The observations in the preceding chapters on the use of power from 2011 may be considered as close to damning. This immediate vista should perhaps be put in perspective by revisiting the change in one crucial aspect, which, as argued in this book, promised a fresh opening towards a gradual yet eventually full political normalisation. The momentous transformation led by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) appeared to end the long- established dichotomy between the ‘state’ and the ‘government’, characteristic of the domestic politics not only in the republican era but, ignoring rare anomalies, also perhaps throughout the history of political modernisation in the country. The settled binary of a state administered by a vigilante bureaucracy and a systemically debilitated government was ultimately supplanted by a single– albeit authoritarian– rule. While the binary order formerly in place inevitably limited political contestation in society, the ending of it, though at the cost of simply extending, even perhaps reinforcing, the draconian state in the immediate aftermath, did by contrast give some ground for expecting a way forward towards an unfettered and lasting form of democracy for the first time. The mayhem subsequent to the change, especially after the Gezi protests of 2013, would lead to most observers reaching a hasty verdict on the emerging order, claiming that the new authoritarianism now in place was possibly a turn for the worse. On this view, the incipient order had wiped out whatever social unity and tolerance, as well as an elementary respect for the rule of law, had been taken over from the old regime, thus marking a new low. This somewhat apocalyptic view of the developments from 2011 appeared impervious to what had just been left behind. The oblique nostalgia for the good old days of law and of purported coherence and solidarity at a basic societal level largely bracketed off various micro histories locally, ignoring the ruling patterns for decades in relation to a number of disenfranchised groups, namely the Kurds, Alevis, non- Muslim minorities, people with non- conventional sexual and gender identities, communists, and, yes, pious Muslims.