FROM LIFE ITSELF

Authoritarianism’s street-level impact.

This is sturdy narrative journalism about life under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “gradualist authoritarian regime.” Fascinating on its own merits, it’s also an urgent cautionary tale for American readers. Hansen, the author of Notes on a Foreign Country (2017), lived in Turkey for a decade-plus. Her focus here is Istanbul’s working-class Karagümrük neighborhood, where she spent years getting to know people and their concerns. Her expansive conversations with shopkeepers, tradespeople, and local officials reveal a city on edge about immigration, corruption, and other familiar issues. Some Istanbullus complain that refugees from war-torn Syria don’t assimilate, resentment that fuels violence. Others express dismay that polarization emanating from Ankara, the capital, now sullies traditionally nonpartisan community leadership jobs. Diehard Erdoğan backers boast about their big families, evidence that they’ve heeded his call for “all Turkish women” to have five children. Hansen methodically chronicles the president’s consolidation of power, the effect of which is chillingly apparent after massive 2023 earthquakes. Paralyzed by an Erdoğan-instituted chain-of-command that slowed the military’s rescue response, countless lay dying under substandard buildings, the construction of which was fast tracked by defanged regulators. As citizens came to realize that the president “had engaged in unfathomable corruption, oppressed a large proportion of the citizenry, and squandered the people’s money,” voters showed signs of turning against him. But by then, Erdoğan had arrested or otherwise marginalized thousands of political opponents, reporters, and academics. A “canny, cruel autocratic leader” had prevailed by “manufacturing parallel realities.” Hansen’s deep-rooted reporting has undeniable gravitas. Turkey’s trajectory should be “very interesting” to Americans, a political scientist tells her. “We had a state. It wasn’t perfect, but we had something, and now it’s gone.”

Long-term reporting informs a rich portrait of a community—and a country—in the shadow of an increasingly powerful president.