Russia in Global Affairs

The fragmentation of civil society and the lack of mutual trust among its organizations standing on different political platforms make it extremely difficult for civil society to consolidate its potential and generate sociopolitical development from below. The same factors do not allow external forces to achieve the desired result from their tangible and intangible investments in the development of civil society, and lead to soft-power fiascoes.

The situation with religious minorities in many respects reflects the logic of the political process of recent decades in Turkey. The social base and the core constituency of the ruling AKP are people of conservative views or even supporters of religious nationalism. For this part of society, nationalism and Islamic identity are interrelated and complementary notions.

Abstract The paper studies the “Turkish model” in a comparative historical perspective from three angles: as an example of mobilization modernization; as a combination of…