Scholars credit the European Renaissance and Enlightenment to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Greek scholars in particular were driven from the Byzantine capital, taking with them everything they had learned about their own Greek intellectual heritage and classical philosophical tradition, thanks, in part, to the scholarly enterprise of Islamic scholasticism and a spirit of intellectual cooperation that had existed until that time. The “expulsion of excellence” that followed closely on the heels of Mehmed II’s military victory in 1453 proved problematic for an emergent, modern-Muslim, imperial power, which his capture of the Byzantine capital instigated, although it was a boon to European intellectual life. Five and a half centuries later, on the night of 15 July 2016, a failed coup attempt that took place in the twin Turkish capital cities of Istanbul and Ankara paved the way for another expulsion of excellence, this time the handiwork of the ruling AK Party and its strongman-cum-dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This volume tells the story of an American academic, Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., living and working in the AKP heartland of Turkey. A distinguished Professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Karabük University at the time, having relocated his entire family to Turkey two years prior, his children becoming fluent in Turkish by this time, and his wife, a native of Kyrgyzstan, slated to enter medical school in just a month’s time, the Forsbergs were forced to flee the country after he was detained by the police and tried for “aiding and abetting a terrorist organization.” Subsequently found innocent of all charges, Forsberg was nonetheless sacked, forced to clear out his office as University cameras rolled, adding insult to injury. Local online newspapers followed suit, publishing false and misleading stories about his arrest, targeting him and thus putting him and his entire family in danger. Other foreign faculty at Karabük University were likewise falsely charged, imprisoned, and, despite being found innocent of all charges, dismissed and forced to leave the country. A professional historian, American Studies scholar, and Open Society Institute alumnus, Forsberg recounts the events leading up to and following his arrest, employing a media studies approach, which asks hard questions of the role of social media in the preservation of democratic freedoms, which, in the wrong hands, became a very effective tool of the Turkish State and its suppression of democratic freedoms. In Forsberg’s case, his imprisonment and subsequent suspension were for the “crime” of posting a poem online that was critical of Karabük University and the country’s ruling AK Party’s so-called “purge” of foreign faculty.

This book investigates how monuments have been used in Africa as tools of oppression and dominance, from the colonial period up to the present day. The book asks what the decolonisation of historical monuments and geographies might entail and how this could contribute to the creation of a post-imperial world. In recent times, African movements to overthrow the symbols and monuments of the colonial era have gathered pace as a means of renaming, reclassifying, and reimagining colonial identities and spaces. Movements such as #RhodesMustFall in South Africa have sprung up around the world, connected by a history of Black life struggles, erasures, oppression, suppression, and the depression of Black biopolitics. This book provides an important multidisciplinary intervention in the discourse on monuments and memories, asking what they are, what they have been used to represent, and ultimately what they can reveal about past and present forms of pain and oppression. Drawing on insights from philosophy, historical sociology, politics, museum, and literary studies, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars with an interest in the decolonisation of global African history.

A transdisciplinary Mormon history, this book is a work of American religious history, theology, science history, and cultural and historical geography. It deconstructs the “race” creationism, White supremacy, and Christian imperialism of leading interwar Mormon theologian B.H. Roberts. Roberts hoped to introduce the front-rank post-Darwinian, scientific, and philosophical postulates of his time—polygeny, preadamitism, electromagnetism, idealism, the multiverse, infinity, and interstellar travel—to an increasingly fundamentalist Mormon establishment. Church authorities, however, including eventual “prophet” Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., proscribed and rejected Roberts’ modernist manuscript, The Truth, The, Way, The Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, circa 1930. Paradoxically, however, Roberts’ thinking appeared uncited in Smith’s 1954 theology, Man, His Origin and Destiny. Here, Smith accelerated Roberts’ racism toward African Americans, while reviling science, philosophy, and free thought. This book contextualizes all such fundamentalist Mormon thinking within today’s struggle for social and environmental justice, and especially the Black Lives Matter movement.

This anthology of selected, thematic articles is a unique approach to Holocaust Studies because it focuses on the responses to and consequences of Holocaust persecution rather than on the fact of it. After a brief overview of the Holocaust itself, the book is divided into two sections, “Responses to Holocaust Persecution” and “Consequences of Holocaust Persecution.” Each section of the book begins with a scholarly essay by an internationally recognized scholar. Robert Satloff, Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories of the Holocaust’s Long Reach Into Arab Lands, contributes a scholarly essay to the Responses section of this volume called “Countering Holocaust Denial in the Middle East: A New Approach.” Satloff maintains that Holocaust denial in Arab regions may be more effectively countered if recognition is given to Arabs who helped Jews during the Holocaust and if the fate of Jews in Arab lands, particularly during World War II, is given a more thorough consideration. Two additional essays in this segment of the book focus on Arab or Muslim reactions to the Holocaust. In addition, the Responses section includes articles concerning both collaboration with the German occupiers and Jewish rescue of Jewish victims, as well as essays that discuss political and personal responses to Nazi persecution. Gerhard L. Weinberg, author of the magnum opus A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, is generally considered to be the world’s most important authority on the Second World War. He contributes the primary article in the Consequences section of this volume, “The Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials.” His essay argues that the evidence presented at the Nuremberg tribunal as well as the legal principles established at Nuremberg, have set important precedents in international law that also influence the course of contemporary politics as well as both Holocaust and genocide studies. Subsequent articles in this section of the book discuss the legal, personal, moral and political consequences of the Holocaust.

Despite being democratically elected, Turkey's ruling AKP party moved towards increasingly authoritarian measures in the years that followed. After the coup attempt in July 2016, the AKP government declared a state of emergency which President Erdo?an saw as an opportunity to purge the public sector of pro-Gülenist individuals and criminalise opposition groups including Kurdish separatists, Alevites, leftists and liberals. The country experienced political turmoil and rapid transformation, and debates around constitutional amendments began that would change the regime to a “Turkish style” presidential system. This book identifies the process of democratic reversal in Turkey. In particular, contributors explore the various ways that a democratically elected political party used elections to implement authoritarian measures. They scrutinise the very concepts of democracy, elections and autocracy to expose their flaws which can be manipulated to advantage. The book includes chapters discussing the roots of authoritarianism in Turkey; the political economy of elections; the relationship between the political Islamic groups and the government; Turkish foreign policy; non-Muslim communities' attitudes towards the AKP; and Kurdish citizens' voting patterns. As well as following Turkey's political trajectory, this book contextualises Turkey in the wider literature on electoral and competitive authoritarianisms and explores the country's future options.

A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

Demonstrating how Turkey’s politics have developed, this book focuses on the causes and consequences of the failed coup d'état of 15 July 2016. The momentous event and its aftermath challenges us to ask if the coup was the cause of Turkey’s present crisis, or simply an accelerant of trends already in motion, and thus a catalyst for the realization of Erdoğan’s latent authoritarian impulses. Bringing together approaches from politics, sociology, history and anthropology, the chapters shed much-needed light on these crucial questions. They offer scholars and nonspecialists alike a comprehensive overview of the implications of the coup attempt and its aftermath on the issues of religion, democracy, the Kurds, the state, resistance and more besides. Its effects have been felt in almost every aspect of Turkish society from religion to politics, yet it came at a time when Turkey was already experiencing significant social and political turmoil under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Readers interested in contemporary politics, Turkish and Middle Eastern studies will find the volume useful, as they ponder other cases in this era of democratic retrenchment and global turmoil.