Merhabalar…

This week I am including an interview in podcast form in Angle, Anchor and Voice. The reason is really simple: to let you hear the experts speak directly to you. My hope is that you come away from each conversation holding a better-formed version of the question that drew you in, rather than a neater version of its answer.

For this opening conversation I could not have asked for a more fitting scholar than Nathalie Tocci, a thinker I read with consistent admiration and one of the most incisive voices on what Europe is and on what it keeps failing to become. She holds a professorship of practice at Johns Hopkins in Bologna and a senior fellowship at Bocconi University’s Institute for European Policymaking. Between 2015 and 2022 she served as special advisor to two successive High Representatives, Federica Mogherini and then Josep Borrell, and in that role she drafted the 2016 EU Global Strategy, the text that gave the Union the language of “principled pragmatism” and “strategic autonomy” it has been struggling, with uneven results, to inhabit ever since. Her books are many, among them a co-authored volume on Turkey’s relationship with the EU. Her recent documentary, Why Europe Matters, has just been released. Here is the link to that.

I wanted to talk to her because the EU finds itself, once again, in the predicament it understands best and resents most, the predicament of having to make decisions it would rather defer. It has to decide how to deal with a Turkey that is both indispensable and impossible. It has to decide what to do about the credibility it has bled on Gaza, on enlargement, on the rule of law within its own borders. And it has to decide how to read Ursula von der Leyen, who told a Hamburg audience last month that the EU’s task was to complete the European continent so that no part of it would fall to Russia, Turkey or China. The two days that followed were spent in Brussels trying to soften the sentence. What was it all about? What is the current sentiment in Europe regarding Turkey?

Nathalie elaborates that Turkey is not viewed as one of the “baddies,” but it is also not on the “map of the goodies.” The current EU enlargement narrative is driven by a geopolitical logic of integrating a “free, secure and democratic grey zone” to prevent it from falling under adversarial influence. That logic, applied to Ukraine and Moldova, does not match Turkey’s situation.

Turkey hits a brick wall

While one could argue Turkey might one day “see the light” — e.g., post-Erdoğan — the logical next step, resuming accession, faces significant, often unconscious resistance within the EU. Because Turkey is an uncomfortable case that defies simple categorization, European discourse often avoids the topic. Nathalie identifies several sources of the “brick wall”: doubts about Turkey’s long-term potential to be a stable liberal democracy; concerns about its size and the complexity it would introduce to EU political balances; and underlying, often unstated, civilizational or religious biases.

The current “geopolitical” rationale for enlargement, which is about integrating vulnerable states for security, doesn’t apply to Turkey. Already in NATO and a strong military power, Turkey doesn’t fit the “integrate them or else” logic relevant to Ukraine. That leaves only the old, unresolved sources of resistance, making the topic hard to address.

For the other topics we touched upon — Ursula von der Leyen’s controversial statement on Turkey, the possible role of the Israeli lobby on her and other European leaders, and our collective failure to find an alternative to accession for EU–Turkey or EU–Britain relations — listen to the podcast. Once again, sorry for any unpleasantness in this podcast. I hope I will learn more along the way, and many thanks to Nathalie Tocci for her insights and her patience with me.

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The lecturer answering it was Comfort Ero, the President and the CEO of the International Crisis Group — perhaps one of the few organisations that produces genuinely granular, on-the-ground conflict analysis. Founded thirty years ago in response to the international community's failure to prevent the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the state collapse in Somalia, and animated by the dictum ‘never again’, Crisis Group spent most of its institutional life treating Europe as the stable periphery from which the world's disorders could be analysed. No longer.

Under Ero, the organisation has just taken the strategic decision to reinvest in Europe, treating the continent not as a stability anchor but as a region exposed to conflict pressure and great-power competition.

That an organisation built to analyse conflict elsewhere has now redirected its analytical resources toward Europe is, as Ero acknowledged, itself a finding about Europe.

The continent is no longer the normative template against which other regions' instabilities are read. It is one of those regions now.

I would not have predicted it half a decade ago. The days we live in…

De-risking or conscious uncoupling with the US

Ero began her lecture with first principles, the three pillars on which the post-war European project rests: American security guarantees. A rules-based international order. Economic integration. All three are now under simultaneous strain. Russia’s war in Ukraine has shattered the assumption that territorial aggression in Europe belongs to the past. The United States -historically the anchor of European security- has become, under its current administration, less a partner than a variable. A recent poll across six European countries found 87 per cent of respondents in favour of greater European autonomy and “de-risking” from Washington.

De-risking, a term Ursula von der Leyen first used for China, is not the same as decoupling. It accepts that structural dependence on a partner has become a strategic vulnerability, but seeks to reduce that dependence by degrees. For example, through diversification of supply chains or the building of alternative partnerships, rather than through an abrupt severance. Isn't it interesting that a concept originally devised to navigate exposure to China is now being used for the future of Europe's relationship with the United States?

Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), has come up with another formulation, conscious uncoupling. He realised, when he saw my blank face, that I had missed the popular-culture reference, and had to explain. In March 2014, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she and her husband, the Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, were ending their decade-long marriage by "consciously uncoupling", yani separating amicably, remaining a family, refusing to make their break-up a spectacle. The phrase was much mocked at the time, but it has aged well. For Shapiro, it captures what Europe's relationship with the United States needs to become, not a rupture, not a continuation of dependence, but a deliberate, dignified renegotiation of the terms.

Timothy Garton Ash asked Ero about the nature of this decline. Was it gradual or sudden? He also recalled that former Vice President of the European Commission (2019-24) Josep Borrell, who had given the same lecture a year earlier, had located the rupture in double standards towards two events - Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s response, or rather its conspicuous non-response, to the genocide in Gaza. Ero accepted that these were the moments in which the crisis became impossible to ignore, but pushed the inflection point earlier, to around 2015.

The deals that broke the principle

You remember what happened in 2015. Faced with a million asylum-seekers arriving via the Aegean, the EU negotiated its way out of the problem by paying Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey to keep Syrians on the eastern side of the border -six billion euros, a revived accession dossier that Brussels had no intention of honouring, and the quiet reclassification of Turkey as a “safe third country” - that almost no serious international lawyer believed it to be. The deal worked, in the narrow sense that crossings collapsed. It also did something more lasting. It exported Europe’s humanitarian responsibilities to an authoritarian partner, handed Erdoğan a permanent instrument of leverage, and inaugurated the externalisation playbook now imitated everywhere from Italy-Libya to UK-Rwanda. Well done, really.

If 2015 was where the principle began to be applied selectively, Gaza is where it snapped clean in half. The European response to Russia in Ukraine had been swift. ICC arrest warrant for Putin endorsed across the bloc, twenty sanctions packages, suspension of cooperation agreements, a near-instantaneous redefinition of what international law required of European governments.

The response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza has been the inverse. When the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that South Africa’s case alleging genocide was plausible, Germany formally intervened on Israel’s side; France, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic dismissed the case in varying registers; the European Commission declined to comment.

When the ICC issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his then defence minister Yoav Gallant who had announced a complete siege of Gaza with the words we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly’, France invented a doctrine of head-of-state immunity that no European lawyer believed in; Italy, Germany, Poland and Hungary signalled, in language of varying clarity, that they would not arrest him.

In April 2025 Orbán hosted Netanyahu in Budapest. Greek PM Mitsotakis met him in Jerusalem on the first day of Eid al-Fitr, one of the holiest days in the Islamic calendar, while Israeli airstrikes were killing dozens of Palestinians in Gaza. The EU-Israel Association Agreement, with its human-rights essentiality clause, was reviewed three times and never suspended. In September 2025 a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that genocide was being committed; the institutional EU did not adjust its position. Spain, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands pushed in the other direction, and they were the exceptions that proved the rule. The phrases rules-based international order or international law or international treaties, repeated across this period in every European communiqué on Ukraine, was being hollowed out by the same governments using it.

What struck me, sitting in a room full of people who had spent careers thinking about Europe, was the quiet consensus about the fundamental reason behind the European project’s fundamental crisis. It is not Russian tanks, nor American volatility, nor Chinese capital. It is the hypocrisy, the double standard, the inconsistent application of the principles on which the entire post-war order was built.

A principle applied selectively is no longer a principle. Yani, it becomes a preference. Which is ok if you are being honest about it. But you cannot claim a rules-based order while choosing which rules apply to allies and which to adversaries; you cannot invoke international humanitarian law in Bucha and avert your eyes in Gaza; you cannot lecture the Global South about territorial integrity while paying Erdoğan to do your border work. The Europeans I most respect understand this. The trouble is that understanding it has not yet been translated into doing anything about it.

Ero’s prescriptions for the short term are sober and operational.

1. Use leverage with unity and consistency. The Greenland crisis showed what coordinated resolve can achieve. A front of eight states - Denmark, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Nordics - and Trump withdrew the threat in January, having met the kind of coordinated European resistance his administration had not anticipated. Acquiescence gains little in the face of leaders like Trump.

2. Reassess reliance on the United States. Unquestioned reliance is no longer credible; de-risking now applies across the Atlantic as well as toward Beijing. But strategic autonomy must be built multilaterally, deliberately, with political will and coherent policy — and not captured by any single member state’s defence-industrial agenda.

3. Build coalitions of the willing. The EU and NATO remain essential but can be ponderously slow. Agile, issue-based coalitions can act faster, as the leader-led initiatives on Ukraine and amid the US-Israel-Iran tensions have shown.

4. Defend the rules-based order consistently. Consistently is the word here. Without it, the rest is rhetoric or laf salatası as we say it in Turkish.

5. Address the eroding global standing. In the Global South, Europe is increasingly perceived as backless, inward-looking and altogether too comfortable lecturing others. Influence is built on credibility, not power alone.

6. Confront internal fragmentation and populism. Despite real progress (the recent overcoming of Hungarian obstacles, for instance), political divisions and populism remain decisive threats. Major elections — though formally local — carry national and Union-wide implications. Europe, Ero insisted, must address the crises it cannot externalise.

The Scramble for Europe

If Ero’s diagnosis is the foreground, Dimitar Bechev’s new book The Scramble for Europe: Russia, China and Turkey Challenging Regional Order supplies the background. Dimitar traces the consolidation of the EU-anchored European order and its slow unravelling from the late 2000s. His central argument is that the three challengers want different things from a diminished Europe. Russia is the radical revisionist, exposed in Ukraine, intent on remaking the security architecture by force. China is the patient co-opter, working through economic dependence to integrate Europe into a future order it expects to dominate. Erdoğan’s Turkey is the perpetual stakeholder, weary of being the eternal candidate, demanding recognition as a top-tier player rather than waiting at the door. Folded together, these revisionisms are not a single threat but a structural condition to which Europe has been responding piecemeal, distractedly, and on the back foot.

Ero and Bechev are arguing, from different angles, for the same conclusion. The crisis is foundational rather than cyclical, which means it will not pass on its own; the pressure is multidirectional rather than singular, which means it cannot be deflected by managing one relationship well. Europe is therefore left with only its own conduct as a variable.

It is shocking how the diffusion of the authoritarian populist playbook, with its transactional, Machiavellian, pragmatic ethos, recognises neither borders nor the lessons of history. Travels fast and furious from country to country, region to region. However, transactionalism works, in the narrow sense in which the 2015 deal worked. In a way it does not work in the long term. The alternative, on the other hand, requires Europeans to pay prices they have been reluctant to pay since at least Bosnia. Is anyone willing to change that? No one in the room was sure at Oxford.

So it is fair to say that whether Europeans choose consistency and principle over expedience in the years ahead will determine not whether Europe matters, -I think it will-, but what kind of Europe survives the period we are now in.

You can pre-order Dimitar Bechev’s book by Oxford University Press here.

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On 11 April, after a Turkish prosecutor sought sentences of more than 4,596 years for Benjamin Netanyahu and thirty-five other Israeli officials over the interception of the Sumud flotilla to Gaza, Netanyahu posted on X that Israel would continue to fight Iran's terror regime and its proxies, unlike Erdoğan, who accommodated them and had massacred his own Kurdish citizens. Hours later, Israel's defence minister Israel Katz went further. Erdoğan, he said, was a Muslim Brotherhood man, who massacred the Kurds. The phrase travelled the way these phrases now travel, repeated across Israeli media, picked up by Iranian outlets pleased with the symmetry, recycled in Turkish nationalist circles for the opposite reasons.

Two weeks before Katz spoke, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD) in Washington published a paper titled “Islamist Turkey: A Base for Muslim Brotherhood Jihadism.” FDD has been part of the Israel lobbying machine in the United States for two decades, with funding patterns and policy outputs that have drawn it consistently into the orbit of Israeli strategic priorities. The paper is worth reading not for what it tells you about Turkey but for what it tells you about how the Brotherhood label is being manufactured for current use. A similar paper was published at the beginning of this year by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security(JISS) recommending that Israel treat Turkey as the leading force of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide and lobby Washington and NATO accordingly.

Now, this should give any observer of the region pause. The Muslim Brotherhood, in 2026, is in full disarray. The Egyptian organisation has been hollowed out by twelve years of Sisi’s prisons. Its London leadership and its Istanbul leadership have been at each other’s throats since the death of Ibrahim Munir in 2022. There is no operational coherence, no unified command, no urgent project being run out of Istanbul or Doha. The figures who remain in exile are mostly producing policy commentary and writing memoirs. So why, all of a sudden, is Erdoğan a Muslim Brotherhood man?

The label is doing extraordinary work in this transition, and it is worth asking what the label actually contains. The answer, on close inspection, is very little.

Türlü is a Turkish stew and…

The methodology is guilt by association. Bin Laden, the report tells us, made a trip to Turkey in 1976 and considered the Turkish Islamist and former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan a source of inspiration. How do we know this? From one journal seized at Abbottabad, the Pakistani town where US soldiers killed Bin Laden in 2011, and reported in Turkish newspapers four decades after the alleged event. Erbakan mentored Erdoğan. Erdoğan, therefore, sits in a lineage that runs through al-Qaeda. This is offered as evidence rather than as the McCarthyite syllogism it actually is.

The conceptual slide is more damaging. It is almost like türlü, the famous Turkish stew where we throw all the leftover vegetables into one pot and serve it for dinner. By the end of the report, the Brotherhood includes Hamas, Ennahda, Yemeni Islah, Libyan Justice and Construction, the Syrian National Army, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, al-Qaeda in Syria, ISIS recruitment networks, Naqshbandi Sufi orders, and Turkish Hezbollah, which is in fact a Sunni group with no relationship to the Lebanese Hezbollah and no clear ideological proximity to the Brotherhood. When the term stretches that far it stops describing anything. It becomes a name for whatever the report wants designated. I think Türlü.

The citation chain is closed. FDD analysts cite earlier FDD analysts. Almost like a sweet little circle of friends playing tag. A-cites-B-cites-A-cites-the Meir Amit Centre-cites-the Jerusalem Center! The New York Times investigation into Hamas financing in Turkey appears as a single piece of mainstream journalism doing the work of an entire field.

There is no engagement with the academic literature on Turkish foreign policy, on the AKP’s actual relationship with Islamist movements, on Brotherhood internal politics, its evolution since 1970s, on the considerable scholarship now available in English on the variety of Islamist trajectories since 2011, including my own book on the interactions between the AKP, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood, The New Spirit of Islamism, which is based on more than seventy elite interviews. Nada!

In other words, the report is not in conversation with the academic field, or with what is happening on the ground. Or shall I say reality? But it is in conversation with previous policy advocacy, with its circular arguments that, vallahi, say nothing useful about the present. Pure regurgitation of neocon mindset.

The main problem is selective ignorance when it comes to unpacking anything related to Islamist ideology, its evolution and trajectory. Of the Muslim Brotherhood. There is a plethora of Arabic and English sources that no one wants to cite in Israel or Washington. That is a much bigger problem than trying to tie Erdoğan to the Muslim Brotherhood with funny little attempts.

Um Kulthum’s songs as torture

The Brotherhood, as the world has learned to imagine it, has very little to do with the movement that actually exists. To see how thoroughly the gap has opened up between the label and the thing it claims to describe, it helps to look at the people the label is meant to refer to.

I went yesterday afternoon to a talk at Oxford University’s Middle East Centre by Mathias Ghyoot, a young historian at Princeton. His new book, Brothers Behind Bars, has just been published by Oxford University Press. It reconstructs the Brotherhood’s experience inside Egyptian prisons from 1948 to 1975, drawing on more than three hundred memoirs by Brothers and Sisters that have remained almost entirely outside the English-language literature. Um Kulthum’s voice was piped through loudspeakers into prison cells, a feature of the Free Officers’ rehabilitation reforms after 1952, meant to integrate prisoners into the new republic. Many were haunted by those songs for the rest of his life. What a shame that the most beautiful voice of the Arab world was conscripted into a torture campaign. So, the reforms Gamal Abdel Nasser introduced became their inversion, and the Egyptian prison service expanded into one of the most violent carceral regimes in the region.

Despite this violent prison machine, according to Ghyoot's sources, the Brothers built underground prison societies of remarkable organisational coherence. They held elections, ran councils, smuggled letters and books with help from the Sisterhood, organised football fields and theatres and Quran recital competitions. Some reported greater religious and political freedom inside than in what they called the big prison of Egypt. The book shifts attention from what state repression prevented to what it enabled, and the result is an account of agency rather than victimhood, of intellectual production rather than radicalisation.

This is the move that matters. The dominant narrative of the Brotherhood’s prison years, as it travelled from Gilles Kepel and Emmanuel Sivan in the 1980s into Western counterterrorism literature after 2001, was that prison produced mass radicalisation and that Sayyid Qutb was the principal radicaliser. America’s strategy on 11 September, one of these accounts claimed, was born inside Egyptian prisons. Ghyoot’s primary sources do not support this. He shows that radicalisation was often shaped outside the Brotherhood by the rise of Salafism in 1960s Egypt, and that the more consequential phenomenon inside the prisons was a sustained majority effort by senior Brothers to contain radicalism, denounce takfir, and articulate a disciplined moderation. Preachers Not Judges, the text written by Hassan al-Hudaybi and circulated in the mid-1960s, was not an aberration but actually the dominant register of the leadership.

Who really ‘radicalised’ the Brothers

Therefore radicalisation thesis was not produced by the Brothers’ own writings. It was produced by the Egyptian state, then exported. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Nasser collaborated with tabloid journalists and Al-Azhar clerics to cast the Brotherhood as a threat to Islam and society, depicting arrested members as deranged bomb-makers or recruits seduced by weird ceremonies. Pamphlets with titles like The Brotherhood and Terrorism and The Brothers of Satan portrayed the Brothers as Kharijites and apostates. By the mid-1960s the smear campaign had internationalised, presenting the Brotherhood as Saudi agents in the Arab Cold War, and even alleging mass conversions to Baha’ism. These tropes entered popular fiction, then nationalist historiography, then Western scholarship.

Yani…The shorthand the world now reaches for when it says Muslim Brotherhood was forged inside the Egyptian state’s propaganda apparatus, refined under Mubarak, formalised after 2013 by Sisi, and exported through Gulf lobbying networks to US and Israel. Or vice versa.

Since the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in 2013, more than 45,000 MB members have been imprisoned across Egypt. Morsi himself died in 2019, collapsing in a Cairo courtroom after six years in solitary confinement and denied medical care. Some have been executed. Some have died under torture. The vast majority are held in indefinite pre-trial detention, in conditions that human rights organisations have struggled even to document, because the Sisi government does not permit the documentation. The number is larger than the entire active membership of most political parties anywhere in the world. They are imprisoned in part because the Egyptian state has spent seventy years exporting a description of the Brotherhood that allows the West to hear their imprisonment as counterterrorism rather than as repression.

This is the empty category the Israeli campaign against Turkey has reached for recently, in the FDD report, in Katz's outburst and the Netanyahu tweet. The label is doing two kinds of work at once. In Egypt, it provides the cover that allows tens of thousands of people to be erased from political life. For Israel, it provides the cover that allows a NATO state - Turkey- to be repositioned as a strategic adversary. The same Muslim Brotherhood label, hollowed of empirical content, available for whichever project a state is currently advancing.

Do not get me wrong here. There is a relationship between the Erdoğan government and various Brotherhood-aligned movements. I have spent years documenting its texture. The Erdoğan government had a close relationship with the Egyptian Brotherhood until 2013 and with Tunisian Ennahda until 2019. It supported them while they were in power. Not after they were ousted. So for Erdoğan it was Realpolitik, power politics, strategic calculation, pure pragmatism, economic opportunism, raison d'état, or whatever you would call a situation that is not determined by ideology. He instrumentalised Islamism to gain influence and economic opportunities, just as he uses nationalist tropes at home to consolidate his base. The instrument is real. The conspiracy is not.

Israeli apparatus turn on Turkey

Katz’s phrase about Erdoğan is not, of course, a description of anything. But so very classic because there is a long tradition in foreign policy of using categories that nobody has had to define for decades because everybody is assumed to know what they mean, and the Muslim Brotherhood, in the Israeli usage Katz is reaching for, is one of these. The category arrives pre-loaded, its content assembled out of seventy years of Egyptian state propaganda, Western counterterrorism literature and Gulf lobbying papers, and it is now applied to a NATO ally with a complicated foreign policy in order to convert that ally into a member of an international conspiracy requiring sanctions, designations and possibly military preparation.

There is something almost vertiginous about watching the apparatus turn on Turkey. Israel is at war on multiple fronts. Its government faces an indictment in The Hague and a separate one from a Turkish prosecutor seeking sentences of between 1,100 and 4,500 years for Netanyahu and thirty-four other officials. Its strategic doctrine, post-Iran, requires a new principal adversary, and Turkey is structurally available.

The Muslim Brotherhood label gives Israel something it can say in public. The real reasons for the rupture between Turkey and Israel are geographic, strategic and emotional. They are about competition in the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey's drift toward Greece and Cyprus, and Erdoğan's response to what Israel is doing in Gaza. None of these reasons sound respectable when stated plainly. The Brotherhood label makes them sound respectable. It turns a fight over geography and Gaza into a fight against Islamist ideology. It does the work that any honest accounting of the rupture, which would have to begin with Gaza, would refuse to do.

In Cairo, the Brothers Ghyoot writes about, or their grandchildren, are dying in prisons whose conditions resemble those of the second ordeal under Nasser. In Istanbul and Doha and Ankara, a small number of Brotherhood figures live in exile and most of them produce the kind of policy commentary and think-tank work that closely resembles what comes out of Washington outfits like FDD itself. The FDD report describes as if they are the centre of the Islamic world. This is laughable. And they know well it is laughable. What is serious is that they are using this empty Muslim Brotherhood package to attack Turkey. While there are countless claims that can be put forth about the regime that runs Turkey for more than two decades; its clientelist networks, the corruption, the lack of rule of law but Israel chooses to go on with the Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because it is just the first step and the easiest and the laziest.

There is more to say about Israel’s aims at Turkey, and I will return to them. But for now, I can say that the campaign does not have a moral backbone or empirical weight. In the meantime, the Muslim Brotherhood members will keep dying in Egyptian cells for nothing more than becoming a social movement that built a political party, won an election, had a crappy eight months of rule, were then massacred by the military and their leaders thrown out by a coup. And Erdoğan, the so-called Islamist, a Muslim Brotherhood man as the Israel lobby likes to put it, has mended his ties with the man responsible for the persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood. Haven’t you seen him shaking hands with Sisi recently?

Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia make people stupid. So much so that they believe the rest of the world is stupid. Well, well.

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While many celebrated Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orbán’s fall via elections at the beginning of April, some found it important to remind us of the political colour and allegiance of those who took him down. Those who are called to be killjoys underlined the fact that “what happened in Hungary is […] that after the leader had been in power for 16 years, voters wanted a fresh face, but not a fundamentally different policy.” And that “Peter Magyar is not anti-Orbán. […] What he promises to change is governance, not ideology.”

By now I can say that the way one responds to Orbán’s defeat and Magyar’s victory reveals the political posture of the observer, whether in Europe or in Turkey.

As you know, the authoritarian styles of Orbán and Erdoğan have been comparatively examined and likened for quite some time. Even though Orbán is an Islamophobe and Erdoğan a proud Muslim, they seem to get along well for the exact reason that they epitomise what is called authoritarian populism, and Hungary and Turkey are often described as cases of competitive authoritarianism.

That is why his fall has been part of the debate in Turkey’s media.

Magyar’s victory in the Turkish media

The pro-government media, filled with sycophants who claim to be good Muslims, have been largely silent on Orbán’s fall, a close ally of Netanyahu. They are silent because they fear that Orbán’s fall means that Erdoğa could also go, and that their crony system would follow. Something they are not entirely wrong about.

Segments of Turkey’s right-wing conservative commentariat, once aligned with the AKP and Erdoğan but estranged over the past decade alongside figures who had formed the party’s intellectual and organisational backbone, have read Magyar’s victory in a similar vein to some of the European pundits mentioned above, though with some nuances.

One of them noted that regime change in a Central European country has dominated Turkish newspapers, television, and social media for days. The intensity of attention, he suggests, reflects the striking degree of resemblance between the political structures of Hungary and Turkey. He goes on to underline that Orbán was not unseated by the left. A right-wing challenger removed him at the ballot box. He argues that incumbent voters are less receptive to voices speaking from across the divide than to those emerging from within.

Another commentator raises a more pointed question. Magyar had belonged to Orbán’s inner circle until their break. How, he asks, did he manage to shed the burden of that association and present himself anew to the electorate? The answer is edged with speculation. Leaders who sense the inevitability of their own decline, he implies, may quietly facilitate transition. Atatürk is invoked as precedent, alongside İnönü, both cast as figures who recognised shifting conditions and prepared the ground for political change rather than resisting it outright.

A third adopts a more demonstrative tone, drawing lessons for Turkey more directly. The Hungarian case, he argues, suggests that figures such as Ali Babacan or Ahmet Davutoğlu, both former pillars of the AKP, could emerge as credible challengers.

What unites these readings is a quiet conviction that the Hungarian result was a transfer of personnel rather than a rupture in a system. The regime’s architecture is left intact in their telling. Only the face on top has changed, and the lesson for Turkey is reduced to a casting question: which member of the old inner circle might credibly play the Magyar role? We can all see the comfort of this reading, no?

It flatters Erdoğan, because it leaves his political economy and ideological project untouched. It flatters the AKP’s exiled founders, who are invited to picture themselves as presumptive heirs. It flatters the pundits themselves, who can now locate the coming transition within a familiar conservative vision without having to concede that the vision itself has failed.

But are they right, the European and Turkish pundits, about what the Hungarian election result means?

Orbán and Erdoğan’s ideology

First, some basics.

Do Orbán and Erdoğan actually share an ideology, and if so, is it one we can usefully call right-wing? The question matters, because the pundits’ reading depends on a yes that is never examined.

A right-wing ideology today, across much of the democratic world, tends to rest on three commitments: a defence of national sovereignty against supranational and cosmopolitan claims, a traditionalist account of family and cultural order against liberal pluralism, and a market economy treated as the natural expression of freedom.

Where the two regimes in question depart from the standard Anglo-American or continental European right is that they have added a fourth commitment on top: the conviction that the national majority is not a procedural fact to be counted at elections but a standing ethno-religious body whose will is already known, and whose authentic voice is the leader. This fourth commitment changes the meaning of the other three, and it is what we may be missing when we equate Orbánism with a probable post-Orbán conservatism.

It helps to think of these regimes as buildings with three layers. The façade is what one sees from the street, the civilisational story each regime tells about itself, Christian Europe in Budapest, Sunni Ottoman revival in Ankara.

The load-bearing walls are the everyday machinery that holds the structure up, yani the captured media, the patronage economy, the family-values traditionalism, the courts rebuilt as instruments of the executive.

The foundation is a single concept that carries the weight of everything above it, what might be called majoritarianism. The idea that the people are not a procedural electorate counted every four years but a standing ethno-religious body whose authentic will is spoken for by the leader, and that constitutions, courts, and central banks exist to serve that will rather than constrain it.

Orbán and Erdoğan have built on the same foundation, with a similar plan, but different façades. When Turkish pundits point to Magyar’s conservative register and conclude that the ideology survived, they are pointing at the façade.

What Magyar’s Tisza platform proposes to remove is the foundation - so rule of law will be restored, EU-aligned constitutionalism reinstated, media pluralism reintroduced, and the majority demoted from a substantive body to a procedural count. That is his pledge. But then, the building does not stand when the foundation is replaced, whatever the façade looks like. So a great deal changes, not just governance, and what is taken to be ideology is often something else entirely.

Neoliberal populism + statism

At this point Cihan Tuğal’s work on what he calls neoliberal statism becomes indispensable. Tuğal argues that the Erdoğan and Orbán regimes outlasted the classical neoliberal populists of the 1990s because they fused three things the earlier cases lacked: dense mass organisation, statist economic tools grafted onto a neoliberal frame, and mobilisation of the faithful against internal enemies.

Let me name the statist tools they used, because these are what differentiate Orbán and Erdoğan from other populists.

Both regimes brought their central banks under political control, enabling interest rates to be cut when elections approached, regardless of inflationary cost. Both built state investment funds, large pools of public capital outside normal budgetary scrutiny, deployed to rescue friendly firms and finance megaprojects when foreign credit tightened. Both designated national champions in strategic sectors, construction, energy, banking, defence, telecoms, and channelled state contracts, subsidised loans, and regulatory advantage towards them, producing the patronage economy on which the regime rests. Above all, both steered a construction boom from the presidency, using public housing authorities, infrastructure megaprojects, and urban transformation to generate employment at scale, visible monuments the leader could inaugurate, and rents distributed to loyal contractors.

All of this was designed to keep the electoral coalition solvent when global conditions turned. Which worked, until it did not.

The picture in Hungary: inflation peaked above twenty-five per cent, the highest cumulative figure in the European Union since 2020. Household consumption per capita is the lowest in the Union. The economy has entered technical recession twice in two years. The fertility allowances that were meant to anchor the Christian nationalist project have failed on their own terms, with births falling back to where they stood before the policy began.

Does this sound like merely a governance problem, or the failure of a model? A model that depended on foreign investment for accumulation while promising national sovereignty in rhetoric, and that financed itself through construction rents and a central bank subordinated to the presidency. What has failed in Hungary, and is failing in Turkey, is not simply corruption or leadership fatigue. It is the system itself.

In a similar vein, Magyar’s past is precisely where Turkish pundits are wrong to take comfort. His provenance is a biographical fact, not an ideological one. He belonged to Orbán’s inner circle until 2024, and he broke with it on substance: over a child abuse pardon scandal, over the family-and-friends economy, and over the direction of Hungary’s relationship with Europe.

The pundits are reading pedigree as if origin determines ideology. It does not.

Hungary’s centre-left coalition that lost in 2022 did not lose because it was led from outside the regime. It lost because the economic base had not yet cracked, and because the electoral machinery was still absorbing discontent. By 2026 the base had cracked. Inflation had done its work on household spending over four years, and the same machinery could no longer hold. Magyar won because conditions changed, not because his past was acceptable to Fidesz voters.

This is the distinction that turns a structural rupture into a personnel change in some readings.

Ekrem İmamoğlu as sign

Erdoğan’s regime rests on the same three legs: a patronage construction economy, a subordinated central bank, and a politically mobilised Islamist base. The trajectory of the lira since 2018, the inflation that has eroded wages, the dependence on Gulf money and now Chinese short-term capital, are not Erdoğan’s personal errors. They are what happens when the neoliberal-statist hybrid Tuğal describes exhausts the conditions that made it possible.

The Ekrem İmamoğlu phenomenon has already shown, at municipal level, that cracks open along economic contradictions before they open along ideological ones, and that the figure who moves through that crack is often, as in Budapest, someone the system once recognised as its own.

As I have been writing for some time, there is a succession issue within the AKP, and many around Erdoğan see it as a dynastic question. Literally. Would it be one of the sons-in-law, or Bilal Erdoğan? Even İbrahim Kalın and Hakan Fidan have slipped down the list. Those who frame Erdoğan’s departure as dynastic are not entirely wrong.

As CHP leader Özgür Özel once said, Erdoğan does not allow a winning candidate to survive, as İmamoğlu’s imprisonment illustrates. The electoral structure, the uneven playing field, and gerrymandering tactics may be similar in Orbán’s Hungary and Erdoğan’s Turkey, but Erdoğan has gone further once the main challenger is jailed.

Still, even if a former AKP insider were to emerge as a future opposition figure, that would not vindicate the project they once helped build. It would confirm its exhaustion. It would show that the system consumed every alternative pathway on its way down, and that by the time voters are ready to move, the only available vehicle is one the regime itself produced.

Atatürk and İnönü are weak analogies here. Those were managed transitions from above. What happened in Budapest was a shift under pressure from below, by voters who could no longer sustain the arrangement. As for Erdoğa possessing anything like Atatürk’s sense of patriotic restraint or long-term vision… Best not to pursue that comparison.

A gift for readers: a lecture from Neoskola

Before letting you go this week, a small gift. From Neoskola, a leading Istanbul-based online education platform, which I occasionally contribute to at the level of content decisions. One of Turkey’s foremost political scientists, formerly of Boğaziçi University, Prof. Hakan Yılmaz, has designed a foundational 12-episode lecture series titled Neoliberalism and Populism (Neoliberalizm ve Popülizm: Tarihi, İlişkileri, Sonuçları).

It will be free to access for 7 days for readers of Angle, Anchor and Voice via the link here. For non-Turkish speakers, English subtitles are available.

It is an important way into understanding the system that underpins today’s authoritarian governments and their populist styles of politics, as the debate on Erdoğan and Orbán discussed above makes clear.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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The newspaper I am holding does not move me simply because it has managed to remain a printed paper. It is the fact that it has endured, one way or another, in a harsh climate where the cold can be biting, the heat suffocating, and spring only rarely shows its face.

There is an irony here that is hard to ignore. The founding editor of this paper I hold in my hands is among those writers of modern Turkey who were taken by a brutal assassination. Yet its presence does not recall that violence so much as it instils a sense of assurance.

Much of that comes, of course, from the resilience and the peaceful character of Hrant Dink - Hrant abi - , the dear elder colleague who was murdered in 2007 in the very orbit of this newspaper, Agos. It also comes from the Agos team who treated his death as a grave turning point and chose to carry on with the same stubborn resolve.

Yetvart Danzikyan, who has been the editor-in-chief since 2015, and who is, to me, one of the most modest, kind, and clear-headed journalists I know (for me he is simply Yeto), described the labour behind the paper in these terms: ‘if you ask what the two strongest traditions of the Armenian people on these lands are, I would say the deeply rooted Armenian press and craftsmanship. During the Armenian Genocide, both traditions were cut back, more than that, cut down. Yet they were not extinguished. To publish a newspaper, and especially to publish Agos, has always felt to me like a form of craftsmanship. It connects both to a void I sensed in my own youth and to the history of the Armenian people. […] I do not know if those who founded and sustained Agos thought of it this way. We never spoke about it. But in practice we were bringing together two deep traditions. Art and craft are often confused. No, we were not artists. We were craftsmen. Craftsmen who kept a rooted press tradition alive. We would put on our glasses, lean over the table, and work the raw material in our hands together. In this way we reached thirty years. They took Hrant Dink from us, but we did not give up. Salute to those who did not.’

Since its founding in 1996, Agos has never been a newspaper concerned only with the issues of Armenians in Turkey. It has also offered Turkish society an Armenian perspective, and to Armenia, a way of reading Turkey from within. This double function established a line of contact that official diplomacy has often failed to produce. The fact that Armenia now appears in the Turkish press not merely as a hostile country or a distant neighbour, but as part of the everyday flow of political life, owes no small debt to Agos.

Another role Agos played, and a critical one, was in the matter of verification. What is now called fact-checking was, even if it went by another name, part of the paper’s daily reflex. From the 1990s onwards, the Turkish media circulated a steady stream of inaccurate, exaggerated, or plainly manipulative reporting on Armenians and Armenia. Developments in Turkey were likewise often distorted when conveyed to the Armenian public. On both sides, the language of enmity proved useful in domestic politics. Anti-Armenian sentiment in Turkey, anti-Turkish sentiment in Armenia, both could be mobilised with ease during election periods. Agos stepped in at these junctures. It tried, as best it could, to explain the substance of events to both publics and to place them on record. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this.

Looking back in 2006 on Agos’s first decade, Hrant Dink remarked that many of its ambitions had, in fact, been realised. There was, he said, hardly any issue concerning the Armenian community in Turkey that had not been brought to the attention of the broader public. Another achievement was the restoration of the word “Armenian,” which in the early 1990s had almost been turned into a term of abuse, to its proper meaning and dignity. Individuals within the Armenian community in Turkey were now able to express their identity without hesitation, even with a sense of pride, and for that, he suggested, they owed a great deal to Agos.

One of Dink’s most striking qualities was his deep attachment to Turkey, to being of this place. It was precisely this quality that the deeper structures of the state could not tolerate, and that led him to his death. As he put it, they had placed their Armenianness within their citizenship, and their citizenship within their Armenianness. They had not confined themselves to their own problems, nor limited their efforts to presenting those problems to the Turkish public. They had made Turkey’s problems the problems of Armenians in Turkey. ‘A paradise cannot be built through the resolution of one’s own issues alone. Unless the particular problems of those one lives alongside become one’s own, one’s own problems do not truly find resolution. Even when they appear to, something remains missing’ he concluded.

As Dink suggested, the scope of Agos was never narrow. A recent investigation published in the paper offers a clear example. It traced a chain of neglect and abuse involving 510 orphaned children brought from Ukraine to Turkey and placed in Antalya under the so-called “Childhood Without War Project.” That report, and the journalist behind it, Burcu Karakaş, were awarded the Uğur Mumcu Prize, one of the country’s most respected awards for investigative journalism. It carries its own grim echo. Uğur Mumcu, whose name the award bears, was, like Hrant Dink, assassinated outside his home for being a serious journalist who disturbed the dark arrangements that damage the country.

In Turkey, the paths that connect certain people, institutions, and communities are marked by deep sorrow. Yet they are also lined with forms of resistance that carry their own kind of inspiration. This country has often exhausted me, worn me down, brought me to tears. It has also, with equal force, etched into me the meaning of attachment and affection. For many of us, it is like this. It is so for those who founded Agos, those who produce it, and those who read it.

Rober Koptaş, who succeeded Dink as editor-in-chief, describes the effect Agos had, both on his own life and on its readers, in terms of a kind of rupture. Agos, he said, has been a school, not only for those who passed through its newsroom but for its readers as well. ‘It exceeded its own small hinterland and became a school for the whole of Turkey, even for different parts of the world if one includes the Armenian, Turkish, and Kurdish diasporas. As a young Armenian from Turkey, I learned not to be afraid, not to hide, not to conceal who I was in that school. In my first year at university I introduced myself to friends as Murat, the name on my ID, hiding that I was Rober, and lived for months under the strain of that secret. Agos changed that. For those who created it thirty years ago, it was a kind of Big Bang within their own atoms. After it, nothing would remain the same. From within a community reduced again and again, diminished, silenced, uprooted, there emerged a newspaper, like a final song, that insisted on rights and justice, on imagining another future, on a life together that is fair and free. It chose engagement over isolation, and, in Hrant Dink’s words, differentiation over fragmentation. In doing so, it showed how powerful the waves of change could be, how something born out of dark nights could become a star that signals the morning, for all the oppressed and for the country as a whole. This was the school Agos offered to anyone thinking about the condition of Turkey and the world.’

Agos is an Armenian newspaper. Agos is a newspaper of Turkey. Agos is the newspaper of a profession that has become scarce. It is a paper that, despite having been struck by one of the brutal killings of modern Turkey, gives me a sense of steadiness. One of the few assurances left in my Istanbul, in the Turkey I still believe in. It turned thirty. We were fortunate to grow with it, and to learn alongside it.

Why is Dink’s murder unresolved?

In a recent interview, Arat Dink, Hrant Dink’s son and Agos’s managing editor, recalled the threats his father received in his final days and the intense pressure the family lived under. He spoke about why they did not leave Turkey at the time:

“To leave or to stay? He [his father Hrant Dink] chose to stay. Perhaps instead of saying, ‘we are behind you, we will go anywhere with you, and if you want to stay, we will stay,’ we should have said, ‘we are leaving.’ Perhaps we should have told him that we could no longer live here. At a time when every attempt to assert our existence was met with accusations of betrayal, it was leaving that felt like betrayal to us. It is too late now to speak of these things.”

Hrant Dink was assassinated on 19 January 2007 outside his newspaper’s office in Istanbul by a 17-year-old gunman, Ogün Samast. The killing followed years of public targeting, legal harassment under Article 301 for “insulting Turkishness,” and repeated threats. In the months before his death, Dink had been summoned to the governor’s office, a meeting he later described as intimidation rather than protection.

The immediate account presented the assassination as the act of an ultranationalist youth and a small circle around him. Samast was quickly arrested and convicted, along with several associates linked to nationalist networks in Trabzon. For a time, the case was contained within this narrow frame, one that left state institutions largely untouched.

That frame did not hold for long. Evidence emerged that elements within the police and gendarmerie had prior intelligence about the plot and failed to act. Some officials knew the individuals involved and were aware of preparations for the killing. They did not intervene. In certain instances, the line between negligence and complicity blurred. The photographs of Samast posing with security officers after his arrest, smiling with a Turkish flag, became shorthand for that deeper entanglement.

Over the following years, the case expanded into a complex and fragmented set of trials. As political alliances within the state shifted, prosecutors began to pursue police and intelligence officials, some accused of allowing the assassination to proceed. In 2021, several former officials were convicted on charges ranging from aiding the murder through omission to membership in an armed organisation. Others were acquitted. Some suspects remain at large.

Ogün Samast himself was released in 2023 after serving his sentence, having been tried as a minor at the time of the murder. His release was legally defensible within the existing framework, but politically and morally jarring. The man who pulled the trigger walked free, while the broader architecture that enabled the killing remained only partially exposed and only selectively judged.

Therefore, the case is widely regarded as unresolved.

Part of the problem lies in the way the trial unfolded. The Dink case is better read not as a failure of justice, but as an example of how the legal system processes and contains a political crime.1 The task was less to trace the full chain of responsibility than to bring the demand for accountability within procedural bounds.

In practice, political questions were steadily recast as technical ones. The role of state institutions became a matter of admissible evidence. Intelligence failures turned into questions of jurisdiction. Responsibility narrowed to what could be established within the file. Over time, it shifted, dispersed, and in some instances expired. The length of the proceedings did its own work, stretching the process across more than a decade, eroding momentum through delay, fragmentation, and statutes of limitation.

The demand for accountability did not disappear. It was translated. Each step in the legal process reduced it to something more manageable, more precise, and further removed from the original question.

At the same time, the degree of coordination across different arms of the state remains striking. Institutions and mechanisms were aligned at multiple stages: in the lead-up to the assassination, in its execution, in the handling and suppression of evidence afterwards, and in the drawing of the limits within which the judicial process would operate. This alignment points to more than a series of failures. It suggests the presence of a durable apparatus, and a way of thinking, that not only made the crime possible but also normalised its aftermath and secured impunity.

We are not dealing with an isolated network, but with a structure that cuts across different segments, widely connected, insulated from scrutiny, and difficult to hold to account. Dink’s lawyers have long resisted the idea that this can be explained simply by an illegal organisation that infiltrated the state. They have pointed instead to the state itself, to its core institutions, the National Security Council, the intelligence services, the military, and the broader system they form together.

The targeting of Hrant Dink, the legal processes that led to his conviction, his eventual killing, and the blockage that followed in the prosecution of that killing all point in the same direction. They reflect a political logic rather than a breakdown.

During the trial, this became visible in another way. A state that is formally bound to protect the lives of its citizens has, at different moments, defined sections of those citizens as internal enemies. Once that line is drawn, the rules shift. Actions that the law defines as crimes, including murder, can fall outside the reach of accountability. Perpetrators are not punished. Officials who step beyond the law are left untouched.

The category of the “internal enemy (iç düşman)” rests on an idea of a homogeneous society, one that treats difference as a threat. In the Dink case, actors who took part, whether through action or inaction, converged around that understanding.

This is why the case has not been resolved. And this is why the continued existence of Agos matters. It stands as a form of resistance.

A previous post on Hrant Dink and state brutality is available here.

To follow Agos in English, this is the link.

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Almost two decades ago, I was working for Turkey’s top mainstream newspaper, Hürriyet, as a reporter when the editor-in-chief of the paper, Ertuğrul Özkök, decided to send me to Malaysia for a story.

I was not the only reporter from Istanbul. The other major newspaper, Milliyet, had sent its top journalist, Ece Temelkuran, now a major author whose recently released book Nation of Strangers is shortlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize.

Ece and I each spent a week in Malaysia without encountering one another, trying to answer a question that had come to dominate public discussion at the time.

Will Turkey become like Malaysia?

The question did not emerge in a vacuum. By 2006 and 2007, Turkey was moving through a series of political confrontations that exposed a deeper struggle over who would contro…

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I don’t think it will end until he captures all of them. Each and every one.

He is Erdoğan. What is being captured, one by one, like a buffalo at the water’s edge, ambushed by an apex predator, are municipalities. Municipalities led by Turkey’s main opposition party, the CHP.

As of today, it is clear that the March 2024 local elections meant very little. One could call them Turkey’s first “performative” elections, staged so that the façade of a democratic contestation is maintained. Or, as we say in Turkish, dostlar alışverişte görsün seçimi.

Since then, the Erdoğan government’s use of the judiciary marks a new stage in its authoritarian trajectory. Consider the numbers.

The CHP won the March 2024 elections decisively. It secured 35 cities, including 14 metropolitan municipalities, and 337 districts. The AKP, by contrast, lost almost all of the major cities it had held, including Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir, and was left with 24 cities, 12 of them metropolitan, and 356 districts. Yet the s…

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In an old world, that would be very embarrassing for Trump. Not in this world. We know that Pakistan and Turkey are working hard on shuttle diplomacy between Iranian and American officials, but all sources agree that Iran is not and will not agree to the terms Trump put forth. Mostly because they do not trust him and think he is buying time to prepare for a harder strike, even a land operation to secure the enriched uranium.

I think at this time it would be a waste of time to make an educated guess regarding what Trump will do. Education is counterproductive to gauge anything about him or the people in his administration who apparently copy-pasted a list of justifications for attacking Iran, from a pro-Israeli think tank’s website and most proba…

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There once was the assassination of a Ferdinand, if you might remember. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand. We all know the spiralling conflicts and the great war that came after. The crises that ensued led to a war that reordered the balance across Europe and beyond. One act, and a sequence no one could fully contain. A historical juncture that changed the power configurations of the world.

Since then, there was, for a long time, a tacit understanding that assassinating another country’s leader was considered off limits, not out of restraint but …

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A few reasons for that.

First, Iran also wants to escalate it to a degree that each and every country in the Middle East feels battered enough that they would do everything in their power to impede another cycle in six months. There have already been two missiles directed at Turkey’s US and NATO bases, both of which were intercepted. What happens, mazallah, if there is a third?

Second, if the war continues at this speed or turns into a protracted conflict between Iran and Israel, there will be a wave of migration from Iran to Turkey, which would make Turkey surely a part of the war as the most stable neighbour.

And finally, and most importantly, Turkey is part of this war because Israel wants it, is intent on it. And in this environ…

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We go on asking why these two men, Trump and Netanyahu, waged a war against Iran. Surely we have moved beyond the claim that Iran posed an imminent threat (it did not), or that it was building a nuclear bomb with its “completely obliterated” nuclear facilities during the so called 12-day war (they were not). The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, recently stated that inspectors have found no evidence of a coordinated Iranian programme to build nuclear weapons.

So we are left with a narrower set of possibilities. Either regime change in Iran. Or outright chaos, sustained long enough for Israel to manipulate the balance of power, perhaps even to engage in territorial opportunism if circumstances permit. But how would that be achieved? There are numerous examples showing how difficult it is to produce …

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In politically charged communities, the interpretive charity, yani the willingness to read what someone actually wrote rather than to verify which side they are on, has largely collapsed. When people are sufficiently certain of who their enemies are, they no longer read. They search for confirmation if you are among them. It is as old as the polis. So we move on. With those who listen, and for them.

I spent a tiresome week battling the label 'jihadi-lover' (meaning, apparently, a sympathiser of Ahmad al-Sharaa or his HTS, I don’t know) after publishing my field observations from Damascus and appearing on a YouTube politics programme to discuss them. A group who claim to follow my work on the Kurdish issue were deeply disappointed. Apparently my reporting from Syria had made me look like one.

How so? I asked with a genuine, if fleeting, hope that perhaps I had said something intellectually interesting. But n…

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Don’t we all?!

When we look at the so-called international liberal order, with the US as its main anchor, what do we see? A crony, clientelist system revolving around the abuse of young girls and women. A system which, as Nancy Fraser argues in Cannibal Capitalism, in a way feeds on the flesh of women. Across social negotiations, cultures and nations, subtle or conspicuous, the patriarchal mindset continues to determine what women can do, cannot do, must do and must not do.

A panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council recently concluded that the crimes revealed in the Epstein files showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls,” they wrote, “that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.”

So yes, women in Syria need ‘saving’. So do women anywhere else. The problem lies …

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Not because the damage is invisible. It is not. The buildings are tired, the infrastructure worn down, the economy clearly strained after civil war, sanctions and foreign intervention. But the streets were alive in a way I had not expected.

Yani there was movement. Noise. Shops open late. Traffic impatient – horrible is another word- as ever. A kind of ordinary insistence on daily life. It did not erase what the Assad dynasty had done to this country. Nothing erases that. But it interrupted the narrative of paralysis that so often frames Syria from the outside.

I believe the resilience of Syrians is a lesson worth listening to.

From afar, the story is still written in extremes. A former jihadist now leads the transitional government. Depending on who is sp…

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We witness a murder carried out by a state official, and are told by senior ministers that it was an act of self-defence against a man - an emergency nurse- lying flat on the floor. We saw this in Minnesota.

This is a time lifted straight from the canon of political dystopias. A time of euphemisms pushed to the edge of absurdity, to the point where we seriously begin to question our own sanity. We have been seeing this in Gaza.

We are told there is a ceasefire, and yet we continue to hear otherwise.

For the past two and a half years we have been systematically gaslighted by Israeli officials and IDF spokespersons. We were instructed not to trust figures or narratives coming from Gazan authorities. We were to…

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The Balfour Declaration was drafted in the glow of wartime idealism and the shadow of imperial ambition. In 1917 Britain promised support for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, imagining it as both an act of justice and a stroke of strategy. Yet the lone Jewish member of the Cabinet, Edwin Samuel Montagu, opposed it with fierce clarity, warning that Zionism would endanger Jews rather than redeem them. His dissent, soon drowned out by triumphal politics, reveals how the language of sympathy can conceal hierarchy and how the moral debts of Europe, left unpaid, still shape the politics of the present. In a previous post, I had promised to return to the Balfour Declaration in greater depth, and I now turn to one of the most meticulous accounts of its making and aftermath, The Balfour Declaration by historian Jonathan Schneer.

In November 1917, as the First World War ground thr…

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The Syrian Kurds, their military wing the SDF/YPG and their political arm, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), have suffered a severe strategic breakdown over the past couple of weeks. A cascade of serious miscalculations, the fraying of key internal alliances, and a sharply transformed regional context combined to produce the swift loss of nearly 80 percent of their territory and the disintegration of their autonomy project.

As I have pointed out before, the main mistake was a misreading of the post-Assad moment. The Kurdish leadership underestimated al-Sharaa’s legitimacy bargain with the US and entered talks with the new Syrian government on rigid terms, while inflating the reliability of American backing and discounti…

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I had the privilege of watching writer and actor Khalid Abdalla’s autobiographical one-man play Nowhere at the Oxford Playhouse. Contrary to its name, the play, using unexpected but marvellous tools of modern theatre, took us everywhere that is politically relevant to our understanding of who we are.

We as friends. We as revolutionaries. We as failed political agents. We as political prisoners. We as immigrants. We as forced immigrants, our countries rendered unliveable under authoritarian regimes and neoliberal miasma. We as asylum seekers fleeing civil war and genocide. We as hopefuls and optimists. We as citizens of everywhere and therefore, as right-wing populists want us to believe, “nowhere.”

Abdalla, an Egyptian born and raised in Glasgow, showed us during the pl…

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A scenario long feared is now beginning to unfold.

Syrian government troops advances deeper into areas held by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria on Tuesday, pressing rapid gains against Kurdish fighters who vowed to defend their remaining enclaves.

A brief ceasefire has been declared, meant to allow the Kurds to hand control of Hasakah to government forces — or else.

How did we end up in this grim situation?

The Syrian Army, whatever it consists of, has moved to push Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates, forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurds, to relinquish control first over the Kurdish neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah in Aleppo and then over the Arab-majority cities of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. Before advancing militarily, the Syrian president made a ca…

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Iranians have been protesting since the last days of 2025, with demonstrations spreading to more than 70 locations. What began in places like the Grand Bazaar, initially sparked by everyday economic shocks, the sudden collapse of the currency, the price of basic goods such as eggs reportedly jumping by 300 percent in a single day, scale shifted, to borrow the language of contentious politics, into a nationwide revolt. It now involves all segments of society, though it is driven above all by the young, teenagers from 15 upwards, who have taken to the streets fully aware of the risks involved.

Iranian people, whom I believe to be among the bravest and most dignified, have taken to the streets again, know…

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