After nationwide protests in 2013, Turkey was convulsed by a “clash of Islamisms” on the one hand, and the breakdown of a peace process between Ankara and the Kurdish movement on the other. Driven by the fraught interplay of charismatic personalities, rousing ideologies, and an increasingly unstable regional context, these processes exacerbated the turns to illiberal governance and religious populism. Two key results of these processes were (i) the Erdoğan-led AKP’s pivot to an alliance with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and (ii) a failed coup attempt on July 16, 2016. A critical juncture in the fullest sense of the word, the coup attempt led to the consolidation of the ruling alliance around a renewed version of Turkish-Islamist synthesis.

This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

The consolidation of the TIS 2.0 enlivened resistance among diverse groups who came together in the seventh major pluralizing coalition since the late Ottoman period. Coalescing around multiple – but not always compatible – visions of living in diversity, the coalition brought together pro-secular Turks on the right and left including municipal actors, youth, women and LGBTQ+ activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and environmentalists, among others. Innovating frames for political, religious, ethnic, and gender pluralism, the coalition registered a major success, retaking city governments in the 2019 elections, an outcome it repeated in 2024.

This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

This chapter launches the contemporary section of the book. The overarching argument is that despite the binaries leveraged by leaders and analysts alike, political contestation in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth and twentieth, is not reducible to an “Islamist vs. secularist” cleavage. Instead, contestation and key outcomes are driven by shifting coalitions for and against pluralism, notably, an Islamo-liberal/secular liberal coalition that marked the sixth major, pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat reforms. It would transform state and society, even though the coalition itself proved short-lived as democratization stalled against a backdrop of debates over Islamophobia, the headscarf, minority rights, freedom of expression, media freedoms, and sweeping show trials.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

This chapter develops two main arguments to account for the surprising longevity of Fujimorismo in Peru. First, although Alberto Fujimori did not invest resources in party-building during his authoritarian government (1990–2000), he developed populist appeals that contributed to the formation of a political identification with Fujimorismo. Second, the second-generation leader of Fujimorismo, Alberto’s daughter Keiko, has been trying to convert this nascent partisanship into a resource for party institutionalization ever since her first presidential campaign in 2011.

This chapter examines how religious transformations in Latin America over the past few decades have influenced the rise of the right. Analyzing a five-wave panel study from the “Democracy on the Ballot” project, the authors show that Bolsonaro won much of his support from evangelicals and Pentecostals during the final month of the campaign. While they find little support for the notion that attending church or discussing politics there influenced vote choice, church leaders’ endorsements of Bolsonaro did in fact matter. Other relevant factors included attitudes on the importance of religion in one’s own life, one’s approval of church engagement in elections, anti-LGBT attitudes, and authoritarian parenting values.

In the conclusion, we review the book’s chapters and argue that Latin America has experienced a resurgence of conservative forces in recent years. We analyze the supply and demand of a broad set of conservative alternatives, paying special attention to the processes of party-building, adaptation, and rebranding. We find that new right-wing forces often have weak organizations, but have been able to mobilize voters along noneconomic cleavages, including security, gender politics, and reproductive rights. The adoption of a highly conservative profile has allowed parties to access lower-class constituencies and mobilize mass support among them. The politicization of cultural issues, such as LGBT rights and religious identities, has contributed to polarization and the rise of populist radical right parties. These parties have flourished within the context of political and economic shocks and benefited from cultural backlashes and the crises of traditional right-wing parties. In these situations, politics becomes a zero-sum game and the stakes get higher. Democratic stability in the region is arguably at its most tenuous state since the age of military dictatorships. Interrupted presidencies have become realities in many countries over the past fifteen years, raising concerns about democratic stability and potential threats to democratic institutions.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the structural constraints and opportunities for the populist radical right (PRR) in Latin America. Unlike Western Europe, material values are still of vital importance in many Latin American countries because of high levels of inequality in the region. This represents a major constraint for the emergence of the PRR, and only some parties have been able to overcome it. The author argues that the growth of the PRR relies on three factors: the appeal of the PRR’s hardline discourses, the mobilization of voters dissatisfied with sexual and reproductive rights and secularization, and a crisis of representation among the traditional parties, who are painted by PRR leaders as a corrupt elite.

The Introduction is a chapter-length outline of the of the book which does more than simply summarise. Though not exhaustive, it includes both explanation and discussion of the historical context of Brexit and Brexitspeak, combined with a description of the linguistic tools of analysis. The starting point is that without language politics could not happen, so it is essential to understand how language works in general and how it is strategically deployed by politicians. In this chapter populism is discussed as an unwritten ideology best characterised by its demagogic appeal to an idea of ‘the people’ within a nationalist notion of ‘the British people’, at the same time promoting a friend-foe antithesis, stirring up emotion and avoiding reasoned argument. Demagoguery is a little used term in political science but highly relevant to the present state of democracy. Indeed, demagoguery exploits and undermines democracy. It is both an effect and a cause of post-truth politics, where truthfulness and facts are overridden. The final section takes a closer look at the fundamentals of language and language use that are at issue in examining the discourse of Brexit.

Recent years have witnessed the rise of a range of authoritarian populist, illiberal, far-right, nativist, and extremist parties. We have seen democratic structures threatened or incrementally dismantled through the subversion of an established democratic party by an outsider or ascendance of the extremist wing of a right-wing party. Parties and party leaders occupying an ill-defined space on the political spectrum today generally present a much greater threat to democratic governance than overtly antidemocratic fringe outfits. The ambiguity of such parties, their growing size, their entry into government, the subversion of “good” democratic parties by a “bad” leadership, and the rise of the “shadow party” mean that contemporary political party threats seriously frustrate the possibility of remedial action afforded by existing public law and policy mechanisms. They also require us to reflect anew on crafting novel remedies and to revisit our assumptions about parties as creatures of central constitutional importance.

Chapter 1 lays out the book’s argument about the rise and sources of welfare nationalism. It explains the significance of the study in focusing on migration issues that are major sources of contemporary political and humanitarian crises and shows ‘how we got here’ – how these crises have built since the 1990s in Europe and Russia. The chapter explains the book’s key concepts: welfare nationalism, exclusion and inclusion, and populism, and sets the study within the literature on international migration and welfare. It focuses on the key role of ethnicity and the importance of political elites and mass media in influencing responses to migration and identifies contrasting cycles: Exclusionary migrations involve a “vicious cycle” of hostile public opinion toward more-or-less ethnically distant migrants that is reinforced and exploited by politicians for enhanced influence, amplified by mass media, and produces policies of exclusion. By contrast, inclusionary migrations involve a “virtuous cycle” of relatively receptive public opinion toward ethnically close migrants, high-level political support, elites’ management of nationals’ grievances, and positive treatment in mass media, producing policies of inclusion. The conclusion provides an overview of the book’s structure and a summary of each chapter.