Turkey’s July 15th Coup: What Happened and Why ed. by M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balcı (review)

This edited volume is the product of a workshop held just three months after the coup attempt in Turkey on July 15, 2016. The workshop attendees and volume contributors are all scholars of the movement headed by Fethullah Gülen, which the contributors believe was primarily responsible for the coup attempt. For those who do not follow Turkish politics closely, this book provides in-depth information about the Gülen movement and its involvement in the Turkish government, as well as about the events of the coup attempt. Yet the book is a frustrating read, especially in terms of the evidence laid out to support its central claim: that the Gülen movement and Gülen himself were primarily responsible for the coup attempt. To be clear, I am not arguing against the contributors’ claims of Gülen culpability. Rather, I am assessing the coherence and soundness of the contributors’ arguments about the coup attempt, and some of the contributors are less than convincing.

The first five chapters in the book are especially prone to polemics rather than providing convincing substantiation of the allegation that the Gülen movement was solely responsible for the coup attempt. One important problem in these chapters is the heavy reliance on secondary sources of information. If no primary sources are available, this reliance would make sense. But some of the sources cited are from publications sympathetic to the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the most vocal accuser against the Gülen movement and the greatest beneficiary of its downfall. In one case, contributors Hakan Yavuz and Rasim Koç stated in a footnote that they had interviewed some coup conspirators and read their testimonies (p. 95n6). A reader would thus expect sustained first-person accounts describing the coup attempt, but none was forthcoming. Yavuz and Koç only provide one quote from a retired police officer, describing how the Gülen movement had long held power in the Turkish police (p. 83). That has been common knowledge for years.

The use of second-hand sources points to the circumstantial nature of the contributors’ accusations. For example, some contributors contend that if Gülen-affiliated members of the military were involved in the coup attempt, and the Gülen movement is characterized by rigid hierarchy with Gülen at the top, then Gülen personally must have been involved in the coup attempt (Gülen has denied involvement¹). It is a reasonable statement, but the contributors do not provide hard evidence. Similarly, Yavuz (in the postscript) argues against the commonly held belief that the military personnel involved in the coup included both Kemalist/secularist officers and others sympathetic to the Gülen movement. Yavuz rejects this idea because Kemalists would never have allied themselves with Gülen-affiliated officers because the two groups profoundly differ ideologically. Again, that is a good point, but where is the evidence?

The chapters in the second half of the book paint a more nuanced picture of the coup attempt and the involvement of the Gülen movement in government power. Sabine Dreher, for example, notes in Chapter 7 that the rise of Gülen movement members in Turkish state bureaucracy was not purely a grab for power but reflected long-term trends in Turkish governance. The Kemalist elite dominated Turkish government for decades, and they excluded pious Turks from positions in the state bureaucracy. When the Justice and Development Party gained power in 2002, the Islamist party allied with the Gülen movement to remake the state bureaucracy in their own image by appointing well-educated movement members and other pious Turks while excluding Kemalists. This points to a much bigger problem in Turkey than the presence of Gülen movement members in positions of power: Turkey’s bureaucracy has existed as an expression of a specific elite segment rather than...