This book has tried to provide a multifaceted look toward the role political narratives play in politics. In Chapter 1, I provided the theoretical and methodological framework of the book and introduced the main topics. In Chapter 2, I focused on how the competing visions of nationhood of Kemalists and Islamists are played out in the Ulus District of Ankara by providing alternative historical narratives of the nation. In Chapter 3, I discussed how economic development narratives are deployed by the AKP to suppress main elements of liberal democracy such as pluralism, and checks and balances. Chapter 4 adopted a comparative perspective and traced the place of narratives of economic development, patriarchy and history in the toolkit of populist leaders, illustrated through the cases of Austria, Hungary and Turkey. Chapter 5 focused on counter-narratives. Through the Gezi case, it analysed how counter-narratives are used to subvert the core patriarchal narratives of authoritarian governments in order to expose and challenge the core assumptions of hierarchical and arbitrary rule. Chapter 6 turned its attention to global discussions and focused on the implications of political narratives for policies and political actions. It first discussed how conspiracy theories, particularly the Replacement Theory (which is in fact a narrative), function in the political realm by ways such as bringing far-right ideas into the mainstream, encouraging bottom-up participation in exclusionary visions of nationhood, and by creating unified camps of ‘us’ and ‘them’. After showing the prevalence of and the deployment of the Replacement narrative by right-wing populists, I turned to the discussion of the potential for countering right-wing populists and their exclusionary, authoritarian and monist stories with inclusive, democratic and pluralist ones.

The different topics covered in the chapters of this book gave me the opportunity to provide a lively and panoramic picture of the political landscape of Turkey. They also enabled me to delve deeply into the functions that political narratives serve in politics and society. As I tried to show, narratives provide us a dynamic lens in situating and analysing political events and phenomena. Narratives play both individual and collective roles due to their essential role in co-constituting personal and communal (mostly national) identity.