This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

Drawing on probate inventories and other archives, agronomic reports and publications, Brazilian census data, and ethnography, this chapter analyzes the long march of modernization in Bahia’s dendê economy. It begins by detailing the remarkable preindustrial development achieved by rural agrarian communities with virtually no support or recognition from elite planters or public officials. It then demonstrates how government agronomists, unable to recognize the ancestral wisdom and resilience embedded in Bahia’s dendê economy, began working to impose “order and progress” on the Dendê Coast. Yet despite the drastic power imbalances and capitalized markets working in its favor, Brazil’s top-down campaign of palm oil modernization produced unexpected and mixed results. Rather than simplified, modern monocultures and hierarchical economies of scale, Bahia’s dendê landscapes, cultures, and economies (re)emerged as complex, contested, and fluid socioecological assemblages.