The Remarkable Scale of Turkey’s “Global Purge”

On July 15, 2016, the Turkish military launched an unsuccessful coup aimed at toppling Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The coup served as a pretext for the Turkish government to arrest thousands of its critics and dismiss almost 140,000 civil servants, members of the military and judges. Erdoğan’s purge has not stopped at Turkey’s borders though – which is why Freedom House’s Nate Schenkkan believes the pursuit of dissidents is not only undermining democracy within Turkey but also eroding key principles of the liberal international order. getAbstract recommends his article if you’d like to understand why what happens in Turkey, doesn’t stay in Turkey.