Turkism, also known as pan-Turkism, is an ideology that aims to unite all Turkic regions into a single political entity. It emerged in the second half of the 19th century among Turkic-speaking minorities in the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. The influence of Budapest University on this ideology is unmistakable; it was there that philologist Armin Vambery helped develop Turanian theory, which holds that Turkic peoples have ancestral links with other peoples, such as the Hungarians, Finns, Basques, Mongols, and Japanese. Turanism is an expanded version of Turkism, which turns nomadic pastoral peoples into a linguistic and subsequently “racial” entity, like Indo-Europeans and Semites.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Turkey, for the first time in 70 years, were able to renew contact with people from other Turkic-speaking states like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. In the words of former Turkish President Süleyman Demirel, the “Turkic world” stretched “from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China.” The Turkist idea, which had regressed during the Soviet years, was again in vogue, and states and organizations began working for greater integration across the Turkic world.
As part of my doctoral research, which culminated in the publication of a book entitled Turquie-Azerbaïdjan: la danse des loups gris (Turkey-Azerbaijan: The dance of the gray wolves), I conducted an ethnographic analysis of the discourse of Turkist activists in Turkey and Azerbaijan using interviews and participant observations, a quantitative analysis of survey data from these activists, and social media network monitoring. I also studied the evolution of Turkism’s concrete projects to assess the practical development of this ideology between the end of the 1980s and 2023. What follows is an analysis of Turkism and its evolution throughout history, as well as its connections with illiberalism, both in terms of its ideology and political manifestation.
Building Turkism through Activism
The associative organizational model has been one of the preferred forms of organization for Turkist militants since the end of the 19th century. In the 2000s, the emergence of the Internet helped modify its scope through social media, allowing younger activists to emancipate themselves from the control of their elders. As a result, the number of youth associations multiplied. I met with around ten of them. Their distinctive feature is that they do not collaborate with each other. They compete, with each claiming to be descended from the legacy of Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, a Turkist ideologue of the 1930s-1970s, known as much for his desire to unite Turkic peoples as for his racist theories excluding ethnolinguistic minorities such as Kurds, Armenians, and Arabs from the Turkish national identity. Turkist youth associations were organized in a hierarchical and militaristic structure, with an emphasis placed on discipline and leaders seeing themselves as military chiefs. Their Social Darwinist-inspired worldview sees civilizations as competitors, meaning the use of force is necessary for the survival of the Turkic “race.” However, their economic capital is still not yet large enough for them to organize as armed militias; political conferences held in rented premises thus remain the heart of their activities.
Whereas in the early 1990s, Turkist activists played an advisory role to politicians in the process of initiating relations between Turkey and the ex-Soviet Turkic-speaking states, the ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party’s takeover of the Turkic question forced some of the older generation to retreat to the university. The same happened to Azerbaijani Turkists, who played a leading political role when Ebulfez Elçibey was in power. With the return to power of Heydar Aliyev and then his son Ilham Aliyev, relations with other Turkic republics were taken over by the state, and the Turkic activists of the 1990s were partly sidelined. In both countries, Turkist activists generally have no desire to found their own political party, preferring instead to use existing political parties to spread their vision.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Turkey, for the first time in 70 years, were able to renew contact with people from other Turkic-speaking states like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Despite a positive image of the Turkic woman as a steppe rider equal to man—as opposed to the black-veiled Arab woman—there is little female presence in Turkist circles; according to my questionnaire survey and participant observations, women make up less than 10% of activist groups. This can be explained by the fact that the woman is generally a product but not a producer of Turkist discourse and her behavior is still widely regarded as tainting the honor (namuz) of the men in her community.
Finally, an interesting aspect of this movement is the relationship that its ideologues and activists have with religion. Some of them, as was the case with Atsız, have a rather distant relationship with Islam, which they consider to be the religion of the Arab world. For them, recourse to the pre-Islamic religion of the Turkic peoples, Tengrism, is preferable. But this vision remains theoretical since neo-pagan religions are rarely the subject of ceremonies and rituals in Turkey, unlike in Hungary, where far-right groups often participate in shamanic ceremonies. Some Turkist militants claim that the Turkic peoples were predestined to adopt Sunni Islam (the Turkish-Islamic synthesis), while others have a more open vision of Islam in which Shi’ism, the majority religion in Azerbaijan, has a full place.
States and the Creation of a Common Identity
In the early 1990s, Turkey created platforms for cooperation with the five newly independent Turkic states. The first, founded in 1992, was the Summit of Heads of State of Turkic-Speaking Countries, which brought together the heads of state of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. A second organization, founded in 1993, was TÜRKSOY (International Organization of Turkic Culture) which functions as a cultural platform linked to the ministries of culture and still exists today. Turkey also founded the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA), an organization in charge of funding infrastructure in Turkic states. In 2002, with the AKP coming to power, TİKA opened its horizons beyond the Turkic world, becoming one of the most effective instruments of Turkey’s cultural diplomacy. Today, it is present in 150 countries around the world and has beenheavily infiltrated by Turkish intelligence services (MİT). Hakan Fidan, director of MİT between 2010 and 2023, served as the director of TİKA from 2003 to 2007.
In 2002, with the AKP coming to power, TİKA opened its horizons beyond the Turkic world, becoming one of the most effective instruments of Turkey’s cultural diplomacy. Today, it is present in 150 countries around the world and has beenheavily infiltrated by Turkish intelligence services (MİT).
The Friendship, Brotherhood and Cooperation Congress of Turkic States and Communities conference series (TÜDEV) deserves deeper analysis, both because it has hardly ever been studied, and because of its original structure, which made it a kind of laboratory for ideas and projects aimed at unifying the Turkic world. Linked to the leader of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), Alparslan Türkeş, TÜDEV organized major annual congresses which invited not only politicians, but also academics, artists, and other members of civil society from the various Turkic states and regions. This was financed by the Turkish state to the tune of half a million to a million dollars per congress. In parallel, various commissions worked on economic, financial, educational, cultural, historiographic, linguistic, and media projects designed to create links between Turkic peoples.
When Türkeş died in 1997, rivalries emerged for succession within the MHP, which had repercussions for the TÜDEV congresses. Between 2001 and 2006, no congress was held. However, internal rivalry was not the only reason for TÜDEV’s fall. Meetings between the heads of state of the Turkic world were also suspended, as new governments in Turkey and Azerbaijan pursued different cultural diplomacy policy: the AKP won the 2002 parliamentary elections in Turkey and brought with it a new political force, while in Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev replaced his father as head of state after the latter’s death in 2003.
The Nagorno-Karabakh War of October 2020, in which Turkey provided logistical assistance to Azerbaijan, confirmed a new site of relations between Turkic Council members: the military.
Then, in 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agreed to finance the TÜDEV congress with state funds. The following year, the congress was organized for the first time outside of Turkey, in Azerbaijan, on the joint initiative of Erdoğan and Aliyev. The two leaders then founded the Turkic Council in 2009 to replace the Summit of Heads of State and TÜDEV. The Turkic Council, which sees itself as an international organization despite not enjoying full recognition by the United Nations, has developed a network of satellite organizations, like the Turkic Academy in Astana, Kazakhstan. This demonstrates a motivation for the Council to play an active part in multilateral relations between Turkic-speaking states, at least in the cultural and educational spheres.
The Nagorno-Karabakh War of October 2020, in which Turkey provided logistical assistance to Azerbaijan, confirmed a new site of relations between Turkic Council members: the military. Symbolically, in November 2021, a year after Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia, the Turkic Council changed its name to become the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) and declared that it wanted to play a greater role on the international stage. In September 2023, Azerbaijani forces launched a rapid operation in Nagorno-Karabakh, leading to the capitulation of local authorities and the flight of most of the Armenian population. While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan publicly congratulated his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, the Organization of Turkic States remained silent. During the conflict, Hulusi Akar, then Turkish Minister of Defense, visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to sign military cooperation agreements. At the 12th OTS summit in 2025, member states expressed support for an infrastructure project to connect Azerbaijan to the exclave through Armenian territory, signaling a clear endorsement of Azerbaijan’s victory. This corridor could also facilitate the transit of goods from Central Asia to Europe and the Mediterranean, reducing both distances and costs for exports to the West, and thus representing a strategic victory for the members of the Organization of Turkic States.
Another turning point occurred in 2022, when Kazakhstan faced social protests over rising fuel prices. The OTS declared its readiness to support the government against popular unrest. Although this declaration had no practical effect, as it was not requested by the Kazakh authorities, it nevertheless marked a new stage for the OTS, signaling the potential for involvement in the internal affairs of its member states.
In sum, an analysis of relations between the Turkic states from the 1990s to the 2020s shows, contrary to what some researchers had predicted in the early 2000s, increased cooperation in various fields. Turkism, as an ideology aimed at greater inclusion of the Turkic world, is therefore not dead after the turn of the second millennium. It gained new momentum, driven by new players.
Beyond State Borders: Transnational Practices of Turkism
Between the early 1990s and the 2020s, several state-led cultural projects aimed at promoting a common identity for the Turkic peoples emerged, supported by institutions such as universities and civil society organizations. I examined three specific projects: the co-creation of a common identity through education, the foundation of a common Turkic literary language to enable all speakers of Turkic languages to communicate without having to use Russian or English, and finally, the use of television as a vector of Turkey’s cultural diplomacy.
Student exchanges were one of the first projects launched by Turkey and the former Soviet republics in the early 1990s. In addition to a system of scholarships enabling students from the Turkic republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia to study in Turkey, two binational universities were set up. These are the Ahmet Yesevi University (Turkish-Kazakh), founded in the Kazakh city of Türkestan in 1991, and the Manas University (Turkish-Kyrgyz), opened in 1997 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Turkey also set up a network of schools in Azerbaijan and Central Asia through the Fethullah Gülen brotherhood, but between 2014 and 2016, the conflict between Erdoğan and the Gülen led to their closure, notably in Azerbaijan.
Between the early 1990s and the 2020s, several state-led cultural projects aimed at promoting a common identity for the Turkic peoples emerged, supported by institutions such as universities and civil society organizations.
Historiography is a privileged area of cooperation within the Turkic world, since it is vital for producing common identities. It is not just contemporary history, but also ancient and medieval history that is the subject of a new historiographical narrative seeking to demonstrate that all Turkic peoples have a common origin. Epics are an important but sometimes contentious source of this history. While the epic Dede Korkut is perceived as a common heritage of both Turkey and Azerbaijan, the Turkish epic of Sayyid Battal portrays the character of Babek the Hurrami as someone who sold his soul to the devil, whereas he is considered a national hero in Azerbaijan. Similarly, Shah Ismail 1, who represents 16th-century Shiite Turkishness, is an important historical figure in Azerbaijan, while Sultan Yavuz Selim, his Sunni Ottoman opponent, is part of the Turkish historiographical pantheon. Writing a common history is therefore no easy task. When the Turkic Academy, commissioned by the Turkic Council, set about writing a common textbook of Turkic history, it took eight years to complete and did not cover history after the 15th century.
The endeavor to create a common Turkic literary language is one of many such projects that never came to fruition. Although several philologists examined the question in the 1990s, as part of a group orchestrated by Marmara University in Turkey, no practical model was created. This common language project faces a paradox: how can states teach and use an artificial language spoken in no country? The ex-Soviet republics were already in a situation of diglossia, meaning they had to strive to give their national Turkic language the status of a scientific and media language after the long years of Soviet rule, when Russian dominated over local languages. Including a new language, and an artificially created one at that, could not be a priority. Faced with this, the Turkish state decided that Turkish could serve as the common language to be spread through education and media.
In 1992, Turkey founded the TRT Avaz television channel aimed at the Turkic world and broadcast via Türksat satellite to Azerbaijan and Central Asia. My analysis of the channel’s content, coupled with an opinion survey of 269 Azerbaijani citizens, revealed that TRT Avaz is in fact relatively unwatched. Turkish series seem to have higher ratings. However, this reveals another paradox. In 2008, Aliyev decided to ban these popular programs from Azerbaijani national channels over fears that they could lead Azerbaijani Turkish to lose its specific characteristics. The proximity between these two Turkic languages allows for the mutual diffusion of terms and expressions which is often the subject of complaints from certain Azerbaijani intellectuals.
Turkism [often] promotes a dominant ethnocultural and linguistic identity to the detriment of other affiliations particularly when the Turkic identity is in the demographic majority of the state concerned. [However], when Turkist activists find themselves in a minority, Turkism takes on an essentially affirmative function: it is not a form of cultural illiberalism, but rather a strategy of identity recognition and preservation.
Finally, Turkish media production toward the Turkic world also focuses on music. From 2013 to 2015, three editions of Türkvizyon, a Eurovision-style music competition, have been organized. All contestants came from Turkic countries, regions, or communities. After 2016, the competition was put on hold due to a legal controversy, and only one edition has been organized since: an online competition in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of that same year, following Azerbaijan’s military victory in Nagorno-Karabakh, it was announced on TMB TV that a new edition of Türkvizyon would be held within the year, in the city of Shushi, recently taken by Azerbaijan, though it ultimately was never organized.
(Pan-)Turkism and illiberalism
Illiberalism is an admittedly heterogeneous school of thought whose strands are linked by an opposition to the foundations of liberal democracy. It takes several forms. Politically, it defends a majoritarian vision of power, calling into question the separation of powers and the role of institutional checks and balances. Economically, it criticizes the logic of neoliberalism and promotes a return to protectionism, often in the name of national sovereignty. Culturally, illiberalism rejects multiculturalism and promotes an ethnicist, hierarchical conception of the nation and opposes the rights of sexual minorities. Finally, at the international level, it challenges the legitimacy of supranational institutions, asserting the absolute primacy of the nation-state and its political autonomy. Both the militant and state dimensions of Turkism converge with illiberal ideology, although their linkage takes different forms in different countries.
For Turkist activist organizations, Turkism generally adopts an illiberal orientation insofar as it promotes a dominant ethnocultural and linguistic identity to the detriment of other affiliations. This is particularly the case when the Turkic identity is in the demographic majority of the state concerned. In Turkey, Turkist militants openly oppose the political and cultural inclusion of the Kurdish, Rum (Turkish Greeks), and Armenian minorities, as well as the presence of refugees, notably from Syria. This can be described as cultural illiberalism, based on the belief that human beings possess essential and immutable ethnic and cultural characteristics that justify exclusion or marginalization.
The manifestation of Turkist cultural illiberalism is more nuanced in other Turkic states. In Azerbaijan, for example, Turkism is integrated by the authorities as one of the constituent elements of national identity, alongside “Lezginism” and “Tatism.” All these elements are subsumed under the concept of “Azerbaijanism,” conceived as an officially multicultural identity. National identity there is therefore less ethnicist than in Turkey. That said, Azerbaijan is not exempt from identity-based rejection: Armenians, of whom there are very few today, are designated as enemies, not only by Turkist circles, but also the state and a large part of the population, due to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Thus, in Turkey and Azerbaijan, Turkism takes the form of ultranationalism with a strong racial connotation.
On the other hand, when Turkist activists find themselves in a minority, such as the Uyghurs in China, the Crimean Tatars and other Turkic minorities in Russia, or the Gagauz in Moldavia, Turkism takes on an essentially affirmative function: it brings a weakened, sometimes oppressed identity into a dominant political or cultural environment. In such cases, Turkism is not a form of cultural illiberalism, but rather a strategy of identity recognition and preservation.
Alongside so-called militant Turkism, there is also state Turkism, as manifested within the framework of the OTS. The boundaries between state and militant dimensions are porous, and the same actors are sometimes found within Turkist activist groups and multilateral organizations. Here, the illiberal element is not the Turkist project itself—i.e. the idea of collaboration between different Turkic states—but rather the ideology advocated by the governments of the member states. All the member states of the OTS (Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Hungary, and Northern Cyprus) are, to some extent, political and culturally authoritarian; several of their leaders have explicitly or implicitly criticized liberal democracy and Hungary’s Viktor Orban even directly used the term “illiberalism” to describe his regime in 2014. In both Turkey and Azerbaijan, power is highly concentrated in the hands of Erdoğan and Aliyev. Kazakhstan, despite its constitutional reform, retains a powerful executive, while Kyrgyzstan has moved toward a heavy-handed presidentialism. Overall, judicial and parliamentary institutions play a marginal role in regulating power.
These regimes share a mistrust of international institutions. Turkey regularly criticizes the European Court of Human Rights, Azerbaijan rejects the condemnations of international bodies, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan use the law to entrench the power of its leaders. Their sovereignist stance makes it possible to evade their human rights obligation. In Turkey, Azerbaijan, Hungary, and Turkmenistan, for example, the rights of sexual minorities are under threat.
Unlike the European Union or other multilateral institutions based on the rule of law, the OTS does not impose any democratic, judicial, or human rights standards on its members. It is a space for voluntary cooperation between governments that share a vision of the world centered on sovereignty, order, and identity, rather than freedoms, pluralism, and individual rights. This normative deficit makes the OTS not an essentially illiberal geopolitical project, but a space where illiberal regimes can support each other, reinforce each other’s legitimacy, and develop economic and cultural partnerships without fear of interference from external, democratic actors.
Conclusion
Turkism is the subject of caricatures in the Western press and, to a lesser extent, in certain academic publications. Turkism is most often viewed solely in discursive terms, with no attention paid to its concrete projects; the figure of the gray wolf, the symbol of Turkism, is systematically demonized. The French government even went so far as to ban the far-right Gray Wolves political movement in 2020. In reality, the gray wolf is a figure from Turkic mythology that was used as a national symbol at the beginning of the Republic of Turkey in the 1920s, before being gradually appropriated by supporters of Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, members of the MHP, and a fringe of the Turkish diaspora in Europe, often close to the AKP. While it is undeniable that Turkist discourse in Turkey has a strong racialist dimension, linked to the far right, that excludes ethnolinguistic and cultural minorities from the national identity, this is not always the case in other Turkic states.
If we step back and analyze the evolution of Turkism over the last 30 years in Turkey and Azerbaijan, as well as the ex-Soviet Turkic states, especially Kazakhstan, we can see that it is in the cultural sphere that cooperation has been most marked, notably through the creation of common school textbooks, student exchange programs, and musical projects. This cultural collaboration can be seen positively: it aims to enhance the various occurrences of a historical, archaeological, linguistic, culinary, and musical heritage shared by Turkic peoples. These initiatives, carried out in collaboration between Turkey and the other Turkic states, are part of a genuine coproduction of identity. It is therefore important to deconstruct the idea that Turkism is merely an extension of unilateral cultural diplomacy by Turkey.
However, on an international scale, the political regimes behind this project have authoritarian traits, sharing a common distrust of liberal democratic norms. The OTS, while pushing cultural projects, imposes no requirements in terms of human rights or democratic norms. In this way, it constitutes a space for cooperation between ideologically illiberal governments.
Aurélie Stern holds a doctorate in political studies from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). A specialist in Turkic studies, she published her thesis in 2025 under the title Turquie-Azerbaïdjan, la danse des loupes gris (Turkey-Azerbaijan, the dance of the gray wolves) with Maisonneuve & Larose/Hémisphères publishers. She has lectured at Galatasaray University in Istanbul and the University of Western Brittany (UBO) in Brest.
Image made by John Chrobak using “Samarkand hosts 9th Summit of Organization of Turkic States 04” by Press Service of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan licensed under CC BY 4.0; “Flag of TÜRKSOY” by Chabe01 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; “Wolfsgruß Graue Woelfe” by Canlanma licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0; all other assets used are in the public domain.
