A Comparative Analysis of Radicalization in Turkish and Syrian Armed Forces

A paper workshop with CCAS visiting scholar, Dr. Nuri Salik, on his research comparing Syria and Turkey in the 1960s.

About the paper: This research project focuses on the political radicalization in the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the 1960s in a comparative perspective. In this period, there was a growing influence of radical leftist juntas in collaboration with intellectuals both in the TAF and the SAA, which led to several coups and failed coups both in Ankara and Damascus. The study seeks to shed light on the similarities and differences between the Turkish and Syrian juntas as well as intellectuals who ideologically influenced them. In this regard, this study analyzes the ideological similarity between the Baath Party and Yön-Devrim (Direction-Revolution) movement which gave motivation to the radical juntas in the TAF and the SAA in the 1960s. In this context, it will discuss to what extent socio-political imagination of Talat Aydemir and Cemal Madanoğlu juntas, which aimed to carry out a leftist coup in Turkey in collaboration with Yön-Devrim movement, was affected by Baathism. Academic literature on civil-military relations in Turkey and Syria tends to analyze coups and coup attempts of the 1960s through domestic factors. This study adopts the "intermestic approach" to explain domestic and international factors that caused the radicalization of army officers in Turkey and Syria. Besides, it aims to understand to what extent the typology of the coup plotters, who operated in different countries in the Middle East in the 1960s, was similar.

Dr. Nuri Salık is Assistant Professor of History at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Turkey. He received his B.A. in History with a minor in International Relations from Middle East Technical University (METU) with high honors in 2009. He earned his M.S. degree from the Department of International Relations at METU in 2012. Dr. Salık completed his Ph.D. at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University in 2018. He was a visiting doctoral researcher at King’s College London’s Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in 2017. Currently, Dr. Salık is interested in the radicalization of army officers in Turkish and Syrian armed forces during the 1960s. He is a visiting research scholar at CCAS for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Papers will be sent upon RSVPing for the workshop. Please send any questions or requests for accommodation to mcf77@georgetown.edu.