Twenty years ago, the firebrand mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led his party to a landslide victory in a parliamentary election that would transform Turkish politics. What followed were two decades of uninterrupted control of the government by the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which set out to prove that an Islamist party was not a threat, but could in fact move the country forward. Soon after winning in 2002, the government launched one of its most intriguing plans: a new policy branded “zero problems with neighbors,” introduced by Ahmet Davutoglu, an obscure academic then serving as the government’s […]