When do people rise up against their governments? Senem Aslan’s answer to this popular question is when people become aggrieved as a result of state repression. States are centralizing agencies and punish forces that resist these attempts. They routinely repress minority groups for expression of their culture, which they consider a challenge to a totalizing central rule. The latter in turn resist such attempts, some of which turn violent as in the example of the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey. Others find a way, though an uneasy one, to coexist with the center, as Berber nationalists have done in Morocco. Aslan demonstrates in great detail the Turkish state’s policies, starting with the single-party era as Turkish statesmen attempted to integrate Kurdish areas in the Southeast into their nation-building project. These attempts, according to the author, mostly took the form of assimilation where expressions of ethnic identity were banned in the public sphere and were replaced with nationalistic ones. In a similar fashion, she documents the Moroccan state’s symbolic gestures to Berber activists, starting with the postcolonial period that included cultural rights as long as they were exercised under the monarch’s watchful eye.

Nation-Building in Turkey and Morocco opens with an important empirical puzzle: Two ethnic minorities in the Middle East context exhibit very similar features. However, the evolution and outcome of their political claims within the nation-state framework show wildly different patterns. Aslan attributes these differences exclusively to states’ policies, whereby ethnic movements are suppressed in one case and appeased with cultural concessions in the other. Her evidence shows that the Moroccan king skillfully engaged in political maneuver that allowed him first to retain his significance under French colonial rule and then to survive under the nationalist Istiqlal Party and eventually overthrow it. He adopted an ambiguous mix of Moroccan nationalism, Islam, and Arabism and refrained from undertaking an ambitious transformation project to upset the tribal hierarchy. This was mainly because his survival depended on appeasing the rural masses, most of whom were of Berber origin. The Moroccan king’s strategy seems to reflect the median Middle East experience, where fragile centers with ties to Western powers patched up a “state” from local powerholders, which worked in some cases and utterly failed in others.

While the Moroccan case is a familiar one, Turkish nation building is unique in its experimentation with modernization: After a hard-won peace, Turkish nationalists had public support and were independent of international pressure to replace the fragile societal status of Ottoman rulers, much like the Moroccan king, with a sense of nation and nationhood. Therefore, Aslan’s choice of Turkey in a comparative case study of minority—state relationships against the backdrop of state formation in the Middle East is an appropriate one, but since the Moroccan case is typical of the region’s experience, as in the foundation of Jordan, most readers will be left wondering why the author made this particular choice and will be looking for a justification of case selection in the book.

In her Introduction, Aslan asks why some states repress their minorities while others do not, but the answer remains limited to this chapter. The succeeding chapters address the “how states repress” question, mostly detailing the individual policies that Turkey and Morocco adopted to respond to the politicization of ethnic identities. The book is organized temporally and traces state policies from independence to the present day, rather than around mechanisms to address the causality between state policies and the course of minority nationalisms.

The author’s choice does not allow the book to substantiate some of the critical arguments, and it reads as an agglomeration of evidence. For instance, Aslan argues that while both states adopted repression toward minority groups, the Turkish state indiscriminately targeted the Kurds whereas repression was selective in Morocco. However, she does not present systematic evidence that would support this argument. Similarly, the reader is left to wonder the scale of repression in the Turkish case. Aslan mentions that local officials rejected registering Kurdish names. It is not clear if these were isolated incidents involving a few rogue regional administrators or if they were part of a systematic effort. The latter would require evidence to determine how prevalent the practice was. Similarly, the use of historical material from the early Republican era points to less clear patterns than the author expected. Given that most initial uprisings by Kurdish tribes were organized by members of Hamidiye Regiments established to fight Armenian nationalists, it remains a question if these groups were making ethnic claims or were using their military skills to force the center into a better deal. Similarly, counterinsurgency operations in the early era were not necessarily conducted in response to a rebellion but, instead, aimed to contain tribes that engaged in banditry.

The book is a state-centric account of a state—minority relationship that would benefit from acknowledging the role of nationalist entrepreneurs in the outcomes that it aims to explain. The author brings up critical similarities between the leaderships of Berber and Kurdish movements that make political demands: They are both educated groups exposed to leftist ideas in university settings and have no societal status in the traditional hierarchy of their society. As such, minority activists and tribal formations that govern individuals’ daily lives in the countryside do not have the same societal base. In fact, in the Turkish case, the Kurdish insurgency staunchly opposed the tribal structure and referred to local strongmen as collaborationists of a colonizing state that should be eliminated from “Kurdistan.” Today, the Kurdish ethnic party still continues to receive very little support from rural areas and instead attracts educated masses in urban areas. Yet, Aslan does not seem to factor this into her analysis: She concludes that states that appease local power holders will achieve relative tranquility. A more careful analysis of ethnic entrepreneurship would have shown that alliances of convenience with tribal actors are no panacea to unrest, given that minority leaderships have modern claims that do not necessarily involve the preservation of rural hierarchies.

Nation-Building in Turkey and Morocco is an important comparativist study of minority nationalisms in the Middle East context. At times, the book’s analysis raises more questions than it answers, but it provides several critical questions for scholars to tackle in future research. States have a long history of dealing with their minorities. National indicators, such as GDP, natural resources, or number of ethnic groups, are too coarse to explain the interactive evolution of ethnic claims and the timing of their rupture into violence. Perhaps more important, the solution to ethnic unrest still remains unclear to scholars and policymakers alike. Aslan emphasizes the need to preserve traditional lifestyles. It is however crucial to understand how minority demands come into being and whether they evolve over time in response to state repression. Minority activists play a critical role in this process and are a product of modernization themselves, interested in transforming their societies as is the modernizing state.