Beyond Binaries: Contesting Pluralisms in Turkish Politics

On June 17 2025, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, closed its term with a seminar chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of the European Studies Centre. The event featured Associate Professor Nora Fisher-Onar, Chair of Global Studies at the University of San Francisco, who introduced her new book on Turkey’s “plural realities” and argued that conventional binary frames—East versus West, secular versus religious—obscure more than they explain.

Fisher-Onar began by explaining how conventional “either/or” frames—East versus West, secularist versus religious—distort our understanding of Turkey. She showed how cover images from The Economist, The Guardian and Der Spiegel rely on binary tropes (a bridge between continents, a covered versus an uncovered woman), whereas her book’s quilted-textile cover from Antalya’s open-air markets captures Turkey’s kaleidoscopic diversity. Those hard binaries, she argued, simplify causal complexity in political science, misguide policy towards Muslim-majority states (by backing whichever authoritarian model seems “our ally”) and fuel Islamophobia and right-wing populism at home.

Laying out her three-part structure—Theory, History and Twenty-First Century—Fisher-Onar described Chapter 1’s survey of three waves of Turkish pluralist thought: early Republican social engineering, mid-century democratisation that welcomed diverse societal energies, and a third wave of area-studies scholars crafting truly comparative approaches. In Chapter 2 she offered a new “complex-systems” key to politics, treating Turkey as a system defined by interacting parameters—ideas (normative repertoires), actors (strategic performers) and structures (from electoral laws to global power balances). Rather than isolating single causes, this lens traces how emergent coalitions—shifting alliances of pluralists and anti-pluralists—drive critical junctures.To operationalise pluralism, Fisher-Onar moved beyond liberal genealogy to ask simply, “How do you feel about sharing space with others?” Plotting two spectra—public religion versus a secular public sphere, and pluralist identity versus unitary identity—she mapped four “quadrants” (e.g. Islamist nationalists, Islam-progressives, secular liberals, ethnic nationalists). This matrix reveals how fragile cross-camp coalitions have governed Turkey’s trajectory from the late Ottoman era to the present, from the multi-party transition of the 1940s through the AKP’s rise, Gezi protests and today’s competitive-authoritarian turn.

Fisher-Onar’s millennia-spanning study—based on over 100 semi-structured interviews in English and Turkish, archival research and process tracing—identifies seven major pluralising coalitions. She showed, for instance, how the early 2000s alliance of Islamist and secular liberals briefly pluralised the system, only for that coalition to fracture as differing visions of pluralism realigned under ethno-religious nationalist agendas. Her framework explains Turkey’s complex “rise and fall” of openings: anti-pluralist coalitions often exploit economic turbulence or global strategic shifts (the post-2003 US pivot, the 2013 Gezi cycle) to consolidate power.

In discussion, Anastasakis and the audience pressed her on why binaries endure, whether Turkey’s pluralism is exceptional, and how top-down coalitions interact with grassroots identity shifts. Fisher-Onar replied that binaries serve as cognitive heuristics—tools rather than truths—that crystallise debate but often outlive their usefulness. On exceptionalism, she argued that while Turkey’s merchant-city traditions shaped a unique pluralist legacy, the core dynamics of shifting pluralist/anti-pluralist coalitions are analytically generalisable. And though her book focuses on elite actors—presidents, party leaders, intellectuals—she noted that grassroots movements (Gezi youth, women’s and LGBTQ+ activists, environmental grannies) also generate the ideas and energies that drive coalition-building.

Finally, questions ranged from the differential treatment of Greeks, Armenians and Jews under mid-century wealth taxes (a function of migrant options and perceived Western loyalties), to the impact of corporate actors like family-run holding companies in providing resources to pluralist causes, to how high inflation and currency crises open space for anti-pluralist populists. Fisher-Onar acknowledged that economic turbulence often fuels opportunistic appeals to security or purity, just as charismatic leaders can harness grassroots discontent into coalitions—whether pluralist or anti-pluralist.

Fisher-Onar’s seminar demonstrated that understanding Turkey (and by extension any complex polity) requires moving beyond reductive binaries. Her pluralism-complexity framework offers both a richly empirical account of Turkish politics and a versatile apparatus for comparative analysis—one capable of illuminating contested transitions from democracy to authoritarianism across regions and eras.

by Yangyang Zhao (ESC Research Assistant)