Editors’ Introduction: Fall 2026

The Fall 2026 issue of New Perspectives on Turkey appears at a moment when Turkey's already harsh political climate continues to be shaped by an even more perilous regional and global conjuncture.Russia's continuing war against Ukraine and the war involving Iran, Israel, and the United States unfold alongside wider economic and political instability, deepening the uncertainties through which societies are living.On the domestic front, the decades-long armed conflict in the Kurdish region appears to be reaching a definitive conclusion through a formal agreement and new legislation, a profoundly consequential process poised to reshape politics in Turkey.These are difficult and violent processes.The contributions gathered here do not offer a single account of this conjuncture.Across distinct periods, sites, and methodological approaches, they examine the institutions, infrastructures, moral languages, memories, and material relations through which power is organized, contested, and lived in Turkey.The issue opens by tracing the deeper historical formation of the authoritarian present.Onur Kalkan's article revisits the politics of religious education from the 1940s to 1971.Rather than treating its postwar expansion simply as a reaction against secularization, Kalkan situates it within a longer history of state involvement in moral education and within the changing forms of political legitimacy that followed World War II.The article shows how secular and center-right actors forged a modern conservative consensus in which religious education became an instrument of moral and civic formation, shaped by mass education, populism, and anti-communism.Questions of history, cultural power, and authoritarianism continue in Kerem Öktem's analysis of two major centennial exhibitions held in İstanbul in 2023 and 2024.The exhibitions offer sharply different Islamist-authoritarian and liberal-Kemalist renderings of the Turkish Republic.Yet, based on fieldwork, curator interviews, and audience responses, Öktem finds a convergence in their state-centric and exclusionary modes of representing the past.The article argues that this convergence illuminates the autocratization of the cultural field, in which history becomes spectacle either in triumphalist or nostalgic forms rather than a space for plural and critical engagement.From the cultural field, the issue moves to the infrastructural and regulatory conditions underlying Turkey's networked authoritarianism.