As is well known, on February 27, 2025, Abdullah Öcalan announced that the PKK, which he had led for forty-eight years, had decided to lay down its arms. On July 11, a symbolic ceremony was held durin...

NATO’s Ankara Summit is over and, as expected, the winner is Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish host has a lot to be happy about.  First, the summit put on display his special relationship to Donald Tr...

As is known, NATO is a military alliance established after the Second World War to protect the military security of the West against communism and Soviet expansionism. Beyond being merely a military a...

The initial agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran to end the recent war marks more than a temporary ceasefire. It represents a possible reorganization of the regional ba...

Turkey’s Opium: Football Great Ambition, Great Disappointment Football is an integral part of daily life in many societies around the world. In Turkey, however, this passion takes on an altogether dif...

Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam offers a useful starting point for understanding the current crisis of political Islam. Devji’s central argument is that political Isl...

Turkey’s path to the dictatorship  The first phase of Erdoğan’s plan to neutralize the main opposition party — carried out in cooperation with former CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu — has been completed...

By moving to effectively install a court-appointed administration over CHP, Erdoğan’s regime has taken a step that pushes Turkey closer to a Russian-style one-man rule, away from the competitive autho...

For all the efforts of European leaders to paper over frictions with Donald Trump, there has been no shortage of transatlantic drama over the past couple of weeks.  At the start of May, the Pentagon a...

As of early 2026, the U.S. had almost 170,000 active-duty troops stationed abroad in approximately 750 military bases located in some 178 different countries. Germany has long been one of the countrie...

Weekly Turkey Report: The End Of April – “Process Frozen, Economy Cracking: Turkey at a Crossroads” Executive Summary:    PKK commander Murat Karayılan issued a lengthy statement highlighting the abse...

The role of Islam in social and political life is often reduced to single-dimensional explanations—either as a doctrine, a set of rituals, or a political ideology (Islamism). Such simplifications obsc...

Weekly Turkey Report: Fourth Week Of April – Öcalan Issues Warning and Demands on Peace Process Executive Summary:   Öcalan: If this process is similarly derailed, the fallout from the crises in Iran ...

Weekly Turkey Report: Third Week Of April – You can kill someone, but you cannot erase them Executive Summary:   New details have emerged in the investigation into the disappearance six years ago of G...

At the start of the now on-hold US-Israeli war against Iran on February 28, 2026, this author speculated on whether or not the United States and Israel would be able to entice the Iranian Kurds’ small...

Weekly Turkey Report: Second Week of April 2026 – Erdoğan Moves to Neutralize CHP Under Cover of Regional Tensions    Executive Summary Arrests and detentions are spreading from CHP mayors and municip...

Turkey’s Strategic Neutrality in the US–Israel War Against Iran*   The ongoing war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran presents a revealing case for understanding the evolving nature of midd...

The current war in the Middle East cannot be understood merely as a military confrontation among Israel, the United States, and Iran. The central issue is no longer who initiated the war, but who will...

Weekly Turkey Report: First Week of April 2026 – Erdoğan is suffocating CHP   Executive Summary:  CHP Bursa Metropolitan Mayor Mustafa Bozbey was detained along with 55 people, including his wife Sede...

Weekly Turkey Report: Fourth Week Of March – The War and The Peace Executive Summary:  A sweeping investigation coordinated by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has targeted a bribery netw...

War is first and foremost a human tragedy. It results in devastating and unnecessary loss of life, disruption of families and communities, and the fracturing of societies. As we continue to see a conc...

Beneath the visible structures of Anatolian political culture lies a deeper emotional and symbolic reservoir—one shaped not merely by institutions or ideologies, but by long durée memories, moral arch...

There is an old witticism, sometimes attributed to Leon Trostsky: “you might not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”  For what it’s worth, it captures well Europe’s predicament in the ...

Weekly Turkey Report: Third Week Of March – A Political Bombshell: Justice Minister’s Wealth Under Scrutiny  Executive Summary:  While war dominates headlines around the world, a domestic story of com...

Weekly Turkey Report: Second Week of January 2026 – CHP in Silivri   Executive Summary      The CHP held its weekly parliamentary group meeting in Silivri, site of the Marmara Closed Penal Institution...

The dramatic escalation of tensions in the Middle East in recent years has renewed interest in a long-standing question: how should Iran’s foreign policy be understood? Is the behavior of the Islamic ...

Weekly Turkey Report: First Week of January 2026 – İmamoğlu trial starts Istanbul Municipality Trial: Proceedings Begin with 402 Defendants A trial arising from an investigation into the Istanbul Metr...

Using The Kurds Again: Will the Iranian Kurds Enter The Iran War on The Side of The United States and Israel?   The United States has a long record of using the Kurds as auxiliaries when fighting agai...

To understand the stance of Turkey’s political class and society regarding the attacks on Iran, two main points must be examined: the fact that Turkey’s secularist circles were raised within an anti-i...

What About Iran’s Proxy Forces in Turkey? Before the Iranian “mullah regime” collapses, it has already built a serious infrastructure inside Turkey—under Erdoğan’s protection—to reproduce itself in ex...

Weekly Turkey Report: Fourth Week of February 2026 – Öcalan calls for democracy   Peace Process & Domestic Politics As the flames of war continue to burn across Turkey’s geography, Ankara presses ahea...

To date, climate change has been variously framed as an environmental, scientific, economic, or political issue. These framings are valid and important, but one framing that is gaining increasing trac...

The Torn Republic provides a comprehensive reinterpretation of modern Turkey’s political trajectory, connecting history, memory, and identity to explain the country’s ongoing turmoil and shifting fore...

Symbolism matters immensely. The Munich Security Conference (MSC) is a prime example to that effect, and Turkey proves the point.  It thinks of itself as a first-rate political player in Europe.  But ...

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Weekly Turkey Report: Second Week of February 2026 –The Construction of a “Monolithic” Turkey: Societal Transformation Under the Grip of Judiciary, Politics, and Economy  Executive Summary –  The midn...

In a lightening offensive reminiscent of their overthrow of Assad in December 2024, Syria’s new president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s forces took some 80 percent of the territory occupied by the pro-Kurdish Syr...

While Syria lived for nearly four centuries under Ottoman rule, it came under the French Mandate in 1923. It gained independence as one of the founding members of the United Nations on October 25, 194...

Weekly Turkey Report: First Week of February 2026 – “Right to Hope” talk, arrests in practice It is alleged that three Romani boys were handed over to Joris Demmink, the Deputy Secretary of the Dutch ...

“The paradox about the European Union’s position in the world is that it is both a giant and a dwarf.” Nearly two decades later, this verdict by Kishore Mahbubani still rings true. The Singaporean lum...

Weekly Turkey Report: The End of January 2026 — Turkey Blocks Aid to Kobani Executive Summary A Turkey-backed jihadist offensive against Rojava catalyzed a new wave of Kurdish mobilization across Euro...

Zbigniew Brzeziński notes that between 1914 and 1990 “mega-deaths” are estimated to have reached 187 million—roughly 9 percent of the world’s population at the time. With the collapse of the Soviet sy...

Weekly Turkey Report: Fourth Week of January 2026 – A New Kobane Moment for the Kurds Executive Summary Kobane once symbolized Kurdish resistance against ISIS and cooperation with the United States; t...

Extinction refers to the irreversible loss of a species – when the last individual dies and no living members remain anywhere on Earth. Biologically, extinction marks the end of a unique evolutionary ...

Weekly Turkey Report: 3rd Week of January – Turkey Chooses the Sri Lanka Model   Executive Summary The report argues that Ankara’s long-admired “Sri Lanka model” approach to the Kurdish issue has been...

How do you de-risk from the US?  “This response to our own allies for sending a small number of troops to Greenland for training is bad for America, bad for American businesses, and bad for America’s ...

Demonstrations that began in Iran during the final two days of 2025 have continued, even if they appear to have lost some momentum. In the early phase, protesters cited high inflation and the Iranian ...

Weekly Turkey Report: 2nd Week of January 2026 – Peace by Beating the Kurds Executive Summary Türkiye entered the new year amid an Ankara-backed assault in Aleppo aimed at displacing Kurdish communiti...