Ten Years On, Turkey's Failed 2016 Coup Still Shapes the Country

Article excerpt

On the night of July 15, 2016, factions within the Turkish military rolled tanks onto bridges in Istanbul and sent jets screaming over Ankara in an attempt to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They failed, and what followed reshaped Turkey as profoundly as the attempt itself. In the decade since, Erdogan's government moved aggressively to expand civilian control over the armed forces, purging tens of thousands of military personnel, judges, academics, and civil servants in a wave of dismissals and arrests that dwarfed anything the plotters had set in motion. Analysts who study civil-military relations say the structural effect is real: the Turkish military, once the self-appointed guardian of the secular republic, has been brought more firmly under executive control than at any point in the country's modern history. That cuts two ways. The probability of another coup has dropped considerably, experts argue, because the institutional autonomy that made such attempts possible has been dismantled. But the same crackdown that reduced the military's independence also thinned the ranks of experienced officers, reshaped the judiciary, and concentrated power in ways critics say have weakened democratic checks. Ten years on, the failed coup is less a historical episode than a living architecture, present in Turkish law, politics, and public life every day.