Is the Cold War finally getting hot in Turkey? The ‘Cold War turn’ in Turkish Studies

Abstract

Turkey has been largely missing in the new global histories of the Cold War. This review essay will argue that Turkish Studies failed to make a proper contribution to Cold War history because of a paradigmatic fixation on the determinism of the early Kemalist state-formation. There is, however, a new generation of scholars who began to recast the Cold War as a formative global experience that shaped Turkey’s contemporary state of affairs and political culture. Recent studies focus on themes of (1) state formation, (2) culture and (3) social movements in Cold War Turkey.