Turkey's July 15th Coup: What Happened and Why.

• Author: Akturk, Sener
• Position: Book review

Turkey's July 15th Coup: What Happened and Why

Edited By M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balc1

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018, 344 pages, $24.95, ISBN: 9781607816065

Evaluating an edited book written by twelve authors with significantly different points of view on one of the most critical events of recent Turkish political history in a brief book review, is a daunting task if not an impossible mission. Each chapter provides additional critical facts and a different perspective, often combined with a different temporal lens, in understanding what happened; a few of the chapters also venture into explaining why it happened, and they provide different answers or interpretations regarding the causes and the consequences of the coup and its failure. Thus, it would not be possible to critically review twelve chapters written by different authors with different arguments as if there were a single argument, methodology, or opinion that they share. Nonetheless, put together, these twelve chapters provide sufficient empirical and theoretical material to critically evaluate the goals, the structure, and the evolution of the "Gulen movement," "Hizmet," or the "Gulenists" as different authors variably refer to them, and the role of the Gulenists in the failed coup attempt in Turkey on July 15, 2016. There is a partial mismatch between the title of the book and its content, since three of the twelve chapters (by Balci, Cobanoglu, and Dohrn) do not discuss the coup attempt at all. These three chapters are about the Gulenists in general or their activities in specific locations such as post-Soviet Republics or Tanzania, and yet Gulen(ism) does not appear in the title or the subtitle of the book.

In Chapter 1, Hakan Yavuz suggests that Gulenism went through three stages: Beginning in the 1970s as a pietistic "weeping community," it gradually evolved into a political movement in the 1990s and "a structure parallel to the government" after 2002. In Chapter 2, Mujeeb Khan summarizes the evidence demonstrating the centrality of the Gulenists, both military officers and civilians, in the failed coup. Khan also draws attention to some of the organizations such as the neoconservative think-tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD, p. 68, 70) and pundits in the United States, who demonized the elected government while implicitly justifying the military coup in Turkey. As for the origins of the conflict between the Gulenists and the AK Party...