Ryan Gingeras’ book Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey interrogates the history of narcotics-related criminal organizations and the role they have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics. At the core of his analysis, the author locates the activities of narcotics gangs and the interactions of prominent gangsters with state officials. He contends that the strategies developed by the Turkish state and United States security institutions to fight criminal syndicates contributed to the development of a national security state in Turkey. In addition to the political consequences of organized criminal activity, Gingeras also deals with the factors that facilitated the emergence and transformation of criminal organizations. He indicates that migrations, urbanization, wars, economic policies, and changes in the international system have all affected the ways in which criminal activities are performed. Gingeras principally uses the National Archives of the United States, the Prime Ministry Archives of Turkey, and journalistic records to disentangle the intricate web of activities between smugglers, gangsters, state officials, and politicians.

In Chapter 1, Gingeras traces the history of the dominant forms of organized crime in Turkey in the late Ottoman Empire, before turning in Chapter 2 to his main subject matter, as indicated by the chapter’s title, “Turkey, the United States, and the Birth of the Heroin Trade.” It is particularly in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 that one finds the most original contributions of the book, as it is in these chapters that Gingeras meticulously investigates the relations between gangsters, Turkish officials, politicians, and the United States Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). U.S. interest in Turkish drug trafficking dates back to the 1930s, as, in the previous decade, the increasing number of drug addicts had begun to occupy the U.S. political agenda, leading to the establishment of the FBN in 1930 to combat illicit drug trafficking. The FBN reported that a significant amount of the opium entering the U.S. came from Turkey by way of individual merchants and smugglers. Further FBN investigations revealed that the heroin introduced from Turkey into the international drug trafficking network was processed in factories located in İstanbul (p. 71). FBN reports also revealed that prominent figures in the young Republic of Turkey were involved in the lucrative opium trade. The U.S. put increasing pressure on Ankara to comply with the International Opium Convention, drawn up at the Hague in 1912, and to craft definitive legislation to strictly regulate the farming and processing of raw opium. Gingeras states that clashes of different interests influenced Ankara’s opium policy. Proponents of economic nationalism and groups and individuals who benefited from the opium trade lobbied Ankara not to change its policy, and Gingeras notes that, according to American sources, “several of Mustafa Kemal’s close confidants, including Şükrü Kaya, Hasan Saka, and Yunus Nadi, privately opposed any restrictions upon opium production” (p. 73). Nevertheless, in 1932, Mustafa Kemal announced that Turkey would comply with the Hague convention (p. 72). Despite the measures taken by Ankara, George Baklacoglu, a prominent international smuggler, posited in a League of Nations investigation that “there were not tens but thousands of small clandestine drug plants operating in Turkey without the fear of interference” (p. 73).

Gingeras also points out that the Second World War marked a definitive turn in the history of the drug trade (p. 80). The war disturbed drug trafficking networks and the number of addicts dramatically dropped during the course of the conflict. However, in the postwar period, the amount of heroin produced on a yearly basis increased steadily, with Turkey continuing to be a principal source of the global opium supply, as both a producer and a transit country. Meanwhile, U.S. interests and involvement in counter-narcotics efforts also increased in the postwar period. Gingeras argues that Washington adjusted its anti-narcotics policy to Cold War conditions, with this global anti-narcotics policy being emblematic of Washington’s quest for global hegemony and national security interests at home and abroad (p. 77). The global war on narcotics enabled the U.S. to intervene, steer, and organize the internal security policies of allied states. After the Second World War, the FBN opened several offices on foreign soil, and Gingeras argues that FBN agents worked with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather intelligence and carry out clandestine operations to fight the perceived Communist threat. In fact, working in coordination with the CIA, the “FBN resonates strongly within the overall construction of America’s postwar ‘national security state’” (p. 135). In Chapter 4, Gingeras explains in great detail the cooperation between the FBN and Turkish security officials between 1948 and 1967, arguing that the FBN played a significant role in the development and professionalization of policing practices in Turkey (p. 181).

Gingeras mentions that, by the 1970s, U.S. anti-narcotics policy had undergone a dramatic change. As the social and political upheavals of the 1960s took their toll on the American dream, narcotics and drug addiction came to be used as scapegoats for the crisis. In 1969, President Richard Nixon declared a new policy that initiated a more comprehensive war on drugs. As such, the U.S. administration increased the pressure on Turkey and France, which were seen as the main sources of heroin. Due to popular and parliamentary pressures, Turkish governments of the time dragged their feet in negotiations with the U.S. administration on the subject of the opium ban. However, the military-led government headed by Nihat Erim finalized the negotiations, banning the harvest of opium in 1972, although this ban did not last long. The left-wing populist leader Bülent Ecevit’s rise to power brought the end of the ban, but the government did enact strict restrictions on and oversight of the farming of opium (p. 202). Along with the Cyprus issue, the opium ban constituted the major source of tension between Turkey and the U.S. during the 1970s. In addition to interstate relations, Gingeras also states that the 1970s entailed a significant transformation in the relationship between the underworld and Turkish politics. In this part of the book, the author invokes newspapers and the journalistic investigations of Uğur Mumcu and Soner Yalçın. In Gingeras’ view, the rising “leftist threat” and the terror campaign against Turkey embarked on by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) prompted new alliances between the state and nationalist gangs (pp. 218–219).

In the concluding chapter, Gingeras deals with more recent debates concerning organized crime in Turkey. This chapter provides an overview of the Susurluk and Ergenekon cases in order to outline the development of the relationship between the Turkish underworld and Turkish politics during the 1990s and 2000s. With respect to the Ergenekon case, the author reasonably abstains from coming up with bold conclusions, as there are serious allegations regarding the lawfulness of the proceedings. However, he does question prevalent presumptions about the case, which suggest that the trials brought an end to a century-old illegal “deep state” structure. At this point, Gingeras engages with the international literature on deep politics, which deals with the relationship between illegal organizations and democratic politics (p. 261). This part of the book provides an important look at the literature, particularly for readers from Turkey, who are typically bombarded by the media with conspiracy theories concerning the so-called “Turkish deep state.” However, there are certain practical drawbacks to employing a deep-state paradigm for analysis. In Turkey, the concept of the deep state is used to depict a monolithic, ahistorical, and abstract entity disembedded from social and economic relations. Moreover, the concept is generally employed to make a fictitious distinction between the government and the state, blaming the latter for the illegal activities of the former.

The history of organized crime is an untouched field in Turkish studies, and Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey makes an unprecedented contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the politics of the subject. As the book unravels the complex web of relations between politicians, gangs, and international agents, it prompts new questions about the nature of modern politics and about historical narratives of the Turkish state. Modern society and politics are based on binary systems, such as public/private, legal/illegal, and domestic/international, and mainstream historical studies generally take this binary system as a given and construct their historical narrative within the boundaries of this schematization. Gingeras’ work, on the other hand, demonstrates that the history of the modern state cannot be studied without crossing over these so-called distinctions by revealing the critical role of illicit activities in the making of the state.

Despite the overall success of the book, there is still some room for improvement. The theoretical depth of the book is weaker than its empirical breadth. While focusing more on empirical material might be a methodological choice of the author, not having the guidance of a social theory has its own drawbacks. For example, the introduction of the book promises to unearth “the roles gangs and gangsters have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics” (p. 2). The catchy phrase “the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics”—which also resonates in the book’s title—conjures up a more theoretical engagement regarding state, society, and power relations in Turkey. Nonetheless, without the guidance of such a theoretical perspective, the detailed narration of historical events sometimes loses connection with the more general process of state-making. Nevertheless, this book would be of interest to students of Turkish politics, of comparative state-making or historical institutionalism, and to more general readers interested in the political history of modern Turkey.