Turkey Archive

As president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan could be the wedge that destroys Turkey’s relationships with the U.S. and Europe. Find out more with your subscription to World Politics Review (WPR). A new mosque in the traditional Ottoman style is currently being built in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square. Due to be completed later this year, it is just one of thousands of new mosques going up across Turkey. But the construction in Taksim is particularly symbolic—an apparent sign of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conquest of the political landscape and ability to reshape the Turkish nation in line with his wishes. […]

For 45 years, the island of Cyprus has been divided, politically and physically, between the Turkish-Cypriot north and Greek-Cypriot south. Despite many efforts over the years to resolve it, including some near misses, the conflict has proved intractable. Security guarantees, though perceived differently for both sides, have been among the major sticking points to reuniting the island. But so, too, has restitution of property abandoned by Cypriots who were displaced from both sides of the island during the Turkish invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus in 1974. That sense of loss has long featured prominently in Cypriots’ experience of the […]

The recent opening of new checkpoints between northern and southern Cyprus represented a rare piece of good news in the long, frustrating push for Cyprus reunification. Yet while the status quo can sometimes seem immutable, the incentives to keep trying for a resolution are only growing more powerful. FAMAGUSTA, Cyprus—On a Monday morning last November, cars began queuing at checkpoints marking the buffer zone between the north and south of this long-divided island. For the first time in eight years, the authorities had agreed to create two new crossings—at the village of Dherynia, in the east, and in Lefke, a […]