With The New Turkey and Its Discontents, Simon Waldman and Emre Caliskan achieve the remarkable feat of writing a book that is both accessible to the non-expert and captures the country's complexities. Eminently readable and deeply relevant, the book surveys developments in Turkish politics with a primary focus on the years since the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) rose to power in 2002. Substantively, the book uses information culled from a combination of interviews, press sources, wiki-leaks cables and vast secondary literature to make the case that Turkey has entered a new, post-military era. While such an argument will hardly come as a surprise to those who have been following political developments in Turkey, just exactly how the country came to find itself in this new era, where a “system that was once dominated by the military now appears to be dominated by the AKP” (p. 171), is certainly worthy of explanation.

The explanation—or rather, the set of explanations—that Waldman and Caliskan provide in the first half of the book reflect a comprehensive synthesis and analysis of recent arguments as to why and how the locus of political power in the Turkish state has shifted from the generals to the AKP and especially president Erdogan. Here the focus is threefold. First, the author's highlight the “irresistible rise,” the title of Chapter 2, of a new ideological fusion between Islamism and nationalism—the Turkish-Islamic synthesis—which emerged in the wake of the 1980 coup and eventually helped to catapult the AKP to power. Next, they astutely detail how this new ideological configuration came to dovetail with the European Union accession processes to abet the demise of 80-plus years military-tutelage. Third, they argue that the AKP's subsequent and deliberate erosion of the checks and balances that have kept Turkey's precarious democracy intact further hastened this trajectory, ultimately tilting the country towards majoritarianism and one-man rule.

As alluded to in the title, the second half of the book turns to the “discontents” in “a new Turkey, with new challenges ahead” (p. 5). The authors identify these grievances as reactions to the shifting landscape of urban politics, the intractable conflict surrounding the “Kurdish issue,” the foreign policy quagmire that resulted from overambitious strategic planning and harsh structural realities, and, of course, to the rising majoritarian tendencies of the AKP under Erdogan. Some of these challenges and discontents are certainly not “new” in the literal and temporal sense of the term. The authors, however, do make a convincing case that they are configured, articulated, and situated differently than in previous eras, with potentially momentous consequences for the future of the country.

In tracing these changes and their consequences, the authors also come to a set of more novel, intriguing, and nuanced critiques about how previous scholarship has gotten Turkey wrong. For example, whereas much ink has been spilled about Turkey's “deep-state,” Waldman and Caliskan take issue with the term. They argue that it lacks conceptual clarity, it absolves the actual state of responsibility for its actions, and “it draws attention to a symptom, rather than the problem facing Turkey today—namely, the weakness of the Turkish state” (p. 9). It is undoubtedly true that the various interpretations and definitions of the deep-state have created confusion both within Turkey and among scholars studying it, potentially obscuring more than it illuminates. What is the deep-state? Who is part of it? Ask 100 different people and you are likely to get 100 different answers. Furthermore, it is correct that the Turkish state has used references to the deep-state (and now its close cousin “the parallel-state”) to deflect attention away from its own failures and less savory policies, thereby eroding government accountability. The way in which the authors weave this second point through their overall narrative is surely one of the great strengths of the book. The third claim that the Turkish state is weak, however, is more dubious. It is difficult to understand how, as the authors themselves clearly show, a state that has succeeded in purging hundreds-of-thousands of people from its own ranks in a matter of months without collapsing while simultaneously engaging in corruption, acting with impunity, and inculcating a climate fear that has paralyzed many potential reservoirs of opposition, can be described as weak. The Turkish state may indeed “lack transparency” and adequate rule of law (p. 9); but this is not synonymous with weakness.

This small critique aside, the book does many things very well, including its remarkable account of the troubling decline in press freedom in Chapter 4. Demonstrating a sound knowledge of Turkey's media landscape, this chapter delivers a blow by blow account of how things went from bad to worse for those committed to media freedom. A press that the authors describe as being “severely curtailed, even compromised” under military tutelage is now even more highly censored (p. 119), to the point that it is almost entirely devoid of diverse opinions and critique. In a fascinating and detailed account of changes in the nexus between big business, government, and journalism, the authors reveal how “the corporatization of the media has all but eroded the independent press” (p. 141). They also touch upon the more recent bouts of censorship in the social media space, which have only served to exacerbate the demise of traditional media outlets.

Also valuable is the balanced account of the failures of the Kurdish peace process provided in Chapter 6. Here the book provides some very tempered optimism with respect to those critical developments that mark a departure from the past: namely that “the government does, at times, seem to understand that the Kurdish problem cannot be solved by military means alone” (p. 196). Still, the chapter is steeped in a steady realism. The political process initiated under the AKP to solve the Kurdish conflict marked “a very early stage” (p. 164), according to the authors. The process has thus been susceptible to problems that were avoidable, such as “the lack of a third-party mediator” (p. 188), and those that were beyond either of the parties’ control, i.e., Syria's descent into civil war. This war produced the “deadly triangle” formed by the Assad regime, the Syrian Kurds and ISIS that “helped sound the death knell of the Kurdish-Turkish peace process” through the tragic events in Kobani (p. 190).

Much of the book is structured thematically as opposed to chronologically, a strategy that does have some minor draws backs. For example, those reading the book cover to cover are likely to encounter a bit more repetitiveness and chronological zigzagging than they might otherwise expect. Nonetheless, the choice of thematic chapters is ultimately effective. It helps to make a complicated narrative comprehensible. It also serves to highlight where and how various themes—say urban politics and the rise of the AKP, or the Kurdish issue and foreign policy—intersect. Finally, many of its chapters could stand alone, and would make for a very useful teaching tool in college curricula. Thus, in part or in whole, The New Turkey and Its Discontents makes for a very good and informative read.