The Turkishness Contract

Baris Ünlü (Author)

9781439924730

Paperback / softback, published 10 October 2025

290 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.4 kg

“Barış Ünlü’s The Turkishness Contract changes our understanding of how, through everyday practices of thinking, feeling, and acting, Kurds and other minorities are by definition excluded from the Turkish social contract. The best books make the invisible visible through a seemingly simple yet deeply impactful and profound intervention that makes one wonder how she did not see it before. The Turkishness Contract is one such book, an almost artistic intervention in critical Turkish studies.”— Esra Özyürek, Sultan Qaboos Professor in Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values at the University of Cambridge

The Turkishness Contract places Critical Race Theory in conversation with literature on Turkey and nation-state making via a historical study enriched by in-depth interviews. In this new English-language edition, Barış Ünlü makes a number of comprehensive changes to his widely read and much discussed 2018 Turkish book, including a new preface and a new sweeping and theoretical introduction.

Ünlü uses Critical Race Theory to present a historical–sociological model to examine not only the historical constitution and contemporary functioning of the Turkish nation-state, but also the affective and bodily modalities of being Turkish. He also develops a framework for rethinking the complex relations between the socio-genesis of the Turkish nation and state and the psycho-genesis of the Turkish people, their cognitive habits and emotional orientations, and the structural privileges and unconsciousness strategies of Turkishness.

The Turkishness Contract addresses broader theoretical concerns including histories of colonialism, ethnic/racial social contracts, privilege, Armenian Genocide and the Kurdish question, as well as the unraveling of Turkey’s social contract at a moment of contemporary right-wing authoritarianism.

In the series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality