey from a pluralizing republic toward a Turkish–Islamist synthesis 2.0, marked with a coalition between the AKP and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), has brought the system full circle: from civic pluralism back to centralized, identity-driven governance (p. 299).

As shown above, this book challenges the traditional frameworks often used to analyze Turkish politics – namely, the binary oppositions between Islamists and secularists, or between the East and the West, as framed by Orientalism and Occidentalism (p. 24). Rather than relying on these polarizing and oversimplified narratives, the author introduces a more nuanced, empirically grounded approach that centers on the dynamic tension between pluralizers and anti-pluralists (p. 36). She, therefore, offers a third way of contributing to the study of Turkish politics (p. 12). She argues that meaningful political analysis must move beyond essentialist binaries and, instead, she maps the unstable, strategic, and often contradictory alliances that shape Turkey’s political evolution (pp. 12–13). By focusing on pluralism as a key metric, the author provides a deeply contextualized account of how democracy can be both undermined and revived through coalition politics. More importantly, according to this framework, no ideology has a monopoly on pluralism or anti-pluralism, which enriches the existing perspectives on Turkish politics. Pluralist commitments are not static, and actors frequently shift positions in response to structural pressures, leadership incentives, or changing perceptions of political risk. This spectrum of pluralizer to anti-pluralist orientation allows for more realistic analyses of political change in Turkey.

For all its analytical depth, the book still underemphasizes the foundational role of “the people” in shaping Turkish political history. While it skillfully traces the interplay of structural, agential, and ideational parameters, the analysis overlooks one of the most vital actors who operates across structural, ideational, and agential domains: the citizenry itself.

The book focuses on strategic-cum-performative leaders, as the key shapers of Turkey’s trajectory. Although this is appropriate for a book that is concerned with elite coalition-making, it implicitly reduces the public to a reactive or instrumental role – voters to be managed, not actors with a structuring power of their own. Although the book repeatedly references electoral outcomes, the discussion tends to treat these as results of elite configuration or structural shifts – rather than expressions of changing popular ideologies, emotional climates, or reactive judgments. Even when “the people” are invoked (e.g. populist appeals, religious majoritarianism), they often appear in the text as discursive constructs, not as complex and shifting political subjects.

In the book, popular agency is mostly confined to the Gezi Park protests, which are rightly identified as a major rupture in Turkey’s post-2000 political trajectory (p. 205). However, the analysis falls short of fully exploring how the Gezi coalition’s sociopolitical aftershocks helped reshape electoral behavior, especially in the June 2015 general elections. These elections not only denied the AKP its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002 but also exposed the limits of majoritarian populism. It was this electoral deadlock – combined with the ruling party’s perceived loss of control and a series of escalating security crises – that catalyzed a strategic realignment between the AKP and MHP, culminating in “the Turkish–Islamist Synthesis 2.0” (p. 254). While the author rightly emphasizes the July 2016 coup attempt as a decisive structural rupture (p. 219), the summer of 2015 was already a critical juncture, marking the shift from Islamo-liberal pluralism to ethno-religious authoritarianism as a result of the election taking place. This shift cannot be fully understood without analyzing how public backlashes, political fatigue, and security fears reshaped the electorate’s expectations and empowered anti-pluralist discourse.

The effect of the said backlash also became particularly evident in the 2023 elections, where both the ruling Cumhur Alliance (AKP–MHP) and the opposition Millet Alliance were compelled to court secular ultra-nationalist actors to secure electoral advantage. In the end, it was the ultra-nationalist position – decisively shaped by rising anti-immigrant sentiment and a hardened ethno-nationalist mood – that tipped the balance, enabling the Cumhur Alliance to retain power. It is, thus, not only the ideological architecture or institutional design that shapes Turkey’s political direction, but the evolving mood of the electorate, which continues to function as a structuring force – quiet but powerful – in moments of political realignment.

From this perspective, it can be argued that a macro reading of a very complex and long period of Turkish political history has its own drawbacks. Although her framework is well-suited for Turkish politics on a macro scale, sometimes such a holistic view falls short of explaining micro-level details, as illustrated by the examples of the results of the 2023 elections and the impact of the 2015 elections in the emergence of Turkish–Islamist Synthesis 2.0. Also, during the process when this review is being written, a new alliance has emerged between the Islamo-nationalist camp and the Kurdish movement. Given this new chapter promises some fundamental reforms, whether or not it will add to the strength of this book’s explanatory power or will pose a challenge to it, only time will tell.

To conclude, this book explains the Turkish political structure through a unique point of view, as it introduces a third perspective based on alliances rather than ideological camps, as has always been the case in analyses so far. It also lacks a very important foundation of the system, however, namely the people. Integrating them meaningfully as active participants in the formation and the evolution of all the three domains – namely, agential, structural, and ideational domains – would sharpen the explanatory power of the author’s otherwise rich and complex explanatory model.