Contesting Pluralism(s): Islamism, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond is a fresh, original, and welcome contribution to the literature on Turkish politics, as it moves decisively beyond conventional wisdom. Nora Fisher-Onar challenges reductive binary frameworks—such as “Islam” versus “democracy” or “secularism,” “Turk versus Kurd,” and “Sunni versus Alevi”—that existing scholarship has long treated as the primary drivers of political contestation in Turkey. By tracing Turkish intellectual and political debates from the late Ottoman Tanzimat period to the 2023 parliamentary and presidential elections, the book reconceptualizes Turkish politics as shaped by shifting alignments between “pluralizing” and “anti-pluralist” actors across divergent ideological orientations.

Fisher-Onar defines pluralism as an orientation—namely, an individual’s basic openness to sharing social and political space with “Others”—and anti-pluralism as the unwillingness to share such space with those perceived as “Other.” The book’s central argument is that political change in Turkey is driven not by clashes between Islamists and secularists, but by shifting alignments of pluralizing and anti-pluralist actors that cut across ideological camps. In this context, Fisher-Onar underscores a persistent tension in Turkish politics between a will toward greater pluralism and the competing desire to sustain a unitary national project.

Contesting Pluralism(s) maps alliance formation and dissolution through an analytical–descriptive framework that captures the interaction of ideas, agency, and structure, thereby offering a dynamic and processual account of contestations over pluralism. Fisher-Onar introduces a matrix that locates political actors along two axes: openness to “Others” on the x-axis and positions on public religion on the y-axis. On the pluralizing side of the spectrum, pro-secular pluralizers generally support religious, sectarian, linguistic, and gender diversity, while pro-religious pluralizers foreground the challenges faced by practicing Muslims under twentieth-century Turkish secularism (e.g., veiled women’s access to public institutions). Both pro-secular and pro-religious pluralizers appear in liberal and progressive variants. Liberal and progressive pro-secular pluralizers tend to be uneasy about Islamic majoritarianism in Turkey. Islamo-liberal and Islamo-progressive pluralizers, by contrast, pursue varying degrees of openness toward non-Islamic “Others,” while diverging sharply on questions of political economy. Whereas Islamo-liberals embrace global capitalism—thus converging with secular liberals—Islamo-progressives align with secular progressives in their critique of neoliberal globalization.

On the anti-pluralist side of the spectrum, Fisher-Onar identifies multiple strands of ethnic, religious, cultural, and leftist nationalism. The book demonstrates that alliances are neither forged nor dissolved on the basis of immutable ideologies. Rather, coalition formation and rupture are best understood through the causal interplay of ideational, agential, and contextual or structural factors. Ideas, in this sense, constitute a necessary but insufficient condition for alliance making and unmaking.

Methodologically, Fisher-Onar supplements her (anti-)pluralist framework with insights from institutionalist approaches in politics and international relations, as well as tools from qualitative and multimethod research, including process tracing, analyses of path dependence and rupture, and the identification of critical junctures.

Fisher-Onar identifies seven major pluralist alignments, beginning with the Tanzimat period and extending to contemporary Turkish politics, each articulated through Islamo-liberal frames: the Tanzimat reforms advocating an Islamo-liberal project of multicultural citizenship; the Young Turk–Ottoman movement culminating in the First Constitutional Period; the Young Turk Revolution and the emergence of late Ottoman electoral politics; Turkey’s initial experiment with multiparty politics in the early 1950s under the first Democrat Party government (1950–1954), which promoted political pluralism and religious freedoms; the era of Prime Minister Turgut Özal, marked by neoliberal economic reforms; the Justice and Development Party’s early years, characterized by EU-oriented liberal reforms; and the 2019 municipal elections, during which a broad coalition of diverse political strands gained control of major metropolitan municipalities.

Fisher-Onar also delineates a series of anti-pluralist alliances, including the 1913 Young Turk coup d’état; the racist turn of the 1930s and early 1940s; the Turkish–Islamic synthesis that emerged in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup; and today’s “Turkish–Islamist synthesis 2.0,” forged through a coalition of religious and secular nationalist actors.

Fisher-Onar’s model further accounts for the Islamist–liberal alliance of the early 2000s, the intra-Islamist rupture of the early 2010s, and the subsequent pivots toward religious populism after 2013 and ethno-religious nationalism after 2015, enabled by an alliance between Islamist and secular nationalist actors. At the same time, Fisher-Onar explicitly notes that her analytical framework neither makes claims about actors’ deeper motivations nor requires consistency between ideology and political tactics.

This analytical choice, however, also has limitations, as it leaves the reader without a systematic account of why particular actors enter into, sustain, or abandon specific alignments. Without greater insight into actors’ motivations, it becomes difficult to trace how and why ideological transformations occur over time. Consequently, while Fisher-Onar’s framework is highly valuable for understanding when and how coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists form and unravel, it remains less equipped to address the question of why these shifts take place. Relatedly, the framework does not sufficiently illuminate the ideational or ideological transformation of agency itself. For instance, the book does not adequately explain what prompted the Adnan Menderes government to shift from an Islamo-liberal pluralist orientation in the early 1950s to an anti-pluralist ethno-religious nationalist stance after 1955. Similarly, it remains unclear why the secular-liberal Özal leadership maintained core elements of the anti-pluralist Turkish–Islamic synthesis during the Motherland Party era (1983–1991). Comparable questions arise regarding the fragmentation of Necmettin Erbakan’s National View Movement into divergent political trajectories—most notably the emergence of the Justice and Development Party and the Felicity Party in 2001, followed by the formation of Hüda Par in 2012 and the New Welfare Party in 2018. In this regard, the criteria through which the definition of the “Other” evolves within the Islamist movement, and across broader political fields, remain under-theorized.

Moreover, while Part II of the book provides conceptual clarity in identifying political parties and groups within the pluralist and anti-pluralist matrix across the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this clarity becomes less pronounced in Part III, which examines twenty-first-century alignments. In particular, Fisher-Onar’s differentiation of pluralist and anti-pluralist orientations based on support for or opposition to the presidential system between 2016 and 2023 leaves unresolved how previously categorized actors are reclassified within the matrix.

One of the book’s major contributions is its challenge to both Orientalist and Occidentalist perspectives: the former typically centers on claims about the incompatibility of Islam and liberalism, while the latter delegitimizes Western critiques of Turkey’s illiberal turn by dismissing them as inherently Islamophobic. Yet, given the book’s broad temporal scope, some conceptual and classificatory choices invite scrutiny. For example, Fisher-Onar characterizes Necip Fazıl Kısakürek as an Islamist ideologue; however, his intellectual project is more accurately understood as a synthesis of Islamic ideals and Turkish nationalism. As such, Kısakürek exerted a formative influence on both Islamist and Turkish nationalist currents in Turkey, complicating a strictly Islamist categorization.

Relatedly, Fisher-Onar’s use of the term religious nationalism tends to obscure the ideational competition between Islamism and nationalism. Although she employs the distinction between ethnic and ethno-religious nationalism to differentiate political orientations, drawing on the nationalism literature—most notably the work of Rogers Brubaker—a more analytically precise formulation would be ethnocultural nationalism. This term more effectively captures the fusion of cultural and religious markers without collapsing distinct ideological traditions.

Finally, while Contesting Pluralism(s) holds significant promise for future research, the book does not offer a clear model for how its innovative framework might be systematically applied to other cases in comparative politics and international relations. Moreover, the criteria by which actors define, accept, or are accepted as the “Other” remain insufficiently specified throughout the book.

To conclude, the questions raised above do not detract from the significance of Fisher-Onar’s contribution to the literature on Turkish politics. Contesting Pluralism(s) fills a long-standing intellectual gap by offering a fresh and original approach that moves decisively beyond entrenched binaries. The book thus paves the way for future studies that analyze political change through shifting alignments among political actors across divergent ideological orientations.