This book has examined Turkey’s trajectory from a military regime in the early 1980s to one-man rule after the referendum of 2017. Our goal was to provide the outlines of the transformation and shed light on its causes. We have argued that the struggles for democratization and the recent decline of democracy in Turkey were shaped by both structural factors and actors in global and domestic contexts. We have also argued that no single factor best explains the rise of the Islamists to power and the gradual process of democratic decline in Turkey but that different factors or their combinations better explain different stages of the long and gradual process. After the military leaders transferred power back to the civilians in 1983, the governments in charge attempted to democratize the polity. Diverse groups and movements then challenged the state for further democratization. Islamist and Kurdish groups demanded religious and ethnic recognition, using different means.