Kerem Öktem - Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989

Many friends and colleagues have supported me in the rather daunting effort to make sense of Turkeys contemporary history. Aye Kadolu (Istanbul) and Dimitar Bechev (Sofia) have been intellectual soulmates and meticulous readers of the final draft. Harun Ylmaz (Oxford), Ipek Yosmaolu (Chicago), Nora Fisher Onar, Deniz Yazgan and Sevin Turan (all Istanbul) have commented on various drafts of the book. May Dabbagh (Dubai), Rahul Rao (London), Gustaf Arrhenius (Stockholm) and Leila Vignal (Rennes), were all in Oxford at various stages of writing the book, and their input and criticism were crucial in every sense. Ceren Zeynep Ak, Karabekir Akkoyunlu (London) and Adam Becker (New York) have helped me greatly with the final touches.

Ece Temelkuran (Istanbul) was a true inspiration for courageous investigative journalism, (Ankara) an indispensable intellectual companion, especially in the critical discussion of Turkeys judiciary, and Abdullah Demirba, district mayor in Diyarbakr, an impressive role model for KurdishTurkish friendship in times of war and peace. To Thierry Fabre (Marseille) I owe a couple of last-minute but crucial suggestions on the issues of fear, anger and rage. The Maison Franaise in Oxford, and its former director Alexis Tadi, provided me with an intellectually challenging environment. My housemates Deniz Bostanc and Dimitris Antoniou gave me much-needed friendship and respite from writing, Justin Smith was an indispensable anchor, while my sister Aye ktem and my aunt Fatma Sayman supported me in exploring the intersections between our family history and the history of contemporary Turkey.

Many colleagues and friends at the University of Oxford helped me to develop the argument for this book. I am particularly grateful to Kalypso of the Oriental Institute introduced me to different aspects of Turkeys engagement with modernity, while Reem Abou-el Fadl reminded me of the importance of comparative analysis and alerted me to the evils of an isolated study of Turkeys politics. The administrators of SEESOX and the European Studies Centre (ESC), Julie Adams and Anne-Laure Guillermain, were always ready to help when time and temper were running short. Thanks to my mentor Timothy Garton Ash of the ESC, I already had a sense of what a history of contemporary Turkey could look like, when Nicholas Guyatt and Ken Barlow of Zed Books first approached me. They proved to be wonderful editors indeed, and they continued to bear with me through the often erratic process of writing a history of the present, as this very history stubbornly kept unfolding, defying any end point.

Yet more friends and colleagues helped me during my research in Turkey and its many diasporas. Gkhan Ycel opened many doors for me in the long corridors of Ankaras state bureaucracy. Susan Pattie and Levon Chilingirian (London) generously helped me pass through numerous boundaries separating Armenians and Turks, both politically and emotionally. My Cypriot friends Olga Demetriou, Murat Erdal and Sossie Kasbarian ensured that the forgotten revolution of the Turkish Cypriots in 2003 did not go unnoticed, at least not in this book, and Filiz elik (Swansea) introduced me to the mountains of Dersim, their mournful past and their remarkable residents. Baskn and Feyhan Oran (Ankara and Bodrum) were loving and critical, encouraging and forceful, and their friendship helped me to go beyond the fears and restrictions that have shaped so much of the scholarship within Turkish studies.

And finally, I would like to thank the men and women, Turks, Kurds and Armenians, Alevis and Sunnis, Muslims and Christians, Islamists, social democrats and socialists, scholars, politicians, activists and writers, who gave me generous insights into their political and private lives and shared with me their intimate knowledge of what the film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan called my beautiful and lonely country, which I love passionately. It is their unadulterated frankness and determination to make their country a better and less lonely place which have made this book possible. The responsibility for all omissions, ambiguities and mistakes rests, of course, solely with the author.