Turkey in the shadow of the Syrian Civil War

Hi folks,

We have our first guest on the Pod this week!

Nate Schenkkan, the Senior Director of Research at Freedom House, recently wrote a piece at War on the Rocks entitled How Syria broke Turkey.

The bulk of the piece goes through major events in the 2013-2017 period, when Turkey’s domestic problems and its involvement in the Syrian Civil War mixed into a great cataclysm of deadly violence and authoritarian government.

Nate is a brilliant guy and does an excellent job of bringing it all together. This is a very early draft of history though, so in our discussion, we discuss where we can confidently make causal arguments and where we kind of have to ask questions and hope to get more information in the future.

I highly recommend you read it!

There’s a lot we didn’t get to in our discussion, but I’m going to open up a thread in the Kültürkampf chat open to all subscribers, so feel free to drop by and discuss! We’ll all be there.

All the best,

Selim

---

Protesters at a left-Kurdish rally, the moment a bomb explodes behind them, killing more than 100 people. ISIS took responsibility. It was the deadliest terror attack in Turkey’s history, and set the tone for the second election of 2015, when the AK Party won back its majority. For more, see the Wikipedia page here.