Peace at home, peace in the world.’ The republican peace as communicated in this policy motto introduced by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, meant in effect little more than a mere suppression of issues at home, dragooning ‘peace’ into society in the form of a limited concept of order and calm through the muffling of dissent and division at any cost. Yet it was highly dubious that peace even in this restricted, minimal sense ever became pervasive. Burying sight and perception in the sand, as with the proverbial ostrich, hardly made a host of burning questions disappear, no matter how dogged the administration was, especially in the early period in the 1930s, in its apparent policy of a clean slate that sought to initiate a ‘new’ nation distanced from its variegated past.

A competitive multi- party political system launched in the second half of the 1940s, as the country prepared to anchor in Europe towards both political integration (the Council of Europe) and collective defence (NATO) following World War II, would serve to counteract the republican policy of strictly inhibiting religious fervour in politics. Some of the pious and practising Muslims, ignored and subdued for decades yet eager to use likely outlets to survive and surface, would present a unified front in domestic politics from the late 1960s– as Islamo- nationalism (Millî Görüş). The movement would be increasingly instructed in the following period by the anti- colonial Islamist ideologies of Asia and the Middle East. Making significant inroads first in local administrations in the 1990s, the Islamo- nationalist politics would dominate the political scene from 2002 by skilfully using the blunders of mainstream political agents in the management of wealth, coupled, no less significantly, with an apparent drive at the grassroots level towards reconciliation within the nation and with the wider world through a promise of improved democracy for all, understood as key to peace and prosperity. The secular urbanites, long the clients of the republican bureaucracy in urging a fettered democracy that ignored the pious Muslims, would find themselves suddenly alienated from the patronage of the state, feeling politically destitute and threatened in the wake of the old regime from 2011.